Morning in the city

To the editor:
    A return to the schedule is almost always fraught with tension. Here in Shanghai, a city that does sleep, there is a lot that begins to happen in the early hours of the morning. As I bicycle down the empty streets to my school there is only myself, the street sweepers, and delivery people.     Street sweepers are a tough bunch. Comparatively speaking, Shanghai is a clean city. Thousands of workers are out at all hours of the day pushing the detritus of modern life around with old-fashioned twig brooms. A stick and some dried branches suffice. Each worker has a few meters of street to clean. Starting at about five o’clock in the morning the sweepers begin the work of polishing the city. Their brooms and rubbish carts collect the wrappings and waste that are no longer part of the world. If you listen you can hear the scrape and scratch of the twigs on the pavement. It is a pleasant rhythm and one that heralds the everyday world of the street.
    China has been in the resource recovery mode for many tens of years. Today, buying a bottle of juice or water begins a process that will see that bottle generate three or four jobs. Every packaged food item is put into recyclable packaging. A tax has been paid for this material. Collect the refuse and you can get a few jiao (Chinese pennies) or yuan for them. The lifespan of a bottle of soda after it has fulfilled its purpose is about three hours. Within three hours it has been picked up, turned in, consolidated, and loaded back on a truck to be turned into some other product. This is one area where China is ahead of the West. With the large population it demands resource recovery.
    Yes, there are dumps in China. But for each dump there are hundreds of gleaners rummaging through the waste. Some will collect nothing but the wrapping paper for candies, others the plastic utensils for food. No, these are not clean and sharp workers. They are just trying to survive and get a little bit of money. But their efforts go a long way to supplying the materials chain of a voracious beast.
    Buildings in China are also recycled. In going to work this morning it was intriguing to see a giant wreckers claw carefully chewing the concrete. I wrote earlier of how the Chinese had learned how to grow concrete. Here I get to see the creatures that consume it.
    The six story building had been stores, offices, and partly a hotel. When it died, the high priests of demolition entered. Like the death priests of ancient Egypt, they carved out the vital organs of the body for preservation. Light switches, doors, hinges, and windows were all removed to be put into their own vessels of mortality. Then enters the master priest: The Claw.
    Acolytes connect hoses and pumps as the giant beast waddles through the primordial muck. A single command and the salivary glands start the process, water shoots from the hoses and wets the meat of the concrete. On a giant articulated arm the claw begins to feed on concrete. It carefully bites and chews at small sections protruding from the body and gradually a building becomes nothing more than a pile of dust and bricks. Crunch, grind, tear, and rend and yet one more morsel of concrete becomes food for the next new building to go up in the city.
    I do not know if irony is present during this deconstruction phase. The name on the machine is Hitachi. In the early part of the 20th century Japan occupied and managed this area of China. The British Archives has rare footage of the bombing of Shanghai by Japanese planes during World War II. Yet today, under the guiding hands of a Chinese master, the Japanese beast is used to begin the rejuvenation process that will see a new concrete body grow and become a home for the city of tomorrow. Welcome to Monday.
Orpheus Allison
Shanghai, China
orpheusallison@mac.com