"Unless, like me, you already admired industrial sites for reasons of

personal history, Burtynsky's images can be therapeutic by introducing

aesthetic doubt into your culturally determined sensibility."

Marc Mayer

"As urban as China's modern cities look, they are vast collections of

country folk who have left home in the past few years. These new

urbanites exist in the middle of a single generation that will send

300 million people to China's cities and are creating the urban

industrial future that is changing the tilt of the world."

Ted Fishman

"Burtynsky's treatments of China are poised at a moment of alarming

perplexity: how high can it all go before something comes

crashing down?"

Mark Kingwell

"To be rich is to be glorious!" With these words, in

1992 Deng Xiao Ping announced to his countrymen,

and to the world, that China was ready to embrace

Western lifestyles. In 1978, a national economic

revitalization program that began with widespread

land reforms and in the early 1980s was further

fuelled by the establishment of Special Economic

Zones (SEZ). These long-awaited constitutional

reforms swept the Chinese population headlong

into an optimistic future. While surveying the evolution

of SEZ in southern China, the aging chairman

made this declaration and in so doing kick-started

a developmental process that was stalled in the

aftermath of Tiananmen. The impact of Chinese

passions to share in our contemporary way of life is

plainly felt both in global economics and on the

world's ecology.

In this book, Edward Burtynsky presents photographs

of the remnant and newly established

zones of Chinese industrialization-those places

created while realizing the "glory" of wealth for a

powerful civilization yearning to move forward and

join the ranks of modern nations. Using diplomatic

channels, Burtynsky has gained rare access to these

sites, creating images that are at once arresting and

unsettling. These photographs afford us privileged

glimpses of the vast social and economic transformation

currently underway in China.

Burtynsky casts a watchful eye over the extreme

expressions of Chinese industry. His subjects

include the Three Gorges Dam, at present the

world's largest engineering project and Bao Steel,

China's biggest steel producer. He explores the

vanishing dinosaurs of old industrial complexes in

the north eastern "rust belt" and shipyards at

Qiligang, the single most concentrated area of

shipbuilding in the country.

His camera penetrates into entire villages dedicated

solely to the recycling of electronic waste,

plastics and metals where the painstaking work of

sorting is done by hand. We are taken to see the

internal vistas of seemingly infinite factory floors

such as that of Cankun, the world's largest maker

of irons (23,000 employees); Yu Yuan, a sport shoe

manufacturer that employs 90,000 and Deda,

China's principal chicken processor. Finally,

Burtynsky turns his attention to the landscape of

cities, zeroing in on the new, tall China of high density

centers like Shanghai, where countless skyscrapers

quickly replace an older, once graceful

incarnation to accommodate the mass influx of

new and hopeful urbanites.