When I returned to Jiaxing during the Spring Festival, I accompanied my mother to visit Nanhu Lake along Huijing Garden, Spoon Garden, Lanxiu Garden, Xiaoyingzhou, and Nanhu Tiandi as usual.
The weather was nice and sunny that day, and it was a holiday, so it was crowded everywhere on the lakeside and on the island in the middle of the lake. Even in front of the cruise ship dock, which is usually crowded, there is a long queue. Due to the overload of people, the stone bridge connecting the Nanhu Scenic Area and the Nanhu Tiandi commercial block was even temporarily closed to block the intersection of the two **.
During the walk, I heard two Shanghai tourists discuss: "Is Nanhu a barbarian now?" "After all, it's the façade of Ella Jiaxing. This can't help but bring back my mother's first memories of Nanhu.
In the mid-60s of the last century, my grandfather moved his family from Hangzhou to Jiaxing because of job transfer. Before they came, their mothers had learned from the classroom that there was a South Lake in Jiaxing, which was called the "Three Famous Lakes in the South of the Yangtze River" along with Hangzhou West Lake and Nanjing Xuanwu Lake. So on the night of coming, the group hiked to Nanhu. I thought that Nanhu Lake would be as brightly lit and lively as West Lake, but when I got to see it, hey, it was a suburban lake, and I couldn't see anything around it with black lights and blind fires.
Although 60 years have passed, my mother still remembers this feeling of loss clearly.
In fact, until the 1990s, when I was a child, Nanhu was not the first destination for Jiaxing children to travel on weekends. At that time, there was only one revolutionary memorial hall in Nanhu Lake, except for the Yanyu Building on the island in the middle of the lake, and it was obviously not interesting for children.
I remember the last time I climbed the Yanyu Tower, it was when I was in elementary school, and the school organized a spring outing. At that time, the ticket price was two yuan (if not five cents). Who would have thought that one day, Nanhu Lake would become the first stop for tourists from other places to check in Jiaxing?
Not only Nanhu, but also those must-visit check-in points recommended by the ** number for a day trip to Jiaxing, such as Nanhu Tiandi, Zicheng, Catholic Church, and Yuehe, except for the development time of Yuehe a little earlier, not to mention that when we were children, even ten years ago, no one went to it, and it didn't even exist at all.
In the minds of the older generation of Jiaxing people, the city center of the most popular and lively Qinjian Road and Jianguo Road (equivalent to Yan'an Road in Hangzhou, Nanjing Road and Huaihai Road in Shanghai), although the traffic is still congested, this congestion is more often due to its connection between the two major Internet celebrity attractions of Yuehe and Zicheng - Catholic Church. Even people like me, who grew up on the road to the founding of the country, haven't been there for many years.
The shift of urban centers, sometimes so quietly but resolutely, is behind the brutal growth of Chinese cities over the past three decades.
Before the reform and opening up, Jiaxing, the whole city was squeezed within the Huancheng River24 square kilometers in a small space. Although there are many factories in the eastern part of the city, they are mainly concentrated on both sides of Luli Street.
After the land was withdrawn in 1983 to build a city, with the construction and penetration of Zhongshan Road and its extension to the west, the urban area of Jiaxing also overflowed the Huancheng River for the first time, and a small new area rose in the Hexi area. However, like most places in the country, Jiaxing's large-scale old city renovation and urban construction wave will not wait until the 90s.
During that wave of urban sprawl, my family moved from the center of the First Ring Road to Sanshuiwan in the east of the city. At that time, there was still a farmland around Sanshuiwan, and the cicadas chirped during the day and frogs chirped at night. The terminals of several major east-west buses, such as No. 5, No. 7 and No. 9, are located at the entrance of our community. It can be said that 30 years ago this was the eastern boundary of Jiaxing City, and now, the entire second ring road has been officially defined as the old city.
As for the new town, it's boundless. When I bought a house for the first time after joining the job in 2010, I was already going to the Science and Technology City east of the Third Ring Road to see the real estate. Later, I bought it again, and I bought it near the seven major highways, which are known as the "East Fourth Ring Road" in Jiaxing.
That is to say, in just one generation, the built-up area of Jiaxing has increased from 19Eight square kilometers (1990 data) swelled to more than 160 square kilometers, an eightfold increase.
Jiaxing's case is just a microcosm of the explosion of Chinese cities over the past few decades. Since the reform and opening up, with the large-scale migration of rural population into cities, first, second, third and fourth-tier cities have blossomed, grown rapidly, and continued to grow taller.
I remember chasing Hong Kong dramas and Japanese dramas when I was a child, and I was always shocked by the rows of high-rise buildings in Hong Kong and Tokyo, and the ubiquitous flyover rail transit, and sighed that people's cities are so modern and modern. Nowadays, when traveling abroad, whether it is to New York, Tokyo, or Hong Kong and Taipei, I feel that in terms of street scenery alone, not to mention compared with our Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen, even the provincial capitals such as Hangzhou, Chengdu and Wuhan are much more glamorous than them.
On the contrary, the old subway in New York, the smell of urine on street corners in Paris, and the low-rise bungalows everywhere in Taipei are often the targets of Chinese people to complain and make fun of them, and even give these cities nicknames such as Xinxiang and Poxian.
The problem is that people's cities aren't born so old. Whether it was Haussmann's Paris during the Haussmann Plan, the United States in the 1930s, and Japan in the 1960s, they were all veritable infrastructure maniacs.
Like Shenzhen's "one floor in three days" in the early days of reform and opening up, it took only one year to build the 381-meter-high landmark Empire State Building in New York. These past cases remind us that:
Can the current sense of novelty in domestic cities be maintained?
Ma Yun once said that in the past, when there was no high-speed rail, it took half a day to take a train from Shanghai to Hangzhou, so people would generally stop in Jiaxing halfway to have a meal and rest. Later, with the high-speed railway, the one-hour direct connection between Shanghai and Hangzhou was realized, and Jiaxing was directly skipped.
In fact, it is not only outsiders who abandon Jiaxing, but also their own people. In the past, transportation was inconvenient, and the radius of human movement was small. Whether it is studying, working, or getting married, almost all of them are confined to their hometowns. For example, when I went home this time, I talked to my parents about their emotional experience when they were young, this ex, that blind date, and went around and found that it was not a worker, a neighbor, or a classmate's sister or brother, and finally everyone couldn't help but sigh: Jiaxing is so small!
Later, with the gradual popularization of private cars, airplanes, and high-speed rail, the scope of people's travel became larger and larger. Relatives, friends and classmates around them sent small schools, and many of them went out to college and never returned, and there were people who settled in Tiannan and Haibei. Even if it's the New Year, it's hard to get together as much as you did when you were a child.
Of course, as the "lucky ones" certified by the whole network, only children like us in Jiangsu, Zhejiang and Shanghai generally do not go too far, except for those who go abroad, most of them are still concentrated in the Yangtze River Delta. But if you are a young person from a small town in the inland countryside or a third- or fourth-tier city, it is more likely that you will be uprooted from your homeland.
As people move farther and farther away from home, people change cities more and more frequently. This year in Beijing, next year back to the hometown, the next year to the Yangtze River Delta to try their luck, the year after the big south to the Pearl River Delta to see the situation is not uncommon, but also the name of "go south to the north to see the world".
However, regardless of whether it flies east or south, the trend of population further concentration in head cities and core metropolitan areas following employment opportunities and high-quality medical and educational resources is certain. Moreover, due to the relatively limited number of leading cities, and the homogenization phenomenon of "one thousand cities", the scope of objects available for selection is shrinking sharply.
In fact, as the process of urbanization is coming to an end, it has been basically completed in different large cities according to their preferences and capabilities. In recent years, the number of people moving across provinces has been lower than the number of people moving within provinces. This may also indicate that the large-scale population flow between the east and the west, the north and the south since the reform and opening up is coming to an end.
In the future, we may transition from picking cities to adapting to cities, including adapting to the shortcomings of cities.
The ancients said that the hometown is timid, but for me, although the hometown is not timid, people are a little timid. Especially in the past few years, every time I go home, there will be elders who say that I have grown taller. At first, I was still happy, thinking that I was ushering in a "second spring".
Later, I found out that it was not me who grew taller, but my fathers who were getting old and shrinking.
The white horse passed through the gap, and those "masters in charge" who once stood up to the sky and the earth in our hearts are now dying, just like the mottled door number, how many stories have been recorded? That's why I started last year with the idea of launching the "Writing History for My Father" project.
In fact, it is not only people who will get old, but also cities. The reason why well-known cities in Europe and the United States look old and dilapidated is because they have been repaired and used for hundreds of years. The New York subway, for example, was built in 1904 and has been in operation for 120 years. The most recent large-scale renovation of the city of Paris began in 1853 and has been completed for more than a century and a half.
On the other hand, although our cities claim to have a history of thousands of years, there are very few buildings that are more than 100 years old. At present, the glamorous high-rise buildings we see are basically newly built in the last two or three decades.
It doesn't make much sense to compare a young man in his thirties with a hundred-year-old grandfather, and then say to himself that we are so trendy that they are really dirty.
In fact, as China's urbanization comes to an end, especially considering the high debt caused by a large number of ineffective investments in various places in recent years, ** has successively stopped the construction of new ultra-high residential buildings with more than 18 floors in the county, raised the threshold for subway construction, and even named 12 provinces with high debts in addition to basic livelihood projects such as water supply, heating, and power supply, and no new projects will be started in 2024.
Admittedly, the era of infrastructure mania in China's cities is gradually fading.
In the future, large-scale renovation of old cities and construction of new districts will be replaced by local organic renewal, becoming the new normal of urban infrastructure. In the process, the city will age at a rate that is visible to the eye. Looking back ten or twenty years or even fifty years later, today's new subways and new buildings may still be in use at that time, but the luster of the exterior has long been eroded and mottled by the years.
But on the other hand, the soft power of the city can really bloom when it is washed away by the glossy hardware.
And what we need to do is to learn to grow old with the city. Just like accompanying an elder in the family and a partner who has grown up together, after seeing the dreams of his childhood and the brilliance of youth, it is time to settle down and savor the mediocre middle age and long old age. In this way, we can fully understand a city, an era, and my own life.