Changing Chongming - Fantasy Islands - page 45

illegitimate child” and, thus, its “secret garden.” Chongming's seductive
potential lies in its position more closely aligned with (feminine) nature, and
antithetical to the hyperurban and highly capitalized economic (masculine)
“engine” that is Shanghai. Chongming Island is Shanghai's secret garden,
ripe for development, waiting ecstatically for the technology and tourism
that will at last reveal Chongming's charms to off -island visitors seeking an
“experience” with nature, albeit a version of nature heavily mediated
through technology and engineering. It is this mixing of female nature with
masculinist technology that transforms historically degraded rural spaces
into highly desired ecological places. While rural spaces remain poor, eco-
logical sites retain the virtues of rural spaces (i.e., clean environments) while
increasing their value (i.e., investment capital opportunity).
h ese changing ideas about “nature” explain why Dongtan on Chong-
ming is the right project in the right place—at least, according to its various
champions and a signifi cant number of environmentalist, architects, and
other professionals, both in China and internationally. 33 h is view dovetails
with the local government's attempt to develop Chongming Island as an
eco-friendly tourist destination. Another major factor is the changing
national language and policy about improving rural spaces and environ-
ments. Dongtan's boosters thus also implicitly reference policy and language
around “quality.”
Quality, or suzhi , includes physical, psychological and cultural attri-
butes, and the quality of consciousness. 34 h e government's fear is that
China is populated with too many “low-quality” people, defi ned in both
moral and educational terms. 35 Suzhi was used in the 1980s in reference to
population management and was later given prominent attention in 1997
when Jiang Zemin gave a talk at the Fifteenth Congress of the CCP. At this
meeting, the private sector was raised to the same level as the state sector in
the socialist market economy. To do so, Jiang explicitly called for more
“high-quality people.” For its part, the national government describes