Hinterland America's new landscape ofclass and conflict

189 Pages·2018·1.474 MB·English

by  Neel, Phil A

hinterland
field notes
series editor: Paul Mattick
A series of books providing in-depth analyses of today’s global turmoil as it unfolds.
Each book focuses on an important feature of our present-day economic, political and
cultural condition, addressing local and international issues. ‘Field Notes’ examines the
many dimensions of today’s social predicament and provides a radical, politically and
critically engaged voice to global debates.
Published in association with the Brooklyn Rail
H INTERLAND
America’s New Landscape
of Class and Conflict
PHIL A. NEEL
reaktion Books
Published by Reaktion Books Ltd
Unit 32, Waterside
44–48 Wharf Road
London n1 7ux, uk
www.reaktionbooks.co.uk
First published 2018
Copyright © Phil A. Neel 2018
All rights reserved
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the
prior permission of the publishers
Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ International, Padstow, Cornwall
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
isBn 978 1 78023 902 6
Contents
Introduction: The Cult of the City 7
one Oaths of Blood 23
two Silver and Ash 60
three The Iron City 92
four Oaths of Water 129
References 177

Introduction: The Cult of the City
The train hurled through the hot, mist-damp blackness of
southern China. If you stood in the barren cavities between
cars, you could feel the air as it was sucked into the compartment
via thin windows slit in the metal like narrow wounds. The stink
of factories and endless, fertilizer-soaked fields pushed against
the claustrophobic smell of food and bodies. Nothing was visible
outside save for the few platforms we stopped at, small oases
of yellow-lit concrete lodged within a jungle of limestone cliffs,
cash crops and half-abandoned industrial sites all sinking in the
hot darkness, a dull orange glow on the horizon like fires burning
somewhere behind the karst plateaus. At each platform, more
people entered, mostly migrant workers hauling their belongings
on their backs in gigantic plastic-fiber mingong bags, all the
same pastel plaid. For the first eight hours, no one seemed
to disembark.
Like me, none of the migrants had bought seats. Chinese
trains have an elaborate hierarchy of ticket types, the lowest
and cheapest being these standing tickets, which entitle you to
entry but nothing else. Most people with these tickets stand or
sit in the aisles and in the spaces between cars. If you’re lucky,
the other tickets were underbooked and you get a seat without
the extra cost. Otherwise you can negotiate for half a seat shared
with a stranger or simply squat in the mire of trash and sleeping
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hinterland
bodies strewn down the aisle. Some people had come prepared
with small, fold-out stools. Others sipped instant noodles as
they slumped against their plaid plastic bags filled with whatever
necessities they’d used to build makeshift lives in the dormitories
and run-down rentals of some boomtown.
This was in 2012, during the tail end of the Chinese commodity
bubble driven by the post-crisis stimulus package, much of which
was funneled into large-scale infrastructure projects attempting
to lay the groundwork for further development in the interior.
As growth stagnated in the coastal capitals, boomtowns prolifer-
ated in lesser-known secondary and tertiary cities in the poorer
provinces. But as the stimulus hemorrhaged and these interior
hubs failed to grow at the same rate as their coastal forebears, the
construction projects were finished with only a small measure of
factory jobs left in their wake. As investment slowed, the migrants
packed up their plaid sacks and moved elsewhere.
I stared out the slits in the metal into endless horizons of
receding light. People shuffled up and down the cars, each looking
as if they were searching for something specific, as if they’d lost
someone they knew or heard of open seats in the next car over.
But really they were wandering aimlessly. There was no one to
find, and nowhere better that could be reached from here. Some
would stop near me, red-faced, taking swigs from dark bottles
of erguotou, a dizzyingly strong liquor distilled from sorghum.
They’d offer me some and try to ask questions in English: where
I was from, why I was here, what America was like. America is
pretty much like China, I would tell them. No, they’d shake their
heads. America must be better, they said, because in America you
have guns.
Constellations
The stops became more and more infrequent, oases of concrete
drying up as we approached China’s far hinterland of emptied
8
IntroductIon: the cult of the cIty
villages and hissing insects. In these areas, the vast majority of the
working-age population has simply left, returning only during the
Spring Festival, if at all. Five or ten years ago the villages would
have been all old people and children, but today even the extended
families tend to migrate if they can. Handfuls of elderly residents
are all that remain, wandering through largely uninhabited villages
encircled by the tombs of ancient ancestors. The train now felt
like a bullet shot between two points. Its claustrophobic pressure
was simply the physical force of our acceleration through the
economy’s outer atmosphere, compressing us within the steel
carcass while the world itself was reduced to a series of points.
This isn’t something unique to China, though the gigantism
of Chinese development here, as elsewhere, provides a pristine
example of the central tendency. The planet created by global
capitalism is a serrated one. Some geomorphologists have taken
to calling this economic earth the “technosphere,” a skein of
human-enhanced advection processes comparable in scale to those
of the hydrosphere or biosphere, but marked by its intense tendency
toward agglomeration and long-distance mass transport.1
Economic activity shapes itself into sharper and sharper
peaks, centered on palatial urban cores which then splay out into
megacities. These hubs are themselves encircled by megaregions,
which descend like slowly sloping foothills from the economic
summit before the final plummet into windswept wastelands of
farm, desert, grassland, and jungle—that farthest hinterland like a
vast sunken continent that met its ruin in some ancient cataclysm,
populated now with broken-looking people sifting through the
rubble of economies stillborn or long dead.
The Chinese megacity is different only in scale. If anything,
decades of suppressed migration, agricultural protections, and
strong property endowments in the countryside have made China
less urban than it otherwise would be, despite popular images
of traffic-clogged highways barely visible through dull red smog.
Its official urban population sat at a mere 56 percent in 2015,
9