David Gray/ReutersAir pollution is a commonly heard complaint in China’s mega-cities. A Beijing street cleaner took precautions in June.
HONG KONG — Charlie Custer, a filmmaker and blogger, is back in the United States. Left China. Couldn’t take it any more. Bad air. Unsafe food. And there was a nasty-scary spat with a government journalist.
Mark Kitto, a Welshman and a resident of China for 16 years, he’s going, too. “I won’t be rushing back either,” he says. “I have fallen out of love, woken from my China Dream.”
The artist Ai Weiwei cannot leave. The authorities won’t let him. After his studio was demolished in Shanghai, he relocated to Beijing, which he calls “a city of violence.”
“You will see migrants’ schools closed,” he said of Beijing in a Newsweek essay last year. “You will see hospitals where they give patients stitches — and when they find the patients don’t have any money, they pull the stitches out. It’s a city of violence.
“This city is not about other people or buildings or streets but about your mental structure. If we remember what Kafka writes about his Castle, we get a sense of it. Cities really are mental conditions. Beijing is a nightmare. A constant nightmare.”
And China’s nightmare-cities are expanding. There are now more than 40 Chinese cities with populations over a million. In a dozen years, there will be more than 220 such cities, according to McKinsey projections cited in a new Foreign Policy series on China’s urban woes.
Read more at The New York Times
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