Storm clouds tore open as we shot above ground in the 9 train, the newest branch of the Shanghai metro, bound for the “satellite city” of Songjiang Xicheng. This train line opened in 2007, connecting Shanghai to its new suburbs and exurbs. Both the train line and the satellites reflect dominant urban planning trends in twenty-first-century China: planned urban sprawl to ease overcrowding in the supercities and residential relocation to make room for high-powered development in the city center.
The Shanghai municipal government announced in August 2001 that it would begin work on 11 satellite cities and 22 satellite towns, some of which would actually be satellites themselves of the satellite cities. The construction would take place over 20 years. Songjiang Xicheng was the first to be built and was envisioned as a cultural and tourist resort, boasting a foreign-themed district called “ThamesTown” and seven new universities. (Other satellite cities have Scandinavian, Italian, German, or Spanish-themed towns.) The combination of high-tech infrastructure—high-speed metro lines, gated communities, and shopping malls—and foreign architecture was to woo affluent Shanghainese. In addition, I’m told, many middle-class families in substandard housing in the city center received large payments to move to the high-rise apartment complexes in this satellite and others.
Migration, however, is much harder to plan than urban sprawl; although a number of Shanghainese families have moved to the satellite cities, so have huge numbers of unemployed graduates and undocumented migrant workers from other provinces. China’s “huji” system of household registration, whose ancient roots were broadly developed and institutionalized in 1958 to prevent massive rural to urban migration, allocates each person “hukou,” or residency in one place. The overwhelming majority of rural immigrants in China’s cities do not have hukou to live, own property, work, or attend school in the cities, and so can be considered undocumented even within their own country.
The ride to Songjiang Xicheng took less than an hour from central Shanghai, and on our way we barreled through tracts of farmland that are now interspersed with developments. Some were older clusters of farmhouses huddled between rice paddies, with small piers leading down to criss-crossing canals and waterways. Others resembled towering, slightly grim, Walter Gropius-style housing developments; others still, luxurious Florentine villages, their orange- and ivory-colored villas on neat avenues lined with tall conifers. In the subway car, sleepy young migrant workers with giant camouflage-patterned suitcases and duffel bags snored, and a family with two rambunctious girls with scabby, dirt-smudged legs drew disapproving glances from the other commuters.
The terminal station at Songjiang Xicheng sat in a large plaza flanked by apartment complexes on one side, and on the other, an ornate park full of gazebos, streams, and picturesque bridges. Underneath the train platform was a mall with dozens of restaurants, cafés, and boutiques, including an ice cream parlor called “HAAGEN DESS.” I ducked into a popular Japanese noodle restaurant chain, Ajisen, to wait out the rain and chat with some of Songjiang’s residents.
At the table next to me, the Chengs, a middle-aged couple, enjoyed large bowls of noodles, glancing toward me with cheerful curiosity. Cheng teaches English at the Gold Apple Bilingual School, an expensive private school in Songjiang with a student body equally comprised of wealthy Shanghainese and even wealthier students from the provinces. Cheng, a teacher for 20 years, migrated to the greater Shanghai area some five years ago, but his wife and daughter only recently joined him here.
They came from a town called Yanchen, in the nearby Jiangsu Province, known as the “place of rice and fish” for its prosperity. But wealth is a relative term, and for Cheng, the youngest of seven siblings (five older sisters and one older brother) and first to graduate college, life in his hometown was restrictive. “I like city life,” he said, explaining he came to Shanghai because it is a famous city, not just in China, but throughout the world. He takes his wife and daughter into the city at least twice a month to shop in its bookstores and boutiques, and is interested in buying a home in Songjiang. Cheng clearly has the means to afford living in Shanghai, and the self-professed love of city life, so why the suburbs? “This place has better environment, less pollution,” he says.
But for Li Xui, a pretty young waitress from Anhui province, things like suburban comfort and access to good shopping are close to irrelevant. Li, 21, has worked in Songjiang for two years. Her parents and two brothers still live in a poor farming town where simple meals of steamed rice-flour balls called “manto” dominate their diet. Li said she was one of only 10 children out of her village of 500 people to attend high school, but even with a high school degree, she was unable to find work. She doesn’t have hukou here, and she believes that she is at the brunt of more customer rudeness because she is not Shanghainese. But she still wishes to stay, dreaming of marrying her Shanghainese boyfriend in spite of his parents’ disapproval.
A number of migrants from Anhui province, a predominantly agricultural province to the west of Shanghai, whose per capita income is one-third of its two neighboring provinces, live in Songjiang. One family of three sisters from Anhui told me there tends to be more work for migrant workers in and near satellite cities, where new businesses are looking for employees and universities requiring low-skilled janitorial staff. In addition, rents tend to be lower in the satellite cities, and it is still possible to find land to farm for individual families. Two of the sisters had moved here to join their elder sister, who had been migrating between her home village, where her mother oversaw the family’s wheat farm, to Songjiang, where she held a variety of jobs in food and other service for 10 years. Their family was increasingly divided between the two places, with younger children attending school in Songjiang near their mothers while older children attended the free provincial school and assisted their grandmother with farming the family land.
Songjiang’s government buildings were built in the impressive Soviet style, featuring grand cupolas and glass observatories set back from the road in broad stone plazas. The main road running through the park and this government district led from the train station to office parks, malls with the majority of their commercial space as yet unrented, a massive warehouse grocery store, and more shopping districts. Clearly, Songjiang is set to welcome far more than its current population, an estimated 300,000. As I left Songjiang behind me, the clouds cleared and the sun lit up the emerald-colored fields and unoccupied buildings on the way back in to Shanghai.
Kavitha Rajagopalan is a senior fellow at the World Policy Institute and the author of Muslims of Metropolis: The Stories of Three Immigrant Families in the West.