It wasn’t until we went to Buttonville that I finally knew we were in real China. The rugged busyness of this layered hall of fabrics and materials is a reminder of China’s proficient and industrious nature. Although it is a market and not a factory, Buttonville’s buzzing activity is not unlike what one can find in the factories in and around cities like Chongqing, a somewhat unknown Sichuanese city that is home to some 30 million souls, which are like small towns themselves where thousands of workers spend the majority of their time on Earth. The factories have shops and places to drop off kids who, odds are, will also be working there in the future. The China of the 90s was like US during the 1870s up till the early 1900s when it was experiencing a dramatic industrial rise. Everything just happened bigger and quicker in China. A Pyrrhic victory, the Chinese factory masters are the Carnegies, the JP Morgans and the Chases of today and they work deals with bribes to get more and more for themselves, creating bigger gaps between those who have access to the fruits of China’s rise and those who are just manual labor.
Nevertheless, places like Buttonville are humming with activity and I found myself quite at home enjoying the scenery here.
1 comment:
These photos completely mess with my sense of scale. First I think they're close-ups of items on a rack or counter, then I think that I'm wrong and it's an open mall space, and finally my eyes just cross and refuse to process anything further. Well done!
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