Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
of time over space, and a world where cars win over boats. It symbolizes a
practical and predictable world where passage to Chongming Island is no
longer subject to the whim of the weather (bad weather could stop boats for
up to many hours and sometimes even days). Control and transformation go
hand-in-hand for the engineer, which explains why many of the leading
political fi gures in communist authoritarian states (including Hu Jintao) are
engineers.
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Americans like their politicians to be self-made men; commu-
nists like theirs to be engineers. A sympathetic profi le of the founder of the
maker of the world's largest tunneling machines (the company that tun-
neled from Shanghai to Chongming) quotes his admiration of Dongtan, “if
it's green, no problem. I could live there.” His admiration for Dongtan is
unsurprising: “Dongtan was a city after his own heart. It was designed by
engineers, and built by the world's fastest growing superpower. It was per-
fectly made, admirably e' cient, yet not so diff erent from the villages that
Europe built a thousand years ago.”
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But what does it mean that a contemporary Chinese eco-city is meant to
evoke and improve upon European villages from a thousand years ago? And
what does it mean when an island is no longer an island? h e historian John
Gillis, in his account of island cultures and their impact on the global world,
suggests that “islands evoke a greater range of emotions than any other land
form. We project onto them our most intense desires, but they are also the
locus of our greatest fears. We feel extraordinarily free there but also trapped.
Associated with pleasure, islands also harbor pain.”
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h is pain, isolation,
and loss of connection disappears when islands become linked to their
mainland. Paradoxically, he notes that non-islanders project the feelings
and perceptions of pain, isolation, and anxiety onto island residents and
island spaces. In practice, islanders themselves are, by necessity, personal-
ity, and trade, the most well-traveled and cosmopolitan people in the world.
h is observation is certainly true of Chongming and even of my own family.
Chongming men have a strong and proud history as maritime men—from the
