A Preface to the Other Half: From Handshake Buildings to High-Rise Dreams (Part 5, Pages 26-28)

Recognition, therefore, confers political weight. When a city recognizes the presence and contribution of migrant workers—by extending access to public services, by protecting tenure, by ensuring workplace safety, by legislating fair contracts—it elevates the baseline of what is possible. Recognition confers rights, and rights rearrange life chances. Conversely, nonrecognition, the category into which too many migrants are dumped, is not a neutral omission but an active, structural violence that narrows choices and erodes dignity. Shenzhen’s modernity is built on mobility rights exercised at an enormous human scale after 1978. Millions moved. Cities rose. Four decades of urbanization drive has precipitated one of the greatest population movements in human history, but the mobility that powered growth has not been matched, for a long time, by mobility’s legal recognition. The portraits in this book unveil both sides: the costs of nonrecognition and the small triumphs of recognition.

There is a modest civic ambition underlying this book, the hope that testimony constitutes a form of reckoning. The nonmodern half of modern China has built China’s modernity, and when policymakers, scholars, consumers, and in general, citizens, approach their stories with seriousness, the content of public debate shifts. The axiology of political prescriptions could be brought closer to the reality of stakeholders, not to hastily conclude that what is is what ought to be, but to shape how reality is, toward what it ought to be. In plain words, we could begin to envision labor protections calibrated to real work rhythms, to plan redevelopment projects that respect existing communities by refraining from displacing them, to revise eligibility requirements of social services to untangle them from the lottery of birth or accidents of registration. Ambitious policies beautifully embedded in reality so as to propel reality’s betterment, as opposed to ineffectual policies detached from reality and impotent policies replicating and reconstituting reality. The portraits in this book model this politics of close attention that refuses both wieldy romanticization and cruel indifference. I hope the pages that follow will not simply move you; they will demand that you act differently—as a consumer, a voter, a planner, a neighbor.

Finally, I confess that this is a personal book. I am a high school student, still negotiating class schedules, still answering questions about whether I am “serious about my work.” My decision to write these portraits has come in part from intellectual curiosity and in part from my desire to belong ethically and unapologetically to the city I grew up in. Cities are made of relationships, be it between schools and neighborhoods, between factories and urban villages, or between planners’ maps and individual lives they affect. Writing this book is my way of paying close attention to those relationships.

Read these pages slowly. Allow time for the interviewees to come to life through the pages, for the assembly line’s rhythm to become audible, for urban villages’ narrowness to broaden your perception of space. If a city is an argument about who belongs, each of the eleven stories is a separate contention. They insist that modernity is not merely measured by how tall a city can build upward, but by how it treats those who built it from below. It calls for a public imagination expansive enough to contain both the Ping An Tower and handshake buildings, both GDP figures and social welfare, both policy and person. The book seeks to complicate how we imagine “development” so that the human capacity for dignity sits at the center. The eleven people from whom you will hear are not data points; they are narrators of their own lives. I did not write the portraits; I was given the honor of being given their words. It is my hope that reading them will change the way you imagine the city, and the way you imagine your place inside it.