The propensity for rapid change is reflected in the distinctive character and structure of East Asian cities. Unlike European cities — or, indeed, American cities — where the height and character of buildings are carefully regulated and space arranged in zones according to use, Asian cities have no such order: they grow like Topsy, with every area having a little bit of everything and buildings coming in all shapes and sizes. While Western cities generally have a definable centre, Asian cities rarely do: the centre is in a perpetual state of motion as a city goes through one metamorphosis after another, resulting in the creation of many centres rather than one. Shanghai, for example, offers the area around the Shanghai Centre, Lujiazui, the Bund, Hongqiao and Xijiahui, as well as Pudong. Kuala Lumpur had the golden triangle, then KLCC, followed by Putrajaya. Tokyo, like Taipei and Seoul, has grown without method or concept, the product of spontaneous development. The lack of rules, regulations and order that is typical of East Asian cities produces an eclectic and intoxicating mix of benign chaos, compressed energy and inchoate excitement. People make it up as they go along. They try things out. They take risks. Seemingly the only constant is change. Scrap and build is a classic illustration, with little importance attached to conservation, in marked contrast to Europe. [320] Whereas European cities for the most part change relatively little from one decade to the next, Asian cities are constantly being turned upside down. You can rest assured that your favourite landmark in a European city — be it a cinema, a square, a building or an underground station — will still be there when you next visit; the only certainty in many Asian cities is that the furniture will once again have been rearranged so that you won’t even be able to recognize the place, let alone find the landmark. [321]
Japan represents perhaps the most extreme form of this embrace of the future, or hyper-modernity. [322] Unlike Europe or the United States, you will find few old bangers on the roads, there being little demand for used cars — or anything secondhand for that matter. Instead there is a rapacious appetite for the new. Until the post-bubble crisis, Japanese car-makers thought nothing of introducing several model changes a year, rather than the Western norm of one, while the electronics firms that Japan is famous for are constantly changing their product lines. Where the Western fashion industry is happy to turn out two collections a year, one in the autumn and one in the spring, Japanese designers seem to believe in perpetual sartorial motion as one collection follows another at bewildering speed several times a year. Japanese youth have become the cognoscenti of fad and fashion, be it a new electronic game, a new look, the latest mobile phone or another Pokemon style craze. Take your chair in a Japanese hair salon and, be you man or woman, you will immediately be handed a very thick catalogue offering a seemingly infinite range of possible hairstyles and colours from which to choose. Japan is the virtuoso of consumer technology. Constant improvement and innovation are a national pastime: the scooter whose lights automatically switch on as it gets dark, the business card-holder whose lid spontaneously flips open, the toilet seat with its dazzling array of dials and controls, the virtual theme park with rides beyond one’s imagination, and the dance machine which renders the need for a partner redundant.
THE CONCEPT OF MODERNITY
In his book The Consequences of Modernity, Anthony Giddens seeks to draw a distinction between the characteristics of modernity and pre-modernity. Speaking of pre-modern society, he argues:
The orientation to the past which is characteristic of tradition does not differ from the outlook of modernity only in being backward-looking rather than forward-looking… Rather, neither ‘the past’ nor ‘the future’ is a discrete phenomenon, separated from the ‘continuous present’, as in the case of the modern outlook. [323]
In East Asian modernity, however, the present and the past are not ‘discrete’, in terms of perceptions, in the way Giddens suggests, nor is the future: on the contrary, the present is layered with both the past and the future. In other words, the past and the future are combined in East Asian modernity in a way that is quite distinct from Western modernity. It is, at one and the same time, both very young and very old. This paradox is at its most extreme in China, the oldest continuous civilization in the world and yet now, in cities like Shanghai and Shentzen, also one of the youngest. There is a sense of enormous ambition, a world without limits, symbolized by Pudong, one of the most futuristic cityscapes, with its extraordinary array of breathtaking high-rise buildings. [324] According to Gao Rui-qian, professor of philosophy at East China National University in Shanghai, ‘China is like the adolescent who is very keen to become an adult. He can see the goal and wants to reach it as soon as possible. He is always behaving as if he is rather older than he actually is and is constantly forgetting the reality of his situation.’ [325] East Asian modernity, then, is a unique combination, in terms of social and economic realities, attitudes and consciousness, of the present, the past and the future. These countries might be described as ‘time-compression societies’, where the past and the future are squeezed and condensed into the present. Two hundred years of experience and history elsewhere are seemingly contained within the same place and the same moment of time. Everything is rushed. There is no time to reflect. Generational differences are a gaping chasm, society like a living geological formation.
Giddens also argues that with modernity, ‘Kinship relations, for the majority of the population, remain important, especially within the nuclear family, but they are no longer the carriers of intensively organized social ties across time-space.’ [326] That may be true of the West but it is certainly not the case in mainland China, or Taiwan, or the Chinese diaspora: in each instance ‘kinship relations’, especially in the form of the extended family, are frequently ‘the carriers of intensively organized social ties across time-space’. The Chinese diaspora, for example, has relied on the extended family as the means by which to organize its globally dispersed business operations, whether large or small. Taiwan, the Chinese diaspora and the more advanced parts of China are, moreover, unambiguously part of the modern world. [327] The fact is that kinship has always been far more important in Chinese than Western societies, whatever their level of development. Or take belief-systems. In his second BBC Reith Lecture in 1999, Giddens argued:
[320] Interview with Tatsuro Hanada, Tokyo, June 1999.
[321] Acknowledgements to Ti-Nan Chi, Bing C. P. Chu and Chu-joe Hsia in Taipei; Tatsuro Hanada, Takashi Yamashita, Mark Dytham and Astrid Klein in Tokyo; and Wu Jiang and Lu Yongyi in Shanghai.
[322] Interview with Toshiya Uedo, Tokyo, June 1999.
[323] Anthony Giddens,
[324] Pudong was conceived, in 1992, as a completely new business and financial centre for Shanghai. Across the Huangpu River from the Bund, it represents an extraordinary urban and architectural leap into the new century: Cheng Youhua, et al., ‘Urban Planning in Shanghai towards the 21st Century’, in
[325] Interview with Gao Rui-qian, Shanghai, April 1999.
[326] Giddens,
[327] The literature on the Chinese diaspora, and the role of the family and kinship, is voluminous: see, for example, Lynn Pan,