I’m sure everyone has by now heard of Google’s announcement that they may ‘leave the Chinese market’. Although it is not clear what is fully meant by this at this time, it is a situation which poses many ethical questions for all foreign-owned enterprises currently undertaking work in China or similar political contexts.

Google claims that their period of reflection is as a result of what they believe to be state-sponsored manipulation of their Googlemail application. This somewhat ignores the overwhelming animosity that the company received in the West prior to entering the market in early 2006. This was in response to the company’s apparent decision to comply with Chinese censorship legislation requiring it to hide search results from a variety of different subjects.

This is a dilemma that certain architectural sectors have had to deal with many times in the past. One may, possibly naively, assume that, as a liberal profession, the position of the architect may be not to engage with the dictator or the authoritarian regime, but I think we would be wrong. I am specifically reminded of Foster and Partners’ recent works in many questionable democracies on the central Asian steppes.

An interesting case in point is in fact the company I now work for, Ove Arup. The firm has been a market leader in Hong Kong for decades, but was also one of the first of the foreign practices to use this foundation to enter the mainland market. The first mainland office opened in 1984 in Shanghai and remained a lone outpost until quite recently. It was only upon China’s succession to the WTO in 2000 that the practice initiated a series of new openings along the eastern and southern seaboards. So, why the delay?

One could argue that this was because the country at this point received the international ’seal of approval’ - a collective decision had been reached to work with the state, putting other pressing rights issues on the backburner. The Peoples’ Republic gained full legitimacy at this time - for the first time more countries recognised the PRC over the ROC as the ‘real’ China, Beijing was awarded the Olympics. I think it is actually  more simple than this even. Although the morality of such a decision is ambiguous, the economics are not. China is too big a market to ignore and it was at this point that the scale of development became too large not to engage.

I heard recently an extremely interesting analysis by the eminent historian of political government Peter Hennessy on BBC Radio. In this piece he described the government here as a, “tyranny by any other name,” and took the stance that companies should never, “dicker around with tyrants, however important they are in the world.” Although I must say that this utopian and principled position is morally appealing it is not, as I have described, realistic in the world that we inhabit. It is the received opinion that liberal democracy won the cold war. This is clearly not true. Of the CIS states today, only those on the Baltic could be described as fully functioning democracies. And China has only continued to grow. Do we ignore these billions of people?

The common comparison, made by many wishing to disengage, with the economic blockade South African apartheid regime in the 1970s and 1980s is, in my opinion, both unfair and unhelpful. Any blockade would today be unilateral, many of these states are members of the WTO and active members of the international community. They cannot and will not be frozen out. We no longer live in a world dominated by the postwar allied powers and have, realistically, no choice, economically and politically, but to engage due their sheer power and influence. I believe the arts and architecture in particular, are therefore extremely relevant as ambassadors for change in these lands.

As a result of the political stability that many of these regimes provide (regardless that this may be to the detriment of civil rights), there is an opportunity for economic and civic development that will improve people’s lives. Architects are at the forefront of this change. They are a medium for the physical transformation of the world in which the citizens of these states live. One could therefore argue that they have a responsibility to be there, to enable change.

So. Should Google pull out? I’m not so sure. Maybe they should never have entered the market in the first place in order to comply with their mantra, ‘don’t be evil’. But they did, and they are now here. This changes the situation enormously in my opinion and loads upon them more responsibility due to their adopted role as a stakeholder in Chinese society. Maybe their responsibility is to stay? Maybe we should ask the shareholders…

Well I’ve just returned from an interesting weekend in the city of Foshan. I was invited by my boss, Jane, to attend the annual architecture forum in her home city of Foshan. This is a city of a few million (small in the Chinese context), situated about three hours north-west of Shenzhen.

It was great to get out of the city and see some more of the region. What most surprised me was the urban environment. Shenzhen merges into Dongguan, which merges into Guangzhou which merges into Foshan. Guangdong Province is a sea of dense urban sprawl - the world’s factory floor.

Foshan was a delight, however. As it was Jane’s home town she took us to a great local noodle shop, although to be honest I can’t describe the joy I felt when presented with the Swissotel breakfast buffet! A proper English Breakfast, with baked beans.

My room on the forty-sixth floor had a fantastic view of the city laid out below. Foshan is an ancient city and although now much smaller than its neighbour Guangzhou, the two maintain a rivalry as to which is the birthplace of Cantonese culture.

Unusually for traditional Chinese cities, Foshan has no urban centre, but instead a string of neighborhood clusters organised around the many waterways that intersects the urban fabric. This gives the city a smaller, more human scale that is both unusual and at risk of being lost forever in the contemporary Chinese developmental context.

Arup were presenting a recent project in the city - the Culture Mall. This project is massive by European standards and designed to equip the city with the cultural capital in museums, auditoria and the like to enable it to compete both nationally and internationally. The form of the project was inspired by the unique urban fabric of the city and is such extremely fitting in its exciting and eclectic design.

The forum was an interesting opportunity for me to see the kind of work going on in the city and it was extremely impressive to see the focus the city and it’s government were putting on the implementation of good design principles. This does not mean, however, that I was overly impressed with all of the projects. It was clear to me that good design in this region seems to be dominated by a few select firms which sadly means that the majority of developments are made up of buildings - not architecture. Some may argue that this is the norm in most of the world and I would agree. The fundamental difference is that here in China the scale is so different and the amount of construction is so huge that this situation can have a much larger detrimental effect on the urban environment due to the sheer greater number of users involved.

Finally. This is the first time I have had to sit down and write this blog since I arrived in China in September. It was with great joy I opened the email from RIBA Education earlier this summer, informing me that I had jointly won the RIBA Boyd Auger Scholarship 2009. The funding from this enabled me to take up my place as a RIBA Part I intern in the Shenzhen office of Ove Arup & Partners.

This came at the end of a hectic three months of interviews, applications and and inductions. I’m combining the award with a British and Chinese government programme - the UK China Graduate Work Experience Programme. Essentially this means that I get free Mandarin language lessons and support from Shenzhen University (and we even got to study at China’s premier university Tsinghua in Beijing for a couple of weeks).

I’m here in the city of Shenzhen in southern China with three engineers, all working for Arup. It’s a real boom town on the border with the ‘Special Autonomous Region’ of Hong Kong - but it feels like a world away. This is very much mainland China.

I was asked to write a blog following my experiences in practice here in China. I’m only now, however, getting round to doing this. I have never been so busy in my life. It is my intention from this point to try to give an insight into real working practices and to describe the good and bad points of life here. Hopefully, this will be of some use to graduates considering coming out here for work experience in the current economic climate.

So a little about me. I’m James. I graduated from the University of Liverpool in 2008 and didn’t fancy immediately going into practice. Instead I spent the summer studying at university in China and travelling the north west of this massive country. I then enrolled on the MSc in Construction Economics and Management at the Bartlett, UCL. And then… came here.

So. I promise that there will be much more to come. In fact I might start another post right now! ‘Till then.