Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
h e epigraphs to this chapter describe the same place, Chongming Island—
the fi rst as fertile fantasy, the latter as a land beset by wartime terror. h e
description of Chongming Island as a smorgasbord of nations and tastes was
published to both celebrate and imagine the glorious eco-future in Dongtan.
h e second epigraph is from a history of Chinese collaboration during the
brutal Japanese occupation in the late 1930s and early 1940s.
h is juxtaposition unsettled me—neither of them fi ts what I thought I
knew about the island, the place where my father was born and about which
my mother constantly chided him. According to the “Chongming Club,” an
online forum for Chongming locals living off -island, mostly in Shanghai, my
mother's attitude toward my dad's island roots remains pervasive in con-
temporary life. One laments, “h ey, Shanghainese, all look down upon us
Chongming people and call us peasants.” Another adds: “Why do we love
Chongming so much? Because we have taken enough Shanghai people's
supercilious looks.”
1
My Chongming associations were signifi cantly diff erent from the eco-
logical vision of pastoral beauty (and I also have never associated anything
remotely Chinese with cheese). Dongtan intrigued me, and it challenged me
to learn more about a place that only ever existed in my life as the proverbial
“old country” in my family's own journey from China to the United States.
What I learned is that Dongtan is not the quixotic or mad rendering of a uto-
pian environmentalist or a plan generated by a graduate eco-design class,
but the apotheosis of years of interventionist planning from the highest lev-
els in Shanghai and by the national Communist Party, culminating in a 2004
visit to the island by China's president Hu Jintao. On this visit, he expressed
his desire “to construct [Chongming] into the fi rst-class eco-island in the
world.”
2
A year later, the U.K. prime minister Tony Blair and Hu Jintao attended a
ceremony in London, where Arup, a global planning, engineering, and
design fi rm, and Dongtan's principal investor, the Shanghai Industrial
