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Chronicling China’s Changing Cities

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After carefully observing China for 20 years, Jimmy Lam has come to the realization that the only constant is continual change. Over the course of about 150 trips to all corners of China, he has witnessed rapid urbanization, rampant development, the rise of consumerism and the disappearance of some traditional rural cultures.

Though China is still tightly controlled by the Communist Party, it bears little resemblance to the country he first saw in 1994.

“This is what I would call ‘New Wine, Old Label,’” said Mr. Lam, 49. “The old label that is attached to the country is ‘Communism,’ but everything that breathes there is hard-core capitalism. Everyone is out to make a profit.”

And he should know.

He has been photographing China for 20 years. Beyond that, during his “day job” as a hedge fund manager, Mr. Lam invested in China â€" as well as the rest of Asia â€" and made a great deal of money for his customers, employers and himself. So much money that he retired from the financial industry in 2011 to focus on his passion â€" photography â€" and use the insights that he found traveling through China on business trips to help him document the rapidly changing country. And he is able to self-finance his photo projects.

Jimmy Lam In Sanya, beachgoers were charged a fee to be photographed with a snake.

He now splits his time between photographing throughout Asia and raising his 7-year-old twin sons in Singapore, where Mr. Lam was born. His own father migrated to Singapore from southern China as a young man in search of better financial opportunity.

Mr. Lam moves easily through the streets of China’s cities, speaking the Hokkien dialect. In the 1990s, he started out photographing what was old â€" the vanishing cultures of rural southwestern China â€" but now he is focusing on the country’s rapid urbanization.

In the past five years he has photographed in 40 Chinese cities and recently completed a mammoth project, “The New Face of the Cities of China.” It is a series of photo essays on individual cities in China, showing the great changes as old buildings are torn down, agricultural lands become industrial and new cities seem to arise almost overnight.

Jimmy Lam Painting a mall in Hefei.

While many urban centers have their own distinct characteristics, more and more he finds that “every aspiring city seems to have the same things, a new, vibrant pedestrian shopping street, a national theater, numerous theme parks and an observatory tower to see the whole city.”

Mr. Lam believes that China is often misunderstood by Western photographers and journalists. There have been photographers who have romanticized China or only photographed people in the margins â€" which he says is fine because there are many poor people. But his focus has been the many people being lifted out of poverty by 10 percent annual growth and the rise of the middle and upper classes in a country that is at least nominally Communist.

The key to understanding China today, he says, is nationalism, confidence and pride.

“The Chinese people have so much pride; they want to tell the world that they are no longer a third world country, and they want to be treated as equal partners, not as a backward society,” he said.

“It is shocking that this has happened this fast â€" in one generation,” he added.

Jimmy Lam Tourists surveyed a terra-cotta warrior in central Xian.

Mr. Lam has had five books published by Marshall Cavendish, including “Faraway Faces: The Vanishing World of Southwest China” (2006) and “Treasures of Indochina” (2008). His next book, “Christians in China,” will be published by Marshall Cavendish next year.

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