【城市印象】之——福建 · 厦门City Impressions: Xiamen, Fujian's Pretty Face

Fuzhou, Xiamen, Quanzhou — visit all three and they feel slow-paced and easygoing, Xiamen especially so. If you were picking the most livable place, Xiamen would surely rank near the top. But being livable alone isn't enough for a city.

Politics

On a city's political standing, these ten are beyond dispute: Beijing (010), Shanghai (021), Guangzhou (020), Chongqing (023), Nanjing (025), Tianjin (022), Wuhan (027), Chengdu (028), Xi'an (029), Shenyang (029).

Fujian: one of five special economic zones — Xiamen (1980); one of fifteen sub-provincial cities — Xiamen; one specially designated city under separate planning — Xiamen (1988).

The fifteen sub-provincial cities: Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Nanjing, Wuhan, Shenyang, Xi'an, Chengdu, Jinan, Hangzhou, Harbin, Changchun, Dalian, Qingdao, Xiamen, Ningbo.

Put another way: Liaoning — Shenyang vs. Dalian; Shandong — Jinan vs. Qingdao; Zhejiang — Hangzhou vs. Ningbo; Fujian — Fuzhou vs. Xiamen; Guangdong — Guangzhou vs. Shenzhen. Of the provincial capitals paired with the five separately-planned cities, only Fuzhou isn't sub-provincial.

(Figure in original: a 2015 data table on the fifteen sub-provincial cities, GDP.)

The Fujian Military District is a corps-level unit whose jurisdiction covers eight military subdistricts, one garrison district, and coastal-defense forces. One of its most important political roles is, of course, Taiwan.

Economy

Fujian used to be the front line, and with hills scattered everywhere on top of that, the cost and risk of building infrastructure ran high, so national policy rarely reached it. So along the whole coastline, Fujian wasn't on the same level as its neighbors among the "Four Little Dragons" — Guangdong, Zhejiang, Jiangsu, Shandong. Back then, Fujian's regional economy was actually in the same tier as Guangxi's.

Where there's water, there's wealth.

Behind Shanghai lies the Yangtze, with a drainage basin of 1,808,500 square kilometers. Behind Guangzhou lies the Pearl River, with a basin of 453,690 square kilometers.

Behind Fuzhou lies the Min River, with a basin of 60,992 square kilometers; behind Xiamen lies the Jiulong River, with a basin of 14,741 square kilometers.

In 2016, Fujian's provincewide GDP was 2.851915 trillion yuan, a nominal growth rate of 9.77% over the prior year, ranking ninth nationwide. The top six were still Guangdong, Jiangsu, Shandong, Zhejiang, Henan, and Sichuan.

Within Fujian, the top cities by total GDP were, in order, Quanzhou, Fuzhou, Xiamen, Zhangzhou, Longyan, Sanming, Putian, Ningde, and Nanping. The fastest GDP growth was Zhangzhou's 12.94%; next were Fuzhou and Putian, both topping 10.0%. On per capita GDP, Xiamen was highest at 98,000 yuan; next was Fuzhou at 82,600.

(Figure in original: a table of GDP by city in Fujian, Jan–Nov.)

Talk economics in Fujian and Xiamen is always the reference point.

If you ask why Quanzhou fell behind, then apart from policy it comes down to, well, policy. And a big part of the reason is: the railway. Back in the day, the railway development gap between Quanzhou and Xiamen was severe. That was Quanzhou's pain — and the pain of many a city's development.

In the 1950s, thanks to its mountainous terrain and prolonged state of war readiness, Fujian's railway development crawled. Quanzhou back then had maybe two passenger train departures; Xiamen, as the second-largest transfer hub, had 50 to 70. What that meant goes without saying.

Bring up Fujian and people always think first of Xiamen and forget Fuzhou. But Fuzhou's overall resources actually beat Xiamen's. Fuzhou and Xiamen don't really have the Guangzhou-Shenzhen or Jinan-Qingdao kind of relationship.

Xiamen developed early and enjoyed every policy advantage. But its follow-through has fizzled, and it basically has no edge left now. Xiamen's development leans too heavily on real estate and tourism, warping the city's growth. The Macau and Sanya models are the development path Xiamen can foresee for itself.

(Figure in original: a chart of housing prices and price-to-income ratios in China's major cities.)

And it holds no clear advantage over Dalian, Qingdao, Suzhou, or Nanjing. In the National Bureau of Statistics' 2016 ranking of China's top 100 cities by GDP, Xiamen came 52nd; Suzhou was 7th, Nanjing 10th, Hangzhou 11th, Dalian 17th.

Xiamen leaves a very good impression: fresh and delicate, most beautiful island, livable city — the reputation still holds. But the fatal flaw is that Xiamen has no culture of its own; it's all imported.

Fuzhou, by virtue of the conveniences of being the provincial capital, is a bit better than Xiamen in political, financial, and medical resources. In elite education Fuzhou trails Xiamen, but their average levels are about the same. Whatever Xiamen has, Fuzhou has too; whatever Fuzhou has, Xiamen doesn't necessarily.

Population

Latest figures — Fuzhou's resident population is 7.43 million, Quanzhou's 8.44 million; Xiamen's registered (hukou) population is 2.0344 million, while its resident population is 3.81 million.

Among the fifteen sub-provincial cities, fourteen have total GDP above the 500-billion mark, and all of them rank within China's top 30 by GDP. In terms of total population, most of these cities have over 7 million people (Dalian nearing 7 million), with four topping the 10-million mark: Chengdu, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, and Wuhan.

Xiamen is the exception. On GDP, Xiamen managed only 346.6 billion yuan last year, ranking 52nd among China's prefecture-level and above cities — only slightly above Kunshan, a county-level city under Suzhou — a mere 19% of top-ranked Guangzhou's. On total population, although Xiamen's population has grown rapidly in recent years, the city's total in 2015 was only 3.86 million, a world apart from other cities, at just 28.6% of Guangzhou's.

Yet, though Xiamen falls far short of the first-tier city Guangzhou in economic development and population concentration, its housing prices rank fourth nationwide — behind only Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou, and well above Guangzhou. So in China, GDP growth and population inflow aren't the only factors determining housing prices; whether land supply truly meets market needs matters more. Xiamen's property transactions last year came to just 3.5 million square meters, a rounding error next to big cities like Guangzhou and Chengdu.

Culture and Customs

Xiamen is "new" and "young," Quanzhou is "old."

Xiamen is the youngster invested with hopes during the reform-and-opening era; Quanzhou is the aged elder, once renowned across the seas.

Xiamen is a cultured type; Quanzhou is a businessman; the cultured type is elegant, oozing prestige; the businessman is rich, low-key, and greedy.

Xiamen dazzles: it's the "influencer," the "pretty boy," the "fresh and delicate." Quanzhou still holds its charms: it's the older gentleman, the veteran leading man.

Xiamen is a city of "the arts." Quanzhou is a city of "culture."

The encyclopedia puts it this way: "Quanzhou, with its deep and weighty historical and cultural heritage, its distinctive and remarkable multicultural panorama, its rich and colorful cultural relics, and its long and broad history of foreign exchange, stood out among ten shortlisted cities to become China's sole selection and the inaugural 'East Asian Capital of Culture.'"

1: The strongest feeling in Xiamen is the slow pace — very comfortable.

2: Quanzhou is an ancient city, an unwalled ancient city with no walls, where every building is genuinely old and full of character. Quanzhou's residents today still live an authentic life in the old city; every step carries the street-level texture of the ancient town. The Guanyue Temple's incense burns strong, the Tianhou Temple has an unbroken flow of people, the street snacks still taste traditional, and what tourists eat is exactly what locals eat every day. It's a living ancient city — one that fuses the modern and the traditional on a large scale, an old town thick with everyday life.

3: In the Song dynasty, northern Fujian was the province's most culturally flourishing region. Liu Yong, Song Ci, Zhang Dun, Liu Kai, Li Gang, Wu Jie, Yang Shi — a whole roster of heavyweights — all hailed from northern Fujian, and Zhu Xi spent most of his life active there, making Min learning the orthodox transmission of Confucianism. That stretch was also the peak of Fujian's cultural history, when it stood alongside Jiangxi and Zhejiang as the country's most culturally flourishing regions.

4: Quanzhou is the wellspring of Minnan culture. It was a land of fish and rice as far back as the two Jin dynasties, began foreign exchange in the Tang, and by the Song and Yuan was a world-class port and international metropolis. In Marco Polo's words, Quanzhou "is one of the largest ports in the world."

5: In the Song dynasty Fuzhou was a shipbuilding center, with flourishing overseas trade and a developed commodity economy, and it produced 21 zhuangyuan (top imperial-exam laureates) and more than two thousand jinshi. It's fair to say both cities were, in their time, dazzling pearls of the southeast coast — and, both being trade ports, they naturally had a rivalry between them.

6: Fuzhou's Shoushan stone is hailed as the national stone. "The world's stone, Fuzhou's craft" is how people praise Fuzhou's stone-carving artistry.

7: Fuzhou's bodiless lacquerware, together with Beijing's cloisonné and Jingdezhen's porcelain, are known as the three treasures of Chinese handicrafts.

8: Fuzhou is one of the country's key production areas for arts and crafts. Fuzhou's famous dish Buddha Jumps Over the Wall has even become a state-banquet dish.

9: Xiamen people are more exclusionary of outsiders; not speaking Minnanhua gets you looked down on, and it's hard to break into their circles. Fuzhou is highly inclusive, and life there is easygoing too. On the fitting-in front, the two are like Guangzhou and Shenzhen.

10: Fujian is covered in hills, interlaced with river valleys and basins. Mountains and hills make up over 80% of the province's total area — hence the old saying, "eight parts mountain, one part water, one part farmland." Fujian has very little arable land, so there's not much room to develop at home, which is why Fujianese folk love to head out and hustle, singing "You have to fight to win."

11: Fujian is famous nationwide for favoring sons over daughters. In terms of severity it's heavier in the south and lighter in the north — but "lighter" depends on your reference point; drop it into another province and it'd still count as heavy. By recent data, among only-children the male-to-female ratio is 3:1, and the sex ratio at birth is 125:100 males to females.

What does that mean? The normal range for the sex ratio at birth is 103–107, and China's normal figure usually sits around 107. There are even plenty of places where it's "have the child first, register the marriage later" — where the "child" here doesn't mean any child, but specifically a son. Have a daughter, and you don't register. This is a workaround dreamed up to skirt the one-child policy: if the wife can't produce a son, they simply never register the marriage. The most famous case of all is Changle.

City Development

Education

Apart from Xiamen University, Fujian's universities are basically nothing to write home about, so top-scoring Fujian students mostly head out of province for college — and, of course, plenty of low-scoring ones leave too. Xiamen University lives up to its name as the country's most beautiful campus; you only feel it deeply once you've gone.

In basic education there are provincial-key middle schools like Xiamen Shuangshi Middle School, Xiamen No. 1 Middle School, and Xiamen Foreign Language School; in higher education, Xiamen has 17 institutions, including Xiamen University (985 Project, 211 Project), Jimei University, Xiamen University of Technology, and Huaqiao University (Xiamen campus).

Healthcare

Fujian's healthcare is quite good. Tertiary-A (top-grade) hospitals: 23 in Fuzhou; 9 in Xiamen; 5 in Quanzhou; 2 in Nanping; 2 in Putian; 2 in Ningde; 1 in Sanming; 1 in Longyan.

Transportation

Fuzhou Changle International Airport operates 50 domestic routes, with flights reaching 47 major cities at home and abroad — the ninth city airport in the country to achieve full coverage of routes to every provincial capital. It has 8 regional routes and 9 international routes, with annual passenger throughput of about 10 million. Within the city there are 288 bus routes and nearly 5,000 buses. On the subway front, Line 1 is about to open.

Xiamen currently has two train stations, Xiamen Station (HSR) and Xiamen North Station (HSR), with a Xiamen East Station (HSR) in planning. By high-speed rail from Xiamen it's 2 hours to Fuzhou, 4 hours to Shenzhen, 8 hours to Shanghai, 7 hours to Hangzhou, 5.5 hours to Ningbo, 7 hours to Nanjing, 7 hours to Changsha, 7.5 hours to Wuhan, 10.5 hours to Tianjin, 11 hours to Beijing, 9.5 hours to Jinan, and 12.5 hours to Qingdao.

Public transit in downtown Xiamen consists mainly of ferries, regular bus routes, four BRT express lines, eleven BRT feeder lines, and one airport BRT express line.

On rail transit, subway Line 1 broke ground in late 2013 and was expected to open by the end of September 2017; Line 2 broke ground in February 2015; Lines 3 and 4 were expected to break ground within 2015. Xiamen has a 4E-class civil airport — Xiamen Gaoqi International Airport — with direct flights to major cities across the country.

Beyond that, there are international flights to Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Penang, Bangkok, Jakarta, Manila, Taipei, Kaohsiung, Taichung, Hong Kong, Macau, Tokyo, Osaka, Seoul, Amsterdam, and other cities. Xiamen also has a 4F airport in planning — Xiamen Xiang'an International Airport.

But Xiamen is short on land, with resources highly concentrated on the island, especially in Siming District. It's a concentrated type of city too. On urban expansion, Xiamen has basically hit its limit.

Small Tips

1. General Secretary Xi's longest posting was in Fujian.

2. Southeast University is in Nanjing, Jiangsu, and has nothing to do with Fujian.

3. Quanzhou accounts for half of the sites on the Maritime Silk Road World Heritage list.

4. After BAT came TMD: the founders of Toutiao, Didi, and Meituan — Zhang Yiming, Cheng Wei, and Wang Xing — were born on either side of the Wuyi Mountains. Cheng Wei was born at the northernmost tip of the Wuyi range. Zhang Yiming and Wang Xing are both from Longyan, Fujian, at the southernmost end of the range.

5. Fuzhou's three great women of letters in the Republican era: Bing Xin, Lin Huiyin, and Lu Yin.

6. Shangri-La, with hotels the world over, belongs to the Fuzhou native Robert Kuok, Asia's sugar king.

7. Fuzhou is called "Zuohai" (Left Sea). Fuzhou faces the sea to its east, and since the ancients took east as left, it's called "Left Sea."

8. Fujian has several places called Wuyi Mountain, but the truly famous Wuyi Mountain is just those few dozen little Danxia hillocks along the Nine-Bend Stream.

9. Thailand has more than 4 million people of Fujian descent; 13 of Thailand's top 20 companies belong to Fujianese; Thailand's second-richest man (Amnuay) is Fujianese; and a Fujianese married Thailand's eldest princess.

10. A third of all Hong Kong–listed companies belong to Fujianese; the richest Chinese in Australia, in Europe, and in Canada are all Fujianese; Fujianese are the most numerous Chinese in the US; and 23 of the world's top 100 richest Chinese are Fujianese.

11. Japan's largest yakuza gang is the Fujian gang (the Fuqing gang).

12. Minnanhua is the only Chinese dialect that can hold its own against Cantonese in America's Chinatowns.

13. A sixth of Taiwan's population is descended from Fujianese; Taiwan's largest underworld society is the Fujian gang (the Jianyi gang).

14. Four-tenths of Singapore's total population is Fujianese — 680,000; Presidents Lee Kuan Yew and his son are of Fujian descent.

15. Indonesia's four richest families are all Chinese and all from Fujian: the brothers Oei Hui Siang and Oei Hui Chung; the Liem Sioe Liong family; the Eka Tjipta Widjaja family; and the Tjoa Tao Heng and Tjoa Tao Peng family. The four families control over US$25 billion in total wealth — a scale equal to the combined assets of the poorest 40% of Indonesia's 250 million people.

16. Fujian is known by the names "Eight Min," "Nine Min," and "Ten Min." "Eight Min" spread the widest and earliest; after the Qing came Funing Prefecture, and later Taiwan Prefecture was added, giving rise to "Nine Min" and "Ten Min."

17. The "Republic of China" still has a Fujian Province — just the Matsu and Kinmen island groups and some small islands off Putian. Matsu serves as the seat of Lienchiang County in the Taiwan area, representing that Lienchiang belonging to Fuzhou. Kinmen is now nominally a county under Quanzhou. The "provincial government" is on Kinmen.

18. Fujian Province administers 1 sub-provincial city and 8 prefecture-level cities, comprising 28 municipal districts, 13 county-level cities, and 44 counties (including Kinmen County). Of these, the three prefectural seats in Nanping were the three great prizes fought over by strategists — lose the three prefectures and you lose Fujian. Among them, Shaowu and Jian'ou were demoted to county-level cities, and Yanping lost its status as an administrative center too. The western Fujian prefecture of Tingzhou is now Changting County; none of the four mountain prefectures kept its standing. By contrast, the four coastal prefectures all retained their original status and lead economically by a wide margin, and Fujian's four great plains are named after them (Fuzhou, Zhangzhou, Quanzhou, Putian).

19. Fujian has a territorial dispute with Zhejiang over an island group. Zhejiang calls it Qixing Island (Seven Stars Island), the southernmost point of Zhejiang; Fujian calls it the Xingzai Islands. The group consists of five islands — the main island Xingzai, Lieyu, Changyu, Shumin, and Zhugao Islet — plus two reefs, Hengjiao and Nanjiao, and got its "Seven Stars" name from its resemblance to the arrangement of the Big Dipper. Zhejiang once erected a concrete marker on the island to assert sovereignty, which Fujian later blew flat. Today "Qixing Island" is under Zhejiang's effective control.

In a sentence: Fujian is overall slightly unwelcoming to outsiders, a great spot for a holiday and to unwind, and an ideal place to rest, recuperate, and enjoy yourself too. Livability, five stars. Economic development, three and a half stars. Career-grind index, two and a half stars.