On November 5-6, 2005, Harvard Law School hosted “China at Crossroads,” a multidisciplinary conference on the relationship between equality and development in contemporary China. The conference, organized by the US China Law Society, sounded a note of cautious optimism regarding China’s legal reform efforts and the country’s prospects for addressing its growing rich-poor divide. Panelists – who included scholars, practitioners, and policy analysts from China, Europe, and the United States – reviewed the PRC’s transformation from one of the world’s most radically egalitarian societies to one of its most stratified, and offered a range of policy prescriptions for achieving “equitable and sustainable growth.”

The first panel, “Building a Harmonious Society,” addressed the changing dynamics between the “powerful and the powerless” in Chinese society. Moderating the panel was Elizabeth Perry, Harvard’s Henry Rosovsky Professor of Government and a renowned authority on popular protest and grassroots politics in China. Professor Perry opened the panel by suggesting that contemporary China showed pronounced disharmony, and later noted that the panelists’ papers offered an “unsettling” and “grim” picture of growing social tensions. Yet she closed by stressing China’s considerable strides in health and literacy, and noted that, after a semester of intensive study and debate, her advanced seminar in comparative politics had voted unanimously that it would be better to be born as a hypothetical “average Chinese child” today than as its Indian counterpart.

The panelists offered a similarly complex account of a country experiencing both exhilarating economic growth and wrenching social upheaval. William Hsiao, K.T. Li Professor of Economics at the Harvard School of Public Health, lamented the decay of China’s public health system during the reform era. “Peasants protest because they are dissatisfied with their lives,” Professor Hsiao noted, “and one deep aspect of that is the ‘health disparity’” between urban and rural areas. Hsiao argued that in the countryside, the government’s promise to cover citizens’ basic healthcare is often only a “paper guarantee” – since under recent privatization schemes, peasants are usually obliged to pay for the certificates authorizing their “free” care, or for the materials used to deliver it. Meanwhile, Professor Hsiao argued, over 500 million Chinese peasants lack adequate healthcare, and studies indicate that “over one-third of drugs distributed to peasants are counterfeit.”

Professor Helen Siu, a Professor of Anthropology at Yale and author of Mao’s Harvest: Voices From China’s New Generation, discussed her recent research into “uncivil urban spaces” in southern China. In the post-reform era, Profess Siu noted, migrants had congregated around key cities and villages in search of economic opportunity. While they continued to reside in these areas, their non-resident hukou status prevented them from ever becoming local citizens – a continuing source of social tension and occasional unrest.

Professor Yu Jianrong, the Director of the Social Issues Research Center at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, offered a conceptual and statistical analysis of recent peasant protests in China’s rural areas. Rural unrest was growing more frequent, Professor Yu noted, and the tactics and arguments of the protestors were changing. Importantly, protestors were increasingly focused on vindicating their legal rights, and in disputes over land or local corruption, they used references to Chinese law to bolster their claims. Professor Yu argued that while China “will enter into a period of frequent social conflicts” over the next 10-20 years, ultimately the focus on law and reason would help channel social tensions toward productive aims.

Professor Huang Yasheng（黃亞生）addressed the issue of income disparity in China. Professor Huang teaches international management at the MIT Sloan School of Management. He published Selling China in 2003, in which he showed that the lack of competitiveness of domestic companies is chiefly due to the inefficiencies of Chinese financial institutions, hence creating opportunities for foreign direct investment. Using the Gini coefficient, which shows income or wealth inequality within an economic system, he first showed how wide income disparity has evolved in China. China has today greater disparity than most of Western countries, i.e. the United States, Germany, France and the United Kingdom. According to Professor Huang, the major factor that led to such a situation is economic and dates back to the 1990s. The financing of domestic private companies appeared to be more difficult than a decade ago due to the lack of efficient reforms. Hence, economic orientations of the 90s did not favour the creation of a market-based economy. The consequences of such a policy are twofold, affecting both income distribution and social balance.

An expert in the finance and capital markets, Professor Chen Zhiwu （陳志武）teaches at the Yale School of Management and complimented Huang Yasheng’s comments. Professor Chen stressed out inequality caused by state ownership and the role of the state in a balanced approached of economic development. Chen argues that the efficiency of market-oriented reforms is conditioned by political liberalisation, namely democratic institautions. He also focused on the very large geographic resources inequality, and its political origin. Hence, Chongqing started flourishing economically after the central government made it into a provincial-level municipality, benefiting from allocations of investment funds. The allocation of resources has been decided by the government so as to favour some regions, hence it shows a very close link between the Beijing’s economic policy and development at a provincial level. Such inequalities amongst regions might be reduced through a democratic administration of China, which may establish a balanced approach of development.

Finally, Professor Cai Jiming （蔡繼明）, the deputy director of the Institute of Economics at Tsinghua University, exposed the major issues of land reform in China. Cai has focused his research on a comparative study of Marxist and Western economies and is currently a fellow at the Kennedy School of Government. Professor Cai emphasised the lack of fairness in the compensation for land taken by the state, hence reducing drastically peasants’ income. Corruption has also been a major issue in administrative land taking, thus making the whole process highly unfair and unequal.

This panel’s moderator, Professor James Wen, teaches economics at Trinity University and is an expert in the economies of East Asia and developing economies.

Dr Shang made an introductory statement to the third panel, in which he explained the role of the Chinese state in economic development, especially by promoting science and technology. Dr Shang is the Vice-Minister of the Science and Technology of the PRC and serves currently as a Senior Fellow at the Kennedy School of Government. Dr Shang’s presentation included electricity production figures, agricultural improvements and healthcare facilities which have been developed through state-sponsored research and development programs.

The third panel aimed at analysing the Chinese legal system under the following perspective: “Better Governance and Equality before the Law”.

Professor He Weifang （賀衛方）opened the panel by addressing judicial issues from a historical standpoint. Professor He is one of the leading scholars in the field of Chinese constitutional law and is a prolific author (most notably Toward a Time of Rights: A Perspective of the Civil Rights Development in China). He teaches at Peking University and is the Editor-in-Chief of the renowned Peking University Law Journal. He laid the emphasis on the judicial independence, which has no root in Chinese legal tradition. He argued that judges in the late imperial era were under the strict control of the government and this has been kept in modern Chinese judiciary. Moreover, the government lacks a strong interest in developing judicial reform: legal rules are not the only ground for judicial decisions, i.e. decisions motivated by non-legal or customary rules.

Second, Professor Lin Jia （林嘉）is the Vice-Dean of the People’s University School of Law, Beijing addressed the topic of employment discrimination in China. A specialist of social security law and labour law, Professor Lin is a Visiting Scholar at the Harvard Law School’s East Asian Legal Studies Programme. Her point was that Chinese legislation lacks any protection again discrimination in the field of labour law, considering especially the cases of women or the sickely.

Finally, Dr. Eva Pils made comments on the hukou （戶口）system of household registration, which requires an individual to live in a specific area, therefore restraining migrations. (explain very briefly hukou). Pils has been a Research Fellow at the New York University School of Law for two years. She showed how unequal the hukou system may be for citizens, especially for peasants, as this system is administered at a local level. Although the Constitution of the PRC states that all citizens are equal before the law, she stresses out an action on the basis of the Constitution is highly improbable.

The moderator for this third panel was Professor Roderick MacFarquhar, the current director of the Fairbank Center for East Asian Research at Harvard University and a former Member of Parliament, who is well-known for being the author of The Origins of the Cultural Revolution.

Tsunami +: Conference on Post-Disaster Planning and Reconstruction
November 18-19, 2005. Harvard Graduate School of Design

About one year has passed since the tsunami struck the South Asian coast on December 2004, and emergency relief efforts have transitioned to long-term planning and rehabilitation of the built environment which the tsunami destroyed. In that same year, the Pakistani earthquake claimed some 79,000 lives and a flood leveled New Orleans. In response to the enormity of natural disasters and its affect on the design profession was the Harvard Graduate School of Design School conference entitled: Tsunami +: Post-disaster Planning and Reconstruction. The conference was organized by AsiaGSD, a student group investigating design issues in the Asia Pacific region. The conference was spearheaded by two of the members of the winning design team of the MIT-sponsored competition "The Tsunami Challenge: After the Tent", GSD students Eric Ho and Richard Lam. Ho and Lam went to Sri Lanka in August 2005 to build their team’s design for a prototype for a single-family house called Safe(r) House.

The conference brought architects and designers in dialogue with NGOs, government officials, and local practitioners who have had first-hand experience with reconstruction after the tsunami. Several thematic questions framed the diverse panelists from all over the world including, “Can ‘foreign’ or ‘imported’ systems be made adaptable to the culture, values, and customs of local context?” and “Is ad-hoc sporadic organization the most efficient way in relief situations” and “How does one balance the generic and the specific?” Throughout the conference, new issues were being raised, especially local politics as a major obstacle for rebuilding communities, both socially and physically.

The following are summaries of some of the notable presentations from the conference:

Indu Weerasoori is the Director of Development Planning at the Urban Development Authority of Sri Lanka, and brought her first-hand experience of the rebuilding of the Hambantota District, a southeast coastal area of Sri Lanka to the conference. She reviewed the process of identification of land for the relocation of displaced citizens. Building sites must be free from vulnerability, in close proximity to former settlement, have access to infrastructure and amenities, be socially acceptable, and have “political will and blessing”. After inspection of the land and preparing construction documents for the buildings and infrastructure, one must also coordinate this with promoting public awareness of the project to help ease the transition. Numerous planning guidelines drove the design of the houses as well as their relationship to each other. Some guidelines are dimensional (no unit must be less than 500 square feet), while others are performative (“Housing scheme should be designed in such a way that houses are grouped in small and manageable clusters to facilitate social integration within the cluster.”) The overall guiding principle is that the “Proposed Housing Scheme has to be sustainable in the long term and the settlers need social and physical infrastructure, amenities to develop their spiritual and cultural identities.” In terms of safety, there are numerous building specifications which the new houses must comply with, such as the building grade and material, and timber roof-construction. The houses are just one small part of the overall plan, embodied in the Urban Development Authority’s 15-year zoning plan, which assigns land-use in accordance with the level of vulnerability the area has to future flooding. Areas of “Highest Vulnerability” can only be used for parking lots, fishing, and recreation, and existing religious centers and historic or archaeological monuments can be maintained. 2-storey structures are permitted in the “Medium-Vulnerability Zone”. Finally, high-density buildings and tourist facilities are only permitted in the “Minimum Vulnerability Zone”.

Singh Intrachooto is Deputy Dean for International Affairs at Kasetsart University in Bangkok, Thailand. His presentation centered on his experience in the reconstruction of Sook-sam-ran, a small fishing village of around 100 families in on coastal southern Thailand of which none of the families owned the land they lived on. The tsunami claimed around 100 people from the village, which averaged one death per family. Coupled with the destruction of the infrastructure, loss of all livestock, the village was utterly destroyed. Assistance after the tsunami provided each family with a new house on their own plot of land.

Intrachooto revisited the village in June 2005 and discovered that the new settlement was half empty. The new houses built for the villagers were not adequate: they lacked storage area for their fishing equipment, were too small to accommodate the entire family, and failed in creating a sense of community. Coupled with psychological trauma, pervasive fear of the onset of another tsunami, and the loss of community, these victims have problems which extend beyond the reaches of the design of shelter. To address the needs of the villages, a strategic plan shifted from providing shelter to creating a “means” to sustain living. The goals of this plan are to unify the community, overcome the lack of fresh water, and provide healthcare facilities and psychological treatment, and warning systems for future tsunamis. Finally, Intrachooto says that housing must be designed with the participation of social and technological experts, horticultural researchers, water resource engineers, material scientists, social scientists, architects, and the locals if they are to be of any use.

Charles Setchell is the Shelter, Settlements, and Hazard Mitigation Advisor for the Office of U.S. Foreign Disaster Assistance. He has advised the Government of Thailand on Bangkok’s slum housing market, and worked as a Peace Corp volunteer in the Philippines. At the conference, he interrogated the vicious reciprocity between urbanization and disasters by drawing upon examples such as the war in Kabul and volcanic eruption near Goma, Rwanda. Increasing urbanization in some of the world’s poorest countries has led to increasing poverty, increasing density, increasing vulnerability, and increasing conflict. He argues that often shelter is a hybrid of house, factory, granary, and business, and that many relocation efforts treat shelter as solely a place to sleep. A general strategy he has outlined includes relying on local materials and markets, linking shelter to livelihoods, and exploiting new opportunities with new technologies.

Sheila Kennedy, Principal of Kennedy & Violich Architecture of Boston, offered a general framework for “rethinking infrastructure” which steers design-thinking away from a “need-based” attitude and towards the actual interrogation of technology and architecture. While much of the infrastructure (roads, electric and telephone lines, schools, hospitals) in the tsunami-hit areas was destroyed, Kennedy offers technology which decouples infrastructure from the actual building itself, and therefore in its flexibility, is able to better withstand disasters. Though her research has been pioneered with the nomadic Huichol people of the Sierra Madres in an ongoing research project called “Portable Light”, she argues that her methodology applies to all electricity-deprived areas of the world. Kennedy taught a joint-studio at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and the Harvard Department of Engineering and Applied Science in the fall semester of 2005 which researched different ways that high-brightness-light-emitting-diodes (HBLED) and photo-voltaics can be embedded in portable light devices which are independent from a building, and hence independent from a power-grid. While we conventionally think of lighting as being integrated with a building, Kennedy develops fabrics and textiles embedded with light which can be folded into different shapes to adapt to its function. A “portable light” can be a reading light, a heating blanket, or a task light. During the day, these “portable lights” are recharged with solar panels which are embedded in the textile, to create a sustainable and renewable source of light.

New housing in Andaragasyaya, Perumpamulla Stage I, Tissamaharamaya, Sri Lanka