The Short March

(5 of 5)

Meet the Neighbors

There are 148 houses and townhouses as well as three 11-story apartment buildings in Emerald Riverside, and Fan Wei, the president of Forte and Guo Guangchang's deputy, says they are all sold. Slowly, as the day draws nearer that the town will be linked to Shanghai, people are beginning to move in. Until recently, one of our neighbors was Zhang Shuyi, 35, who owns his own small advertising agency. He lived just behind us with his girlfriend and a big mutt of a dog who occasionally scared the daylights out of our daughter, Abby. (Zhang, in typical Shanghainese fashion, sold his house three months ago for a 20% profit and moved to another place not far from here.) Another couple are both engineers who work for Intel, helping design the chipmaker's new factory in Dalian. Another young father, Chen Jun, 36, is a successful clothing wholesaler. These are not rich Chinese, but people who consider themselves solidly middle class. Chen says proudly that he's "the first in my family to own a car as well as a real house." Their homes are about the same size as ours, and they probably paid roughly the same price as we did ($165,000). Most have young children (this being China, usually just one) and have also brought parents or parents-in-law with them, also common in China.

Their reasons for moving way out here are familiar. For some, it's proximity to work. The old Songjiang, the neighboring town, is heavily industrial, with a string of modern factories — many foreign-owned — that runs for miles. One friend, a guy I play basketball with at a gorgeous new public sports facility, is an engineer for SMIC, the large semiconductor company that has a plant not far away. This friend — I'll call him Yu Xiang — has a cousin he has visited who lives outside Los Angeles, and says that New Songjiang reminds him of the area. "Now I call my cousin and kid him: 'I'm living in the Valley too, but at about a tenth of the price!'"

For others, as for us, it was the cleaner environment, a little bit of green and a lot more space. "I love it out here," says Chen. "It's quiet, and the air is better." Two couples we've become friendly with say they want to have a second child — now permissible in Shanghai since the government loosened the one-child policy a bit in 2004. All this at a price much cheaper than it would be to buy a decent apartment in Shanghai (let alone a house in the San Fernando Valley).

These motivations seem so universal that sometimes it's easy to forget where you are. But that's a mistake. There is genuine if sometimes subtle tension even in booming, middle-class China, and some of it is evident every time I go out for a bike ride, past the security guards at the entrance of Emerald Riverside. The developments here aren't exactly gated communities, but all of them are guarded, and for a legitimate reason: the fault lines between the migrants and the middle class are very real. Petty crime — theft, primarily — is common; and rarely do the two groups interact. Qiu, the young woman who loaded bricks, told me I was the only "rich" person she had ever had a long conversation with since she started working here two years ago. The only thing that unites the two groups is China's continued growth. My middle-class neighbors, like Yu Xiang, take it as a given. "As long as there is economic development that will allow me to work and raise my family in a nice new area," he says, "that's what I hope for now. My whole family does. We hope to stay here a long time."

The migrants, of course, hope to move on. Before my wife and I bought a car here, we used to call a guy named Shi Guozheng, 27, from Anhui, who was a taxi driver of sorts. Shi had a battered old van, and made a living transporting migrant workers back and forth to their home towns. He was married, and often his wife, Lin, was in the car on our journeys into town. Over time my wife and she became friendly. One day last summer, they had tea together and Lin told Joyce she was pregnant, and that she and her husband were moving away from New Songjiang to a neighborhood in Shanghai with a lot of new construction, where her husband would continue to try to make a living shuttling workers around. Lin came over to our house one evening just before leaving; Joyce was giving her some of Abby's old baby clothes. We sat up on our deck, overlooking the river and the ever-shrinking patch of green on the other side. I asked her whether, and when, she and her husband might settle down — and what they might do, and where. She just laughed. "Oh, we'd like to live back home in Hefei [Anhui's capital] some day, but we don't know when. It's better here for us, at least for now." A little while later, Joyce handed Lin the bundle of clothes, and off she went.

I've thought of that family frequently. People outside China always want to know what will spur political change, what will turn an authoritarian dictatorship to democracy. Conventional wisdom says it happens when a society develops a solid middle class with rising expectations. That, anyway, is the story of Taiwan and South Korea. But in China, my neighbors, even though they are often, in private, bitterly critical of the government, seem content to leave it well enough alone. Having made the Short March, they have a vested interest in stability.

I think trouble — and change — comes the day Shi Guozheng doesn't have another place to move to, another job to go to. It's not the people living the Great Chinese Dream — with the new house and the car and the dog and maybe a second child on the way — that the government needs to worry about. It's the people who build that dream for others, and then move on, hoping to do it again somewhere else. They, too, are vested in the country's economic miracle. But should that miracle somehow turn sour, look out.

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