Word: centrales
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...fellow suburban pioneers, are stocking up with stuff. In our house we have drapes that were made in Tianjin, and tile flooring from Kunming, but also bathroom fixtures made by Kohler (headquarters: Kohler, Wis.) and consumer electronics from Samsung and Panasonic. Our town's central shopping mall - which looks as if it could be in White Plains, N.Y., or the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles - has had a KFC and a Pizza Hut up and running for the past year. In late summer, New Songjiang passed through one of globalization's initiation rituals: Starbucks opened its first branch here...
...easiest to discern. Others - political, social - are like aftershocks of an earthquake: you know they are coming, even if you're not quite sure when, or exactly how powerful, they will be. One, I'm certain, will be environmental. New Songjiang is supposed to be linked, by 2010, to central Shanghai when a spur on the light-rail system is completed...
...China's move to the suburbs is critical not just to the country's economic future, but also to its politics. As the retired city planner said, there is nothing more important to the central government than making sure economic growth continues, and that the benefits of that growth are spread widely. More than anything, this is what gives the communist leadership legitimacy. All across China, towns like New Songjiang are built on the backs of migrant workers - people who have moved from other provinces to earn better money as construction workers. An estimated 114 million workers in China...
...Consider Qiu Haiyan, 22, from Henan, a province in central China with an average per capita income of $1,100 per year. She first found her way here working on a barge that carries bricks up the river that flows past our house. Qiu has the build of an Olympic weight lifter, with thick, powerful legs, and she and other work-gang members would offload the bricks on a wide wooden plank attached to a rope that they would sling across their shoulders. The subcontractor who built our development estimates he used about 70,000 bricks at Emerald Riverside...
...Jintao, China's President, has said repeatedly that the gap between rich and poor is one of the government's central concerns. In New Songjiang, the reasons for his insistence become obvious. Theoretically, migrant workers are supposed to receive some health-insurance benefits from the companies that hire them. But many, particularly day laborers who hook up with small contractors, do not. I spent one evening a few months ago in the emergency room of the huge, modern hospital in New Songjiang. In the space of about three hours, five construction workers were admitted, including one who had tumbled three...