A Lost Teddy Bear

This past week, we've been having unusually good weather, so some of the other teachers and I decided to take advantage of that and take a jaunt around the countryside. Our goal was to finally get across the river and check out a village there. We had never gone over there previously because the school had completely bricked off any bridges going over to the other side of the river. So with no real plan or forethought, we wandered out of the college and sought a way across the river.

We ended up finding a bridge fairly quickly, after meandering down a side street that turned into a dirt road, but when we got to the other side of the river we found nothing of the village that we had been looking for, but instead a flattened, dusty construction site. It turned out that for months, our school had been buying up all of the land, evicting the people, and tearing down any and all buildings that had once been there at the beginning of the year. Bereft of our purpose, we spent a little time wandering around the barren wasteland.

At the edge of the large swath of bulldozed ground, we found train tracks that are currently being constructed to connect Pengshan to Chengdu. Out here, at the edge of town, we found some of the remains of the missing village. A few houses stood among patches of farmland. Even these, though, were marked with red spray painted characters, indicated that they too would soon be torn down.

After a little while spent wandering up and down the train tracks, we made our way back towards the college. The flattened land was monotonous, broken up only by piles of rubble and concrete. When we were almost back to the school, I saw something lying in the middle of the road, and bent to take a closer look:

It was a teddy bear, flattened underneath the wheels of a tractor or bulldozer. That teddy bear, looking like a piece of roadkill, made me more sad than all of the piles of brick and stone put together. A village, torn down in the matter of a few months to make way for more of this:

China is a rapidly changing and developing country. It is frantically scrambling to catch up with advanced western countries. But what is it losing in the process?