Guangdong: Mar 21 - 23

gaoming - zhaoqing - de qing

Chinese Concrete

Forget pandas, Ming architecture and Confucian riddles. That's a painting. To begin with, China sprawled like a country-sized construction site.

Earth-movers and semi-trailers rumbled past pounding jackhammers, tracking dirt and scattering gravel. Elderly Han streetsweepers with milky eyes and faces like carved wood worked their oversized straw brooms towards the road shoulder. There sit mounds of crushed rock, broken concrete, cement and rebar.

Red China? Concrete-gray.

It's poured into bricks in frontyard kilns. It's the bedrock of two and three story McMansions always laid at angles to each other, as if no two homeowners can agree on where the sun will rise. It's streaked with exhaust in at worn shopfronts and newly set in the massive pylons beneath eight-lane overpasses. It supports factories large enough to contain the town where I was born and spreads through cities as wide bikelanes and footpaths. It builds skylines of identical apartment blocks and crane-topped frames. It's unrendered, bleak and everywhere.

Future-proofing isn't an easy job. It takes a lot of work to concrete to cover poverty and history. After a 20th Century where China ran neck-and-neck with the USSR for World Capital of Misery, Chinese concrete seems as good a symbol of rising living standards as anything. Only, as Leonard Cohen sang, 'There is a crack in everything'.

As we rode through Guangdong some cracks were obvious, so visual they could have been the juxtapositions of a heavy-handed filmmaker. Scene 1: a giant overpass stepping across fields where farmers toil by hand with tools their great-great-grandparents would have used. Scene 2: a truck laden with crushed rocks passing an ox-pulled cart.

Other cracks were more of the social contract type, reminders of why construction sites have health and safety officers and we in the Australia have a 60-country lead in overall life expectancy.

There were the odours, rarely as strong as the bodily assaults of India but more insidious for remaining unclassifiable; wet cement I knew, and I'd grown used to exhaust too, but there were thin black rivers that reeked of burning plastic and factories wafting something like nail polish remover.

Then there was the sky, an industrial rainbow of thick sun-blotting smoke that allowed me to be grateful I no longer needed sunscreen as I coughed carcinogens from my lungs each evening.

To Chinese people, these were the side-effects of the furious, if uneven, pace of construction.

For me, it raised questions about about what progress looks like. I didn’t come to any real conclusions, but I didn’t need to. Mostly, like the overshadowing Indian poverty, it was another raw deal I’d sidestepped through a well-positioned birth. (Thanks Mum, Dad.)

I just pedalled those smooth roads and dreamt of the steady gaze of Queensland skies.

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