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There and Here 6:

The new frontier is everywhere

By Stephen Lawson

any years ago, when Hong Kong was still a British colony, my friend and I went on vacation there for two full weeks, which left us plenty of time to explore. During the second week we took a side trip to Macau, a tiny enclave nearby that at the time was a Portuguese colony. From there we walked over the border to Zhuhai, a Special Economic Zone of the People’s Republic of China.

Getting out of Macau involved getting a form, filling it out, waiting in line, answering some questions, and getting our passports stamped. As we left the immigration station, I was so relieved it took me a moment to realize that although we had left Macau, we weren’t yet in China. We walked down a covered passageway for a few hundred yards, crossing a wide, dried-out lawn with fences on either side. Had we been able to relax there, it might have seemed like a peaceful place compared with the tightly packed lanes and alleys of Macau.

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I thought of that fenced-in lawn recently when I read that the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) between North and South Korea has become, in effect, the largest nature preserve on the Korean peninsula. Four kilometers (2.5 miles) wide and winding across the whole peninsula, it was created as a buffer after the 1953 cease-fire in the Korean War. Though laced with landmines, it’s been virtually untouched since then and is believed to be home to more than 2,000 species of plants and animals. If the two Koreas reunite, some environmentalists want to make it a natural peace monument for everyone to enjoy.

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That would be a fitting use for one of the last artifacts of the Cold War. While the DMZ’s forests grew, globalization changed the world from a place circumscribed by walls to one that’s energized by the spaces in between countries. A lot of the action today, whether in the areas of business, families and relationships, pop culture, or information, happens not in one country or another but across borders. “No man’s land” has become everyone’s land.

lthough I didn’t have a chance to think about this between Macau and Zhuhai, every border crossing involves two steps, an exit and an entrance. No one agent can let you out of one country and in to another. We may not think of it that way, but frequent international travelers spend a lot of time between borders, namely in airports and airliners.

This common experience in transit is a peculiarly modern kind of suspension. I don’t know about you, but after I’ve sat on a plane through half an hour of taxiing, part of me forgets whether I’m still in the place where I boarded or already at my destination. The view isn’t much help. Airports, like airplanes, tend to have a characterless “international” appearance. Even Beijing’s old terminal, which resembled a 1950s bus station, has given way to an efficient new one that looks pretty much like Taipei’s or Atlanta’s.

The same can be said of most of the places – hotels, convention centers, office buildings – where international business people meet and work. That’s not a coincidence. The business world that thrives in those places is really a space in between. In the global economy, companies may raise iiinvestment capital in several countries and sell products in many others. The decision-making, design and manufacturing – in a word, the “business” – often exists in several places, some of which are hard to put a finger on.

For example, since 1976 garment manufacturers have swarmed to Saipan, a remote South Pacific island about the size of San Francisco. Contract manufacturers from mainland China, Hong Kong, and other places have about 30 factories there, largely staffed by foreign guest workers, according to an October 2001 article in the Los Angeles Times. According to the Times, they were drawn there because of Saipan’s unique legal position: It’s part of the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, which means it’s part of the United States, so clothes made there can carry a “Made in the USA” label. However, it doesn’t fall under the same immigration or minimum-wage laws that cover the 50 states. Saipan lies somewhere in between, and that’s all the better for those foreign contractors and the high-priced American labels that use their services.

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or different reasons, pop culture increasingly has the flavor of somewhere between Asia, North America, and Europe. “Hollywood” blockbusters provide tthe best example of this. With budgets that routinely reach nine figures, they need to make money everywhere, so producers go for stories and settings that aren’t tied too closely to a particular place. I suspect it wasn’t by chance that “Titanic,” which set box-office records for many countries as well as for the world, took place on a ship in the middle of the Atlantic.

Another no-man’s land that’s now everyone’s playground is the digital realm in which you’re looking at this essay. The Internet is practically everywhere, yet hard to pin down to anywhere, which is why it’s turning legal systems inside out. That makes it a convenient place to do certain kinds of business (importing, travel), some of which – gambling, for example – are in gray areas of their own. But it also makes the Internet a great place to meet new kinds of people, link up families spread around the world, and even transform your native village into a global village. I’ll explore that possibility in the next There and Here.

Finally, living between two places has become a way of life. In his 2001 book, Crossing Over: A Mexican Family on the Migrant Trail, Rubén Martinez profiled families that live and work in the United States but also spend time in their native village in the mountains of Mexico, where some family members are known to stay behind for a season or more. The costs can be huge: danger, separation, and not being quite grounded in either place. But as globalization builds more bridges, it gives an edge to people who can cross them. To make, sell, or even argue for something today, it helps to know the territory.

I’ve walked across the border at Zhuhai many times since that first trip, and I’ve seen the city evolve from a distinctly Chinese industrial town into a cleaner, brighter metropolis with a few malls that look pretty much like Hong Kong’s. Once, in a grocery store there, I heard the Taiwanese band Mayday’s “Embrace.” It was a bittersweet love song delivered across one of the most politically tense borders in the world – and not incidentally, one that more people are crossing every year.