Beijing, 2004. The Dutch chain Makro opened one of the first warehouse shopping clubs in China.
Beijing, 2004. Drive-in movie theater audience watches “The Lord of the RIngs: The Return of the King,” one of twenty foreign films permitted to be screened per year in China.
Fuling, 2003. College student listens to English instructional recordings.
Ningxia, 2007. Workers salvage bricks near the coal burning government-run electrical plant.
Yiwu, 2006. Refrigerator magnet dealer, one of tens of thousands of small one-room shops at the world’s largest wholesale mall.
Sanjiang, 2015. A Dong minority woman's hand is dyed blue from soaking traditional cloth in vats of indigo.
Shenzhen, 2010. A one-room home in one of Shenzhen's many urban villages, where migrants gather and seek to settle.
Hong Kong, 2004. Container port of China-manufactured goods headed overseas. Over time, shipping that almost all went through Hong Kong now goes out from mainland cities like Shanghai.
Shanghai, 2004. Thirteen year-old Gu Zhou Xin Yu's Gameboy cost his single mother over 1000 yuan. His dental braces cost her 9000 yuan in a country where, at the time, it was reported that a half a billion people never brushed their teeth.
Shenzhen, 2010. Man decorates his home with a flowers he has salvaged from the grand opening of a nearby business.
Guangzhou, 2005. Adidas assembly line.
Qinhuangdao, 2005. Photographer Zhang Xulong prepares model Liu Hui in a soft-core classical setting. Zhang has been hoping to someday to publish China’s first mainstream erotic photography magazine.
Tianjin, 2004. Attendee of a growing number of Chinese weight-loss camps.
Shenzhen, 2010. Urban village migrant workers are still saving for their children's education, so they have very small basic tv sets, like this one showing an Indian soap opera dubbed into Mandarin.
Shanxi, 2005. A young city woman, dressed in white for her grandmother’s rural village funeral, has a cigarette during a break in the mourning.
Lishui, 2005. A construction worker from Hunan Province sleeps on the floor together with his girlfriend who he met in their last stop on the boomtown circuit. They share this tiny unfurnished apartment that costs $20 a month with 4 other guys from Hunan.
Shenyang, 2006. Armed with a metal detector, a salvager scours the rubble of the Shenyang Standard Parts Factory, a state-owned enterprise which was once China’s largest producer of nails, screws and other such hardware until it went bankrupt in the late 1990s.
Shenzhen, 2010. Tan Yue hula hoops on her day off from the New Balance factory. Most of the women in the urban village, including her mother, are migrants from Sichuan who work on these sneaker assembly lines.
Shenzhen, 2010. Unhoused man sleeps on the sidewalk.
Beijing, 2004. Late night empties at a dance club.
Wushan, 2003. Emerald Lake, days before the Three Gorges Dam will go into operation and raise the water level over 125 meters.
Shenzhen, 2010. A girl uses little bits of dried cement to play jacks in the entryway of the multistory apartments next to her urban village.
Produce/Consume