MCLC: urbanites flee smog

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: urbanites flee smog
***********************************************************

Source: NYT (11/22/13):
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/23/world/asia/urbanites-flee-chinas-smog-for
-blue-skies.html

Urbanites Flee China’s Smog for Blue Skies
By EDWARD WONG 

DALI, China — A typical morning for Lin Liya, a native of Shanghai
transplanted to this ancient town in southwest China, goes like this: See
her 3-year-old son off to school near the mountains; go for a half-hour
run on the shores of Erhai Lake; and browse the local market for fresh
vegetables and meat.

She finished her run one morning beneath cloudless blue skies and sat down
with a visitor from Beijing in the lakeside boutique hotel started by her
and her husband.

“I think luxury is sunshine, good air and good water,” she said. “But in
the big city, you can’t get those things.”

More than two years ago, Ms. Lin, 34, and her husband gave up comfortable
careers in the booming southern city of Guangzhou — she at a Norwegian
risk management company, he at an advertising firm that he had founded —
to join the growing number of urbanites who have decamped to rural China.
One resident here calls them “environmental refugees” or “environmental
immigrants.”

At a time when hundreds of millions of Chinese, many poor farmers, are
leaving their country homesteads to find work and tap into the energy of
China’s dynamic cities, a small number of urban dwellers have decided to
make a reverse migration. Their change in lifestyle speaks volumes about
anxieties over pollution, traffic, living costs, property values and the
general stress found in China’s biggest coastal metropolises.

Take air quality: Levels of fine particulate matter in some Chinese cities
reach 40 times the recommended exposure limit set by the World Health
Organization. This month, an official Chinese news report said an
8-year-old girl 
<http://sinosphere.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/11/05/an-8-year-old-girls-lung-ca
ncer-is-blamed-on-air-pollution/> near Shanghai was hospitalized with lung
cancer, the youngest such victim in China. Her doctor blamed air pollution.

The urban refugees come from all walks of life — businesspeople and
artists, teachers and chefs — though there is no reliable estimate of
their numbers. They have staked out greener lives in small enclaves, from
central Anhui Province to remote Tibet. Many are Chinese bobos, or
bourgeois bohemians, and they say that besides escaping pollution and
filth, they want to be unshackled from the material drives of the cities —
what Ms. Lin derided as a focus on “what you’re wearing, where you’re
eating, comparing yourself with others.”

The town of Dali in Yunnan Province, nestled between a wall of 13,000-foot
mountains and one of China’s largest freshwater lakes, is a popular
destination. Increasingly, the indigenous ethnic Bai people of the area
are leasing their village homes to ethnic Han, the dominant group in
China, who turn up with suitcases and backpacks. They come with one-way
tickets from places like Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen, all of
which have roaring economies but also populations of 15 million people or
more.

On Internet forums, the new arrivals to Dali discuss how to rent a house,
where to shop, how to make a living and what schools are best for their
children. Their presence is everywhere in the cobblestone streets of the
old town. They run cafes, hotels and bookstores, and the younger ones sit
on the streets selling trinkets from blankets.

Some become farmers here, and some spend their days home schooling their
children. Their presence has transformed Dali and surrounding villages
into a cross between Provence and Haight-Ashbury.

One magnet is the village of Shuanglang, which became a draw after the
famous Yunnan natives Yang Liping, a dancer, and Zhao Qing, an artist,
built homes there. As at other lakeside villages, the immigrants, some
with immense wealth, live near fishermen and farmers.

“All kinds of people come here with different dreams,” said Ye Yongqing,
55, an ethnic Bai artist from the region who has lived mostly in cities,
including London, but bought a home here five years ago. “Some people
imagine this place as Greece or Italy or Bali.”

“Dali is one of the few places in China that still has a close tie to the
earth,” he added, sitting in front of a table of squashes in his garden
courtyard. “A lot of villages in China have become empty shells. Dali is a
survivor of this phenomenon.”

Ms. Lin said she first fell in love with Dali when she came as a
backpacker in 2006. She returned twice before moving here. In 2010, on the
third visit, she and her husband, whom she had met trekking in Yunnan,
looked for land to lease to build a hotel on Erhai Lake. It has not all
been easy going, Ms. Lin said, citing negotiations and misunderstandings
with local officials, villagers and employees.

“We just wanted to switch to a different life,” said Ms. Lin, who had
lived in Shanghai as well as Guangzhou. “My friends in Shanghai are
struggling there — not only in their work, but also just to live. The
prices are too high, even higher than in Europe. They become crazy, go
mad.”

Ms. Lin moved here less than two years after giving birth to a son. “It’s
good for the baby because it’s like my mother’s childhood,” she said. “My
mother’s childhood in Shanghai — the air was still clean, you could see
blue skies, there was clean water.”

That is a common refrain among parents here. One afternoon, four mothers,
all urban refugees, sat outside a bookstore cafe, Song’s Nest, practicing
English with one another. “The one thing we all have in common is we moved
here to raise our children in a good environment,” one woman said.

The bookshop’s owner, Song Yan, moved here this year and translates books
by an Indian philosopher popular with Chinese spiritual seekers. One
night, she and another translator and urban refugee, Zheng Yuantao, 33,
talked over dinner about their moves.

“I’ve never felt so free in my life,” Mr. Zheng said. “I grew up as a city
boy, and I never realized how much I like living close to nature.”

From the nearby lakeside village of Caicun, Huang Xiaoling, a
photographer, flies back to Beijing to shoot portraits and events for
clients. She had once lived in a courtyard home in the Chinese capital,
but fled in September with her 3-year-old son and husband, an American who
works remotely as a technology director for a New York publishing company.

“I’m still productive even though I don’t go into an office,” she said. “I
don’t know if it’s the weather and the environment, or just me feeling
that, ‘Oh, I got out of the cave that I wanted to escape.’ ”

Shi Da contributed research.