Beijing

by Linda Jaivin

  Migrant construction workers building Beijing.

  In 2003 Peking University hosted a conference titled ‘Beijing: Urban Imagination and Cultural Memory’. Zha Jianying reports in Tide Players how Chen Danqing, an artist with an American passport, was the only participant to raise the protests and massacre of 1989. Chen argued that Beijing’s ‘urban imagination’ had

  always been dominated by big power: emperors, Mao, and today’s city authorities, real estate developers, and big international architects . . . And Beijing’s cultural memory? Well it is full of holes or simply frozen.

  He noted that all the other delegates confined their comments to events before 1949, when cultural memory is permitted to function. Zha says that, following a stunned silence, Chen received sustained applause.

  In 2000 a Starbucks opened in the heart of the Forbidden City at the Gate of Heavenly Purity, where officials of the Qing had gathered for their dawn audience with the emperor. Along with McDonalds, KFC, Pizza Hut and other American fast-food chains, Starbucks had already metastasized throughout the city, but its presence in the palace itself struck many as a marble bridge too far. After a popular news anchor on national TV complained about the ‘symbol of America’s low-class food culture’, half a million people petitioned to have the chain evicted. It packed up in 2007, replaced by the Forbidden City Café.

  The architect Liang Sicheng’s widow, his second wife Zhu Lin, as well as his (now deceased) son Liang Congjie and Lao She’s son Shu Yi all became active in the battle to save what little is left of historical Beijing. Becker comments in City of Heavenly Tranquillity that the epic struggle for conservation has unfolded ‘rather like in Lao She’s 1953 play, Tea House, where in each successive act and each generation the same characters appear condemned to play the same roles’.

  8 Ringing in the New

  In 1954, having realized that the new government had no intention of listening to his pleas for the preservation of old Beijing, Liang Sicheng told Mayor Peng Zhen that in 50 years, he’d be vindicated by history. Almost on the dot of half a century, the city announced it would rebuild a section of the old city wall. It asked anyone still holding original Ming bricks to turn them in; 200,000 piled up in the collection centres.

  The wall rose adjacent to the southeast corner watchtower of Dongbianmen (itself first renovated in 1981 and since 1991 home to the Red Gate Gallery – see pp. 213–14). As Liang had proposed, both the top of the wall and the grounds in the shade of its parapets were transformed into public parkland. According to statistics quoted in Michael Meyer’s The Last Days of Old Beijing, 2,000 homes and 60 businesses that had sprung up on the site since the original wall’s destruction fell before the demolition squads.

  City planners also revived Liang and Chen Zhanxiang’s concept of satellite towns as a way of lessening pressure on the city centre. The Millennial Monument west of Tiananmen (a grandiose replica of the marble sundial in front of the Forbidden City’s main audience hall) sits on a second new north–south axis for the city, coincidentally right where Liang and Chen suggested locating the new government centre.

  After Beijing won hosting rights to the 2008 Olympics in 2001, the city was thrust full tilt into preparations. Having pledged a ‘Green Olympics’ with no net growth in carbon emissions, the city poured over U.S.$12 billion into welcome environmental improvement. It expanded waste-water treatment; served marching orders on a remaining 700 urban factories; planted tens of millions of new trees, including 83 km of ‘greenbelt’; cleaned up 40 km of rivers and canals; and created new parks and gardens with fountains and artificial lakes largely fed by rivers of ‘Category V’ pollution levels (unfit even for irrigation).

  Ming Dynasty City Wall Relics Park: what is old is new again.

  The city also invested almost $73 million in conserving and renovating 100 heritage sites. Yongdingmen (Eternally Fixed Gate), the Outer City’s largest gate tower before it was torn down in 1957, rose again in 2004. It was rebuilt on a smaller scale but to the greatest possible extent with traditional materials and techniques: workers applied tung oil to South African guaiacum columns with cow-tail brushes.

  The restoration of Yongdingmen, first mooted in 1999, was part of a long-term plan to restore and extend the city’s Ming era north–south axis. For the Asian Games in 1990, the city lengthened the axis at its northern end, from 7.8 km to 13 km; in the process it restored Wanning (Lasting Peace) Bridge by Shichahai. The Olympic Park would stretch the axis another 13 km northwards.

  All of Beijing’s UNESCO World Heritage Sites received a pre-Olympics spruce-up: sections of the Great Walls, Cixi’s Summer Palace, the Temple of Heaven, the Ming and Qing imperial tombs, the site of Peking Man’s discovery at Zhoukoudian and the Forbidden City (the restoration of which is due to be completed in 2020). Qianmen Street was done over as well, arguably in both senses of the phrase (see pp. 187–93).

  Environmental and conservation improvements accounted for only part of Beijing’s $44 billion facelift (ten times what Athens spent in 2004 and three times London’s budget in 2012). The city built or upgraded dozens of sports facilities, including the architectural showpieces of the ‘Bird’s Nest’ National Stadium and ‘Water Cube’ National Aquatics Center at the Olympic Green (see pp. 216–24). The Olympic Green is three times the size of New York’s Central Park and features forest and lakes that allow it to serve as a much-needed ‘green lung’ for the city. The authorities also built an Olympic Village, now a complex of upscale apartments, and 250 new hotels.

  Between 2001 and 2008 Beijing more than tripled the length of its subways to 200 km, with the goal of tripling that again and more by 2015. Beijing’s fleet of public buses swelled to 20,000. Of these, 4,000 run on natural gas, more than in any other city in the world. Beijing Capital International Airport’s dragon-shaped Terminal 3, which opened early in 2008, with an area of 986,000 sq. m (sixteen times the exhibition space of the Louvre), is the world’s fifth-largest building in terms of floor space and can process 66 million passengers a year. It’s hoped that, annually, 10 million of these will be international, Taiwan and Hong Kong tourists, which together with 200 million domestic visitors will allow Beijing to earn one-tenth of its GDP from tourism, ideally $10 billion a year.

  On the stroke of midnight on New Year’s Eve in 2008, the Bell Tower’s 63-tonne copper bell, cast in the time of Yongle, rang out a propitious 108 times. The mercury had plunged to −10ºc, but at an outdoor stage at the Millennial Monument, Hong Kong superstar Jackie Chan led several thousand spectators in singing the Olympics countdown song ‘We are Ready’.

  The Olympic Opening Ceremony was scheduled for the auspicious time of 8 minutes past 8 p.m. on the 8th day of the 8th month (a proximate homonym for ‘Prosper! Prosper! Prosper! Prosper!’). As a giant digital countdown clock on Tiananmen Square ticked off the days, hours, minutes and seconds, preparations switched into high gear. Beijing cab drivers and neighbourhood committee members swotted up on English. The most blatant girly bars were closed down. The homeless and beggars were rounded up and shipped out for the duration along with the tens of thousands of migrant workers who’d built the Beijing of the Olympics but weren’t required during it. Their makeshift housing, according to Lawrence Liauw’s study of the ‘Post-Olympic Urbanization of Beijing’, was ‘literally erased’ as unsightly. (Those migrant workers who later returned – or arrived afresh – to carry on with the construction of the still-growing city would have to start again from scratch.) Security forces and neighbourhood committees kept a closer eye than usual on known ‘troublemakers’. Everyone was to smile. No one was to spit.

  Beijing had promised clear skies and air that athletes could safely breathe. It delivered them via industry bans, cloud seeding by the Beijing Weather Modification Office and a strictly managed system of traffic management that kept half the cars off the road at any given time.

  Beginning with the 29 fireworks footprints (digitally recreated for simultaneous television broadcast) that tr
aipsed across the sky from Yongdingmen due north to the Bird’s Nest and film director Zhang Yimou’s grand-scale choreography for the opening ceremony, through to the wealth of gold medals mined by China’s athletes, the Olympics was widely hailed as a triumph for Beijing, its ‘coming-out party’. While prominent in international coverage, scandals such as the revelation that the little girl who sang at the opening ceremony was lip-synching for another deemed too unattractive for the world’s cameras, and concern about ongoing human rights abuses, especially in Tibet, were ignored by local media.

  ‘One World, One Dream’, opening ceremony of the 2008 Beijing Olympics at the Bird’s Nest Stadium.

  The following year, Beijing staged another spectacle, this one to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China. Security was unprecedentedly heavy, with police and paramilitary troops stationed throughout the centre of the city for days beforehand. Emerging from the subway at Xidan, on my way to see the new propaganda film The Founding of a Republic, I walked straight into the machine-gun sights of a SWAT team ranged before a black armoured vehicle; as I scurried off, every hair on the back of my neck upstanding, I recalled dancing on the square in the celebrations 25 years earlier. On the day itself, with the exception of 30,000 invited guests, Beijing residents were commanded to stay indoors and watch the celebrations on television. If Beijing had ‘come out’, it was on its own terms.

  Liu Xiaobo, the former lecturer at Beijing Normal University who’d played a key role in the Tiananmen protests of 1989, remained a leading and bold dissident voice. On Christmas Day, 2009, he was sentenced to eleven years’ imprisonment for ‘inciting subversion of state power’. In 2010, while still imprisoned, he was named Nobel Peace Laureate.

  In 2011 the Beijing artist Ai Weiwei was arrested while leaving China on a legitimate passport and held for nearly three months, eventually charged with evading taxes and kept under house arrest. In 2012 his Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads, a recreation of the circle of bronze zodiac animal heads from the Yuanmingyuan, was unveiled in New York in his absence. While under house arrest, Ai Weiwei made a video of himself and friends doing the Korean rapper Psy’s ‘Gangnam Style’ pony dance, but with handcuffs, and uploaded it to YouTube.

  It’s hard to ascertain what most Beijing people know about these two men who have symbolized their city to the world in the second decade of the twenty-first century. Beijing residents born after the Mao era cannot easily access information about the Cultural Revolution, Anti-Rightist Campaign, Great Leap Forward or famine, much less the events of Democracy Wall or the 1989 protests. Not everyone is interested, either. Not since 1949 has a generation enjoyed such access to education, social freedoms, entertainments, travel and employment opportunities. The young people of Beijing today have almost too much with which to occupy themselves – forget Tiananmen Square.

  The square itself is heavily policed and no longer open on all sides; fences funnel visitors through guarded underpasses. If a young Beijinger wanders from an exhibition on Bulgari or Louis Vuitton at the swanky new National Museum of China to the adjacent Revolution and History Museum on the east of Tiananmen Square, s/he will see only one photograph illustrating the decade of Cultural Revolution: the caption beneath ambiguously describes the period as a mistake that was manipulated by a ‘counter-revolutionary clique’ in a way that caused terrible suffering. On the worst famine in world history, the museum’s text states: ‘the project of constructing socialism suffered severe complications.’ Li Zicheng, the murderous peasant rebel who overthrew the Ming, gets a glowing write-up, as do the Boxers. As I studied an exhibition case of Boxer weaponry, a woman approached with her young grandson. ‘Do you know what the Boxers did with these?’ she asked him. Gleefully, he cried: ‘Killed the bad eggs!’ With a sideways glance at me, as though curious if I understood, but not overly concerned, the grandmother responded, ‘Correct.’

  In an article published in 2006, the elderly historian Yuan Weishi pleaded for honesty in education on such subjects as the burning of the Yuanmingyuan and the Boxer Rebellion. By not facing up to the realities of the Boxers’ extreme xenophobic violence, and by overlooking the torture and murder of the Western envoys by the Qing court that spurred Elgin’s actions, Yuan argued that the Chinese authorities were inflaming a dangerous breed of nationalism and irrationalism in foreign relations. The authorities closed down the journal that published Yuan’s article.

  The Galaxy SOHO shopping mall designed by architect Zaha Hadid.

  Ideology, like history, is a work in progress in Beijing. For nearly a century, progressive intellectuals inside and out of the Communist Party have rejected Confucianism for its conservative social prescriptions. The Communist Party has become a fan, however, in recent years. On 11 January 2011 Beijing residents woke up to discover a 9.5-m-tall bronze statue of Confucius on Tiananmen Square in front of the National Museum. An online poll by the People’s Daily found 62 per cent of the 820,000 respondents wanted him gone. In late April he was shunted to an internal museum courtyard. Beijing wags circulated text messages with jokes like the one claiming Confucius, a Shandong native, had been busted for not having a Beijing hukou (residence permit); a neo-Maoist website posted a photograph of the statue over which it superimposed the character chai – demolish.

  One reason neo-Maoists have regained some traction in public debate (and why pro-democracy activism continues to ferment) is that although China has lifted itself from poverty, corruption and socio-economic inequality have reached levels that would make good King Zhao weep. The problem is not confined to Beijing, but because Beijing is where the most powerful people in China live and work, the abuses can appear all the more egregious: when a Ferrari crashes and kills someone in Beijing, chances are that the son of a prominent person is at the wheel.

  The ultra-rich and ultra-connected in Beijing live in gated communities and do their shopping in Paris. The poor crowd the remaining dazayuan and wretched housing estates of the outer ring roads and fret over the rising price of vegetables. Between the two is a rising middle class that aspires to live in villa communities with names like Beijing Riviera or Merlin Champagne Town. Those in the upper spectrum may buy imported milk and organic vegetables at Jenny Lou’s, a chain opened by an entrepreneurial peasant couple who once carted their vegetables into the city on the back of a flatbed bicycle. Those in the lower spectrum don’t lack for much, but still take public transport. Which is not a bad idea – the 5 million vehicles driven by Beijing’s 20 million-plus residents keep the city’s roads in near-permanent gridlock. In August 2010 a 100-kilometre, 10-day traffic jam blocked up highways from Beijing all the way to Inner Mongolia.

  Renovations in a dazayuan (tenement courtyard).

  More than one in three Beijing residents today were born elsewhere. The classic Beijing dialect, with its purring rhotic vowels and distinctive vocabulary, is no longer the dominant music of the street. Linguists note that today people speak more quickly, in a higher pitch, with a lighter accent and not as many ‘silent’ or dropped tones as in the past.

  Close to 200,000 foreigners live, work and study in Beijing. Over half are from South Korea. Just as Chinese immigrants grew their Chinatowns abroad, Russians have their Russiatown by Ritan Park, there are streets of Korean restaurants and grocery stores, and Sanlitun, inside the East Third Ring Road, is the site of Argentinian, French, Italian, Spanish and even Israeli restaurants and cafés, French hairdressers, international design shops, imported food shops, outlander bars and nightclubs, and even a Hooters.

  The 1980s era clothing stalls of Xiushuijie have evolved into a multi-storey clothing bazaar. The guild-dominated hutong where, for example, you might find jade polishers or wok-makers, are no more, but there are massive shopping centres devoted to such specialized goods as electronics and eyeglasses. Most of the historical hutong have gone. In 2012, 600 were declared heritage-protected. Yet that year the photographer Xu Yong, who specializes in the subject of hutong photo
graphy, told the journalist Jaime Florcruz that, in his view, there were only 200 ‘honest-to-goodness’ hutong left.

  The old Inner City represents less than 1 per cent of Beijing’s total area today. It has become a conurbation encompassing sixteen districts and two rural counties. At 16,808 sq. km, it’s the size of Wales. In administrative terms, like Shanghai and other Chinese mega-cities, Beijing is a municipality with the status of a province. Its 440-km Sixth Ring Road, which girdles the city 15–20 km from the centre, cannot hold it. Nothing can contain its daily tsunami of rubbish, carted out to a mushrooming number of tips and mostly informal recycling centres that ring the city and are dubbed the ‘Seventh Ring Road’ by residents. This ‘Great Wall of Rubbish’ is the subject of independent film-maker Wang Jiulang’s unnerving documentary Beijing Besieged by Waste (2011); the city continues to face serious environmental challenges.

  Street scene, old ‘Chinese city’ south of Qianmen.

  As in the early twentieth century, the dust of demolition has raised clouds of nostalgia. ‘Old Beijing’ is new again. Publishers can’t seem to produce enough books about Beijing history, customs, legends and personalities, including photography books and reproductions of old maps. Recent popular television series have included the 42-episode One Hundred Years of Rongbaozhai, set in a famous Liulichang antiques shop, and director Li Shaohong’s 50-episode Dream of the Red Chamber. As The Economist observed in June 2012 of the fad for Qing drama in particular, ‘It’s a good time to be a Manchu on television’.

  Today on the reconstructed Qianmen Street, you can enjoy your Republican era and eat Häagen-Dazs too. If the Lao She Teahouse west of Qianmen serves traditional Manchu snacks along with digestible bites of Peking Opera, the opera itself is in crisis, with thinning, elderly audiences and fierce internal debate over the limits of reform.