Belt and Road by Bruno Maçães

Author:Bruno Maçães
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Hurst US & Co. (Publishers) Ltd
Published: 2019-09-19T16:00:00+00:00

5

THE WORLD AFTER THE BELT AND ROAD

Trees grow on buildings here, planted on the roof, sprouting from the balconies, hanging from the walls, and so they called it Forest City. Throughout mankind’s history cities have been hacked out of the jungle or reclaimed by the jungle when their time was up. In Forest City, the jungle and the city co-exist as one—you know you have arrived when the trees take over. My hotel stands in the middle of an immense construction site. The buildings around, hundreds of them, bedecked with cranes like giant winged insects, keep rising. When the night falls, they keep rising. Sometimes a skyscraper will be finished in as little as a week.

There are other peculiarities about Forest City. Its inhabitants are just starting to move in, and they are almost all Chinese. Shop signs are written in Mandarin, and the restaurants serve food from Sichuan and Yunnan. But the city is being built in Malaysia, not China. Forest City offers an early glimpse at a world reshaped by China, a world built according to Chinese rules and furthering the goals of a Chinese civilization unhampered by national borders. Not the old China—but the China of the new science fiction being created by Chinese millennials. The world of Forest City resembles that of Chinese science fiction author Hao Jingfang’s Folding Beijing—with a splash of Plato’s Republic.

From the moment you arrive it is impossible to miss that there are four separate social strata in the city. First, the residents: wealthy Chinese from the mainland, who may be looking for a new life outside China or at least a safe haven protected from undesirable developments at home. Second, those providing them with professional services of all kinds, from health to education and entertainment. They tend to be Chinese, although in some cases—like in the posh preparatory school opening in August 2018—Europeans or Americans may be preferred. Third, the guardians: Nepalese security guards, polite and distant. Fourth, the workers: Bangladeshi and Indian, responsible for construction and cleaning.

The city’s scale is hard to compute. There is a very large hotel and a shopping mall at the center. But the city is still growing, the buildings under construction are only a small portion of the whole island that will one day be reclaimed from the sea. And this island will be joined by three others in the near future, and then by an extension on land, bringing the total area of the city to about half the size of Manhattan. The first resident will move in August 2018. But in ten years close to a million people are expected to live here.

I take a walk on the beach. There are numerous warnings against swimming. Forest City sits on one of the busiest shipping lanes in the world, and the heavy construction is not helping keep the waters clean. Fishing boats have all disappeared, replaced by construction trucks parked on the sand. I walk all the way to the end of the artificial island.

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