Whose Utopia

With the background of Pearl River Delta's economic development, OSRAM Factory, as one of the new land promoters, is taking part in the process of China's integration into the global system. On the other hand, the power of the global market is penetrating local areas by means of multi-national corporations. As a result, the local economy is forced onto the global stage while young labourers from many inland provinces are entering this new international labour division.
In the Pearl River Delta area, multi-national corporation management and culture gains a new local experience. Because the majority of labourers in these corporations are new emigrants from inland China, overseas companies and Chinese workers form a new assembly under globalization and a new type of social relationship. Hence, a swift reform of culture, capital and labour is progressing in the Pearl River Delta with the multinational enterprise capital flow and cross-provincial population flow.
The "Utopia" project plans to explore the life of these emigrant factory workers in the Pearl River Delta who represent the "backup force" for China's competitiveness in a global economy; and how they achieve a totally new experience, new standard and new meaning in the overwhelming trend of globalization. This project therefore allows us to see how they light up their "Utopia" in a new reality. Their utopia further exemplifies how increasingly widespread globalization is reshaping the Pearl River Delta area, and even the whole of China.

Their utopia is also our utopia, and the utopia of many more with hopes. I hope this utopia will stop being an ideal and turn into reality one day.

RMB City

In the near future, China Tracy will build a city dubbed “RMB City” within Second Life. This will be the condensed incarnation of contemporary Chinese cities with most of their characteristics; a series of new Chinese fantasy realms that are highly self-contradictory, laden with irony and suspicion, and extremely entertaining and pan-political.
China’s current obsession with land development in all its intensity will be extended to Second Life. A rough hybrid of communism, socialism and capitalism, “RMB City” will be realized in a globalized digital sphere combining overabundant symbols of Chinese reality with cursory imaginings of the country’s future. In “RMB City”, we will be able to cruise the digital ocean, witnessing a Ferris wheel rotating on top of the Monument to the People’s Heroes; looking down from the sky on the water of the Three Gorges reservoir gushing out of the Tian’anmen rostrum; passing the giant new totem symbolizing the Oriental Pearl TV Tower of Shanghai; hopping over the Feilai Temple marooned in a raging torrent; walking across a vast, desolate state-owned factory area in Northeast China; and finally hovering over the Grand National Theatre in Beijing. Also in our view will be gigantic planes gliding over terraces in the crevices of the central business district, and aerial super-malls. We will see water flowing into huge toilets on the container piers of the Pearl River Delta area before travelling through the sewage system into an ocean with floating statues of Mao Zedong. The rusted steel structure of the Olympic Stadium will be washed in splashes of ocean spray, while an aerial band on a floating sheet of the national flag filled with five-pointed stars makes a deafening noise that shakes Rem Koolhaas’ CCTV building, causing it to collapse...