In Zhuhai’s remote Western District, 12,000 tons of dynamite systematically explode a nearby mountain range. The series of detonated blasts, said to be heard from as far away as Macau, eventually clear a 100-kilometer road from Zhuhai’s Eastern District to its brand-new airport. Alongside the highway, tracts of mangrove forest are in-filled with truckloads of rubble. creating an expanse of flat developable land in all directions.

If tabula rasa was modern architecture’s original sin, it has become the battle cry of (post) modern China. During the Cultural Revolution, Mao Zedong’s dictum "without destruction, there can be no construction," professed that new conditions can not arise without destroying the old. Today in the Pearl River Delta (PRD), in keeping with Mao’s political catchword, developer-comrades faithfully destruct mountains and bulldoze fish farms in the hopes of constructing a window to the worlds in the Special Economic Zones, in their goal to build a new paradise of "Socialism with Chinese Characteristics." Under Deng Xiaoping’s reign, "Wu Tong Yi Ping" ("five pathways and one leveling") guides the struggle to modernize: the pathways are roads, electricity, telecommunications, gas, and sewage; and the leveling is that of large tracts of developable land. This freshly razed blank territory, like the most beautiful paper, awaits the brush strokes of a newly modernized Chinese society...

Written by SCAPE.