Beijing

by Linda Jaivin

  At the time, China’s per capita GNP was one-fortieth that of the United States. Beijing may have been one of the best-off cities in China, but its hospitals lacked beds and kindergartens places. There were 1.3 phones per hundred people, many servicing whole neighbourhoods. The supply of electricity was unreliable, brownouts frequent. On clement nights people gathered at the base of streetlamps to study, chat or play cards. Even the public toilet blocks servicing the residents of the hutong since the 1960s had reached new lows of fetidness.

  The city was now home to 9 million people. Living space had shrunk to an average of 3.5 sq. m per person; hardly big enough, as the journalist Tiziano Terzani observed in Behind the Forbidden Door, ‘for a double bed’. Not that it was easy to buy a bed in those pre-consumerist times – Terzani noted that among the first signs of the new market economy was the sight of peasants carting homemade furniture into the city for sale from the back of their bicycle or donkey carts.

  As the country slowly shifted from a command economy in which the state owned all the means of production and distribution to one that allowed for individual enterprise, other peasants brought fresh produce to what were called ‘free markets’. The first individually and collectively run restaurants opened – and stayed open past the state diners’ closing time of 6:30 p.m. When cloth rations ended in 1983, entrepreneurs set up silk and clothing stalls in narrow Xiushui Street in Jianguomenwai. Electronics shops opened at Zhongguancun, close by the universities of Haidian.

  In 1979, the tallest buildings in the capital were the fifteen-storey Peking Hotel and the Soviet-style apartment blocks of the 1970s. The Peking Hotel boasted the city’s sole café-cum-bar, but Chinese visitors had to show ID and be signed in. In 1982 the nation’s first ‘joint-venture’ hotel opened at Jianguomenwai: the Jianguo. It had the foreign community in raptures at the then-singular delights of its French restaurant, café and bakery, and the ease of meeting Chinese friends there.

  Yet even in 1983 Beijing could still impress with its bleakness. The Austrian photographer Inge Morath had lived through one war and documented the aftermath of others. Arriving in Beijing that year, she noted the ongoing food rations, general air of dilapidation and the darkness of the city at night, and remarked to her husband, the playwright Arthur Miller, that Beijing looked ‘like a country after a great war’.

  Beijing’s foreign community was growing rapidly. By the end of 1984 about 500 foreign firms, including 70 banks, had established offices there. The 100-m-tall CITIC Building not far from the Jianguo would soon dominate the skyline in the city’s east, while the revolving restaurant atop the brand new Xiyuan Hotel briefly became a source of wonder in the city’s northwest.

  The authorities scrambled to restore surviving heritage sites, even patching up the tomb of the Jesuit Matteo Ricci. But what to do with temples that Red Guard rampages had left without a single icon? Terzani relates how in a village outside Beijing, farmers had managed to protect the fine bronze Buddha of their local temple from the depredations of the iconoclasts, only to lose it to the Buddha-deprived Fayuan Temple. Such substitutions, largely undocumented, occurred throughout the capital.

  Post-1949 history was an ideological minefield. Film-makers wanting to say something about it turned to the Qing, abusing the empress dowager Cixi as a handy, if facile stand-in for Jiang Qing. In 1986 the Italian director Bertolucci, meanwhile, filmed a fictionalized version of Puyi’s life, The Last Emperor, shooting inside the Forbidden City with Peter O’Toole playing Reginald Johnston. But when the Beijing Film Studio went to make Lao She’s Rickshaw Boy into a feature in 1983, the city had changed so much in just half a century that they had to reconstruct Old Beijing as a film set.

  By 1984 traffic began to flow on the new Second Ring Road, which was laid on the foundations of the old Ming wall and above Line 2 of the Beijing subway (see pp. 195–9). Construction of a Third Ring Road and airport link got under way. The latter would replace the potholed, dusty and narrow airport road that was more like a street in some rural backwater, complete with donkey- and horse-cart traffic, than the approach to a world capital.

  Bicycle traffic on Chang’an Avenue, mid-1980s.

  It was in 1984 too that six peasant families from Wenzhou prefecture in Zhejiang province defied the strict household registration system that dictated where people may live and work to settle in Nanyuan township, less than 6 km south of Tiananmen Square. Others from Wenzhou followed. These entrepreneurial southerners survived successive crackdowns on unauthorized internal migration to found a Beijing institution, ‘Leather Jacket Village’, ultimately supplying a range of goods to buyers throughout north China, the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.

  In 1984 the party celebrated the 35th anniversary of the People’s Republic in Tiananmen Square. Missiles and tanks demonstrated China’s military might. Floats with giant robots, a wristwatch and an electric fan celebrated the consumer economy. A banner proclaimed: ‘Time is Money’. A 1,000-piece band played and Peking University biology students contributed one unchoreographed note, raising a smuggled-in banner with a friendly hello to the country’s leader: ‘Xiaoping, ni hao!’ (In a smaller, unnoticed security lapse, thanks to a pass slipped to me by a Chinese friend, I partied on the square that night with workers from Capital Steel.)

  Second Ring Road under 21st-century noon smog.

  One April evening the following year, 15,000 people thronged the Workers Stadium for the nation’s first-ever concert by a Western pop group: Wham! As George Michael belted out ‘Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go’, the crowds defied police orders to dance at their seats. The following year, China’s first home-grown rock star, a trumpeter with the Beijing Philharmonic called Cui Jian, gave the country its own first rock anthem: ‘Nothing to My Name’:

  Cui Jian.

  I want to give you my hope

  I want to make you free

  But all you do is laugh at me, ’cause

  I’ve got nothing to my name.

  The Beijing Municipal Party Committee was outraged: ‘How can one of our young people sing about having nothing when he has socialism?’

  The writer Wang Shuo captured better than anyone else the freewheeling mood of Beijing in the 1980s. The descendant of Manchu Bannermen, Wang had been an army man, smuggler, pharmaceuticals salesman and the kept man of an airline hostess. He’d done time for snatching the cap off a policeman’s head during the Tiananmen demonstrations of 1976. His novels, screenplays and short stories, including the one that was the basis for the film In the Heat of the Sun, were sharp, satirical and linguistically inventive portraits of Beijing’s underworld and youth culture, and they inspired a new, enduring Beijing literary genre: ‘pizi (smartarse, hooligan) literature’. There was a time when everyone, from intellectuals to lift operators, seemed to be reading Wang Shuo (see pp. 148–9).

  If the reforms offered opportunity to the entrepreneurial, in dismantling the old system of cradle-to-grave employment and welfare, they also contributed to a growing divide between haves and have-nots, and the rise of official corruption. Student protests erupted around the country, including in Beijing, in 1986–7. Deng Xiaoping blamed the popular, free-thinking university lecturer and astrophysicist Fang Lizhi for fomenting trouble; Hu Yaobang, the relatively liberal-minded Party Secretary-General, was also forced to resign.

  In early 1989 Fang called on the party to release ‘all political prisoners, and particularly Wei Jingsheng’ in honour of the 70th anniversary of the May Fourth Movement and the 40th anniversary of the People’s Republic. The poet Bei Dao and many other prominent intellectuals and cultural figures signed petitions in support. Together with the death of Hu Yaobang on 15 April, these ignited a student-led protest movement against corruption and for free speech and democracy. The protests eventually involved hundreds of thousands of people and culminated in the occupation of Tiananmen Square. Students camped on the square, made love on the square, and sang ‘Nothing to My Name’ on the square. The Tiananmen occupation
was part Woodstock and part Berlin Wall, except when the wall fell in China, it fell on the people.

  On 20 May the government declared martial law. People’s Liberation Army (PLA) troops encircled the city. With students on a mass hunger strike, citizens flooded on to the streets in support, erecting, according to the Beijing Evening News, some 600 barricades along approach roads to the square. At 10 p.m. on 3 June, tanks and armoured personnel carriers rumbled towards the square, shooting unarmed citizens who stood in their way and crushing barricades, bicycles and even bodies under their treads. By 4 a.m. there were perhaps a thousand dead, including a handful of soldiers, and untold wounded. In The Monkey and the Dragon I’ve written in detail how the Taiwan singer-songwriter Hou Dejian and the future Nobel Peace Laureate Liu Xiaobo saved thousands of lives on the square itself by persuading the army to open a safe passage through which the students could retreat.

  Pro-democracy demonstrations, 4 May 1989.

  Later that morning, a Chinese Everyman gave the world the iconic image of those events when he stepped out into Chang’an Avenue to confront a line of tanks. To the movement’s sympathizers, ‘Tank Man’ symbolizes individual courage in the face of state-sponsored terror. In official spin, he proves the army’s restraint in the face of provocation. His identity and fate remain a mystery.

  Following the suppression of what Mayor Chen Xitong labelled ‘a counter-revolutionary rebellion’ came a wave of arrests, interrogations and forced confessions. Aiming to deflect popular anger from the party towards – why not – nineteenth-century foreign imperialists, the government launched a nationwide ‘patriotic education’ campaign that included a slew of theatrical, film, television and literary works on the theme of the burning of the Yuanmingyuan.

  On 11 January 1990 the government lifted martial law from Beijing in time to scrub up for the Asian Games later that year. Workers had already begun resurfacing Chang’an Avenue, where armoured personnel carriers and tanks had ground tracks into the bitumen. They replaced broken paving stones on Tiananmen, scrubbed away pro-democracy graffiti and patched the bullet holes in walls and buildings. Under tight security and the dumb gaze of the ubiquitous cartoon mascot Pan Pan the Panda, the Games went off without a hitch.

  In 1992 some of the air shelter tunnel network opened to tourism and commerce. It would eventually house hostels, shops, bars, grain stores and even an ice rink. Other interesting underground developments were occurring in the cultural sphere. Wu Wenguang directed China’s first independent documentary, Bumming in Beijing: The Last Dreamers (1990) about the city’s artistic drifters. Rocker Cui Jian starred in a pioneering independent feature film, Zhang Yuan’s Beijing Bastards (1993). In a lecture delivered at the China Film Museum in Beijing in March 2008, the film scholar Li Daoxin noted that never before Beijing Bastards had a post-1949 film dared to depict Tiananmen as shrouded in grey mist and darkness, as opposed to bathed in sunshine. Zhang’s iconoclastic assault continued in 1997 with East Palace, West Palace, about the gay beat at the public toilets on either side of Tiananmen.

  Street scene, Dashila’r, 2006.

  THE WORLD OF THE OPERATORS

  There’s a Beijing archetype called a pizi: a smartarse, a wiseacre, an operator full of schemes, some of which may be of dubious legality. A pizi is the sort of person you’d cross the hutong to avoid if they weren’t so damn funny and perversely charming. The pizi may also have an element of another, older Beijing archetype, the hutong chuanzi, literally someone who circulates through the hutong, picking up and spreading news and gossip. And both the pizi and the hutong chuanzi owe something to the old Qing Bannerman culture of ‘little amusements’.

  Welcome to Wang Shuo’s world. One of his most popular early works was The Operators (1987). In a memorable scene, an archetypal pizi called Yang Zhong approaches a woman waiting for someone on the street: ‘Sorry, I’m late’, he says. ‘I rushed but still couldn’t make it on time. Have you been waiting long?’ Not for him, she tells him. ‘Ah, but you were,’ he says, ‘you just didn’t know it. No one else is coming.’ He reveals he knows her name and that of the man she’s waiting for:

  ‘Wang Mingshui has a mole on either side of his nose.’

  ‘The moles haven’t gone anywhere. But early this morning he was called to attend an emergency, a leader was having a haemorrhage. So he called my company, and asked us to send someone to fill in. He didn’t want to disappoint you. My name’s Yang Zhong, I’m employed by the Three-T Company. This is my card.’

  ‘Three-T Company?’ Liu Meiping glanced suspiciously at the card Yang Zhong gave her. ‘What’s that? It sounds like some pest control service.’

  ‘It’s an abbreviation for trust us to solve your problems, trust us to relieve your boredom and trust us to take punishment on your behalf.’

  ‘You’re serious. What sort of people work there? People with no sense of shame and nothing else to do?’

  The novella The Operators was one of Wang Shuo’s most popular early works. In it, Wang Shuo captures the roguish humour, banter and verbal play that is an integral part of the Beijing vernacular, along with the freewheeling entrepreneurship of the 1980s and the Beijing penchant for taking sly pokes at power – the incident described in the scene above appears to have been precipitated by a leader’s problem with haemorrhoids.

  Guan Wei, 4 Works: Without Interest, Nothing to Say, Not Interesting, Not Fun, 1989, acrylic on canvas; the artist Guan Wei is also the decendant of Manchu Bannermen.

  Four years before East Palace, West Palace screened at Cannes’ Un Certain Regard, Chen Kaige’s Farewell My Concubine became the first Chinese film to win the Palme d’Or. Set within the world of Peking Opera, the film climaxed with a searing portrait of Beijing during the Cultural Revolution.

  By the time Chen shot Farewell My Concubine on the Old Beijing set built for Rickshaw Boy, what was left of old Beijing faced new threats from rampant development. In 1988 municipal and local governments were freed to raise revenue through the sale of usage rights to land. Many writers on Beijing and journalists including Michael Meyer, Jasper Becker, Philip Pan and the best-selling Chinese author Wang Jun (who introduced Liang Sicheng’s story to a new generation of Chinese readers) have written eloquently of the destruction visited on Beijing’s historic neighbourhoods as a result.

  In 1993 the State Council belatedly set out limits for building density and height within the Second Ring Road. Yet Mayor Chen Xitong personally facilitated developments that broke State Council guidelines and even his own zoning laws. In 1995 he was charged with embezzling U.S.$2.2 billion and sentenced to sixteen years imprisonment (he was released for medical reasons in 2006). The citizens of Beijing hadn’t forgotten his role in the massacre of 1989. Many covertly rejoiced at the news of his arrest just as their Yuan predecessors had when the tyrannous Ahema literally went under the hammer back in 1282.

  By 1998, land rights sales provided the Beijing government with one-fifth of its revenue. According to Philip Pan, kickbacks, speculation and other forms of corruption put over $17 billion in the pockets of developers and local officials during the 1990s alone. Jasper Becker reveals in City of Heavenly Tranquillity how in Xuanwumen district, where nine out of ten original residents were ultimately forced out of their homes, a real estate company set up by the district government’s Cultural Relics Bureau ‘knocked down the listed properties [the Bureau] was supposed to be protecting’. There’s a frequently-told joke, possibly originating with Wang Shuo, that the English word ‘China’ comes from chai na – ‘demolish that’.

  The men and women who are tearing down old Beijing and are builing the new, the ‘foot soldiers of China’s Industrial Revolution’, as the journalist Jan Wong calls them in her book Beijing Confidential, are the migrant workers from the provinces. In the mid-1990s, Beijing’s registered population reached 12.6 million; on top of that were 3 million ‘illegals’, more than the entire population of Beijing in 1949. For about 20 yuan a day (one-sixth the average Beijing wage
at the time) these migrants, as Wong observes, did ‘all the dangerous, dirty, exhausting jobs’ that saw Beijing outstrip all other world capitals in the construction of tall buildings, roads and highways. They built two of the biggest train stations in the world, West Station, terminus for the express train from Hong Kong, and the enormous Beijing South Station, which, as the former China blogger for the New Yorker Evan Osnos has noted, consumed as much steel as went into New York’s Empire State Building. Migrants mucked out the old public toilets and constructed the new ones for the ‘toilet revolution’ of 1996. It was they who uncovered the remains of Palaeolithic campfires while excavating the foundations of the Oriental Mall. Migrant workers also laid down the Third Ring Road and would eventually give Beijing a Fourth, Fifth and Sixth Ring Road as well as highways ribboning out in all directions, including to the Great Wall at Badaling in the north and Tianjin in the east. If one of them should get run over on the roads they’d built, however, their families could expect less than 80 per cent of the compensation due a legal resident – even their lives, Jan Wong points out, are ‘literally cheaper’.

  By 2002, according to the China Heritage Quarterly, about ‘40 per cent of the old city’ had been ‘levelled’. In 2004 the municipal government belatedly drafted regulations ‘on the preservation of the Historical and Cultural City’. And yet, as the scholar Bruce Doar has written, official notions of heritage rarely include ordinary housing, which is only ‘grudgingly’ acknowledged in conservation planning. Between 1990 and 2007, according to the Geneva-based Center on Housing Rights and Evictions, 1.25 million Beijing residents were forced from their homes in the name of urban renewal. ‘This is human upheaval’, Thomas Campanella observed in The Concrete Dragon: On China’s ‘Urban Revolution’, ‘on a scale seen previously only in time of war or extreme natural catastrophe.’