SEAN'S HOMETOWN

From a blog written by David Frum:

To leave Beijing is to leave a city where Western-style affluence is at least everywhere visible for a nation where wealth is concentrated at specific points. I’m staying now at one such point, the campus of Shantou University, a university funded by the philanthropy of the Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-Shing. The guesthouse of the university in particular is one of the most beautiful buildings I’ve seen in China – although it should be said that beauty is rare here, the Chinese preferring to buy grandiosity when they have money to spend.


Shantou itself however is a grim place, a struggling industrial city in southern China, home to a big toy manufacturing industry and to the world’s largest garbage dump for electronic remains. Mao-vintage apartment blocks rust alongside the shattered hulks of pre-1949 housing, the latter still used as shelter for the very poorest. Scavengers work the town garbage sites, where slow fires smolder. Shantou is a place where scooters outnumber cars, where drivers have not yet mastered such concepts as driving the right way on a lane of highway, and where chicken cartilage still counts as meat. And yet there are thousands of places in the interior of China much poorer still.