[As China fights to end extreme poverty while also recovering from the economic damage of the coronavirus, the supposed wisdom of building huge statues in poorer areas to grow tourism is coming under harsh scrutiny.]
To officials in her corner of China,
the statue of Yang Asha, a goddess of beauty, serves as a tribute to the rich
culture of the local people and, they hope, a big draw for sightseers and their
money. To many others in China, she is another white elephant in a country full
of expensive monuments, gaudy tourist traps and wasteful vanity projects that
draw money away from real problems.
Those critics point to the statue of Guan Yu, a general
from antiquity, in the city of Jingzhou, where he also towers higher than
the Statue of Liberty and wields an enormous polearm called the Green Dragon
Crescent Blade.
They point to the Jingxingu Hotel, a 24-story wooden building with lots of
empty balconies and open spaces but few actual rooms — and it has not accepted
guests beyond a few tourists who come to gawk.
They point to the construction
of a
full-size, $150 million replica of the Titanic in a reservoir deep in
China’s interior, 1,200 miles from the ocean.
These projects have always endured
some criticism in China. But these days the harsh words resonate. Xi Jinping,
the country’s top leader, has vowed to eradicate
extreme poverty, and some of these projects are in the country’s most
impoverished places.
China is also still
emerging from the economic
devastation of the coronavirus pandemic early this year. With many
people struggling to get their lives back in order, the projects seem
like little more than costly burdens on a country where many local and
provincial governments are already deeply in debt.
Singling out the $38 million
Jingxingu Hotel and the $224 million Guan Yu project, which also included an
elaborate base and surrounding park, the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural
Development ordered on Sept. 29 that communities may not “blindly build
large-scale sculptures that are divorced from reality and the masses.”
Chinese government officials have
long prized big projects. China now has four-fifths
of the world’s 100 tallest bridges, more miles of ultramodern expressways
than the American interstate highway system and a bullet-train network long enough to span the
continental United States seven times. Those projects have employed millions of
people and helped fuel the country’s breakneck growth.
But local officials borrowed
heavily to fund those projects. Estimates put the amount of local
debt as high as $6 trillion, raising fears of financial
bombs lurking in the
ledgers of far corners of the country.
Yet with each passing year, as
projects are built in ever-more-remote places, the economic kick from each
project becomes less and less. China is on track this year to add debt equal to
four months’ economic output while its economy grows by an amount equal to less
than two weeks’ output.
Local government borrowing “is
still out of control,” said Gary Liu, an independent economist in Shanghai.
Particularly controversial on
Chinese social media are statues built in areas of considerable poverty. Some
local officials are following the model of the city of Wuxi, which drew
tourists by the busload after it built a 259-foot statue of the Buddha in 1996.
But more recent statues lack the same drawing power.
“The people who imitated later are
doing nothing more than wasting labor and money,” said Zhou Mingqi, a tourism
consultant in Shanghai.
In this environment, online critics
seized on the Yang Asha statue when a video of it went viral this autumn. But
the statue’s defenders argue that it and the region it represents have more to
offer than mindless building.
The statue of Yang Asha stands 216
feet when measured from the hem of her gown to the top of her horned headdress.
That is 65 feet taller than the Statue of Liberty’s torch, although New York
City’s statue stands on a much larger base.
Yang Asha is the mythical
ancestress of the Miao people, an ethnic minority in China closely related to
the Hmong of Southeast Asia. The Miao make up the majority of the population of
Jianhe, the county in Guizhou Province that built the statue.
Her headdress, which incorporates
both horns and feathers, is meant to commemorate two Miao groups, and her pale
white aspect nods at the Miao’s reputation as skilled silversmiths.
Yang Asha was an extraordinarily
beautiful woman who was bullied by dark clouds into marrying the sun, according
to local legend. She later deserted the sun in favor of the sun’s brother, the
moon, and had to fight to stay with her new suitor, said Luo Yu, a City
University of Hong Kong anthropologist who is from Guizhou Province.
Predictably, her story became one
of class struggle under Mao, said Ms. Luo, with Yang Asha fleeing a landlord
sun for a moon depicted as a heroic laborer or tenant farmer. In today’s
telling, the Chinese state media gloss over the marital infidelity and economic
inequality, describing her as a beautiful woman who fought for love.
Jianhe is in a region known for
poverty, which has fueled much of the criticism over Yang Asha. The statue
itself was erected nearly four years ago, but construction of its surrounding
plaza was then quickly suspended in response to online criticism. The site
still lacks bathrooms, parking and other basic amenities. An effort began over
the summer to finish construction, but that has helped reawaken criticism of
the project.
“It’d be so much better to spend
the money on alleviating poverty,” asked one of the many commentators who have
weighed in on social media. “What can a statue like this do?”
The local government says that the
statue cost only $13 million, with none of
it coming from anti-poverty programs, and helped the town draw 200,000
visitors during a weeklong National Day holiday at the start of October.
Verifying such numbers is
difficult. Souvenir vendors at the statue said that about only 100 people might
visit the site on a busy weekend day, and that most of them have been local
residents lately because of the pandemic.
Some say the current criticisms go
too far. They contend that affluent people in China’s big cities have become
too quick to criticize ethnic minority communities in rural areas for spending
money to honor their ancestors and their traditions.
Such critics “have this
paternalistic, protective perception of destitute minorities,” said Louisa
Schein, a Rutgers University anthropologist who has long studied the Miao.
Local officials dispute the idea
that their region is impoverished. The Jianhe area declared early this year
that it has raised its last few families out of extreme poverty.
The community itself, like many in
rural China, no longer appears impoverished. It has been transformed by
remittances from residents who migrated to work in furniture factories and
construction sites elsewhere.
Liu Kaimu is one of the many Jianhe
residents who joined that migration. He worked in Quzhou, a vast
furniture-making hub in south-central coastal China that has attracted large
numbers of Miao migrant workers, who have a strong woodworking tradition.
Mr. Liu made $750 to $900 a month
and received free food and dormitory housing. In 2011, he bought a
three-bedroom, 1,300-square-foot apartment for his family in Jianhe for
$54,000.
Weeks before the pandemic, Mr. Liu,
now 35, had decided he would stay in Jianhe. His son, now a freshman in high
school, needs his father home more.
So Mr. Liu started a small
business: a whirling children’s ride of bright purple rockets on the large but
still unfinished concrete plaza in front of the Yang Asha statue. Mr. Liu said
that his take-home income is actually slightly higher than when he was a
migrant worker.
Mr. Liu is grateful that the statue
has given him an alternative to life as a migrant worker. “What we did was hard
toil,” he said. “It’s impossible to do that kind of work again.”
Claire Fu and Coral Yang
contributed research.
