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SINOROVING
Never mind the party, let's party!
By Pepe Escobar
PART 1:
The Great Wall of Shopping
PART 2:
Selling China to the World
PART 3:
The hottest label: China chic
PART 4:
Tiananmen peasant time bomb
PART 5:
Guangdong, unstoppable world's factory
BEIJING - This is a city on a collective Higher Mission. All of Beijing is
getting in shape, training for the 2008 Summer Olympics. In this bodybuilding
frenzy, the Olympics may be a destination, but the journey may be as important.
Two consequences of the frenzy are now evident. As the capital city of the most
extraordinary social and economic transformation in history, Beijing has become
the ultimate frontier town of the global informational superhighway.
Inevitably, it's also turning into one of the hippest, most happening and most
exciting places on Earth.
First we emulate, then we overtake
Beijing citizens have plenty of reasons to be cheerful. They're flush.
Beijing's gross domestic product (GDP) in 2004 topped 428.3 billion yuan
(US$51.8 billion), up 13.2% on the previous year, according to the municipal
statistics bureau. It was the highest growth for the past decade (Shanghai's
reached $90 billion, rising 3.5%).
They're talking non-stop about how good they feel. By the end of 2004 there
were 334 million mobile phones in China, up 65 million from 2003, according to
the Ministry of Information Industry. Beijing is cell-phone kingdom. All over
China there will be 402 million this year - one for every three Chinese.
They know and feel they are on the way up, while superpower US is seen to be on
the way down. The People's Bank of China recently announced that China's dollar
reserves increased by a staggering $207 billion in 2004. The central bank
didn't have to add - because millions already know - that it is now financing
roughly a third of the US current account deficit. Fan Gang, director of the
National Economic Research Institute at the China Reform Foundation, spelled it
all out, in English, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland: "The
dollar is no longer [seen] as a stable currency."
They know their economic model works. "First we emulate, then we overtake" is
the mantra in economic and business circles. Beijing elites think the Communist
Party is right: everything has to revolve around breakneck economic growth. No
populism in the People's Republic: we'll think about wealth redistribution
later, the elites say.
They know that virtually everything that counts depends on China - world trade,
the dollar-exchange rate, the euro-exchange rate, the price of oil, the price
of industrial commodities, bond prices ... They know that since 1975 the Asian
economy as a whole has been growing at least 3% more than the rest of the
world. And in the past few years China has constantly outperformed the rest of
Asia. They know the Chinese economy still has at least another 25 years of high
growth ahead. "To get rich is glorious," ordered Little Helmsman Deng Xiaoping
in the late 1970s. Corollary: "Hope I get rich before I get old."
They know they have few reasons to complain about the party. According to the
Chinese Academy of Social Sciences' annual blue book, 80% of Chinese were
"very" or "fairly satisfied" with life in 2004, and now embrace the party's
fourth generation's "scientific perspective on development" - and its new
mantra that economic progress should promote public welfare and social harmony.
They are convinced they will be progressively subjected to less intrusive state
power.
They feel in the air what is beginning to look like the Chinese century. And
the Beijing Olympics in 2008 will be the stage to broadcast the news to those
who haven't yet noticed.
Beijing Barbie does camouflage
Chinese college students used to dream of the US as the promised land. Not
anymore - and the trend started even before the first administration of
President George W Bush, during the second term of Bill Clinton in 1999, after
the bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade. They used to buy American. Now,
to make a status statement - and to make a political statement as well - they
buy fake European, or legit European if their budgets allow it. They used to
seek privilege in the US for higher education. Now they're planning to study in
Britain, France or Germany, or in good Asian universities.
The party seems to have gotten what it wanted, at least for now, from young,
educated Chinese: a politically apathetic, materialistic generation. Romantic
idealism or revolutionary spirit couldn't be further away from the political
landscape at both Peking University and Tsinghua University. This iPod syndrome
(although iPods are virtually unavailable in China) is also pervasive among
high-school students, the absolute majority more interested in 'Net surfing,
hip-hop, coffee culture and backpacking around China: when asked about the
Communist Party, most tend to imply that the party protects the interests of
all Chinese citizens.
But what you see is not what you get. Welcome to modern Chinese camouflage
culture. Camouflage tactics are a key communist doctrine. You can't fight the
system when the system is too powerful (like the new "humanistic" Communist
Party). So you proclaim your allegiance and surrender to its logic - at least
on the surface, while searching in secret for alternatives.
Resistance means camouflage. The communist model of totalitarian esthetic
values is thus turned upside-down - and the result starts subverting social
conformity. Examples: the Bookworm - a cafe/bookshop that would fit well in
Paris or Amsterdam, where you can read, in English, things that the party
wouldn't want you to read. Or fashion designer Feng Ling selling her "clothing
culture from the Confucian canons to the revolution's canons" at the hip Tong
Li studio. Or retro-Qing Dynasty restaurants, where Qing-clad waitresses chirp
on their cell phones during a quick break.
As Beijing reinvents itself, it could not escape Barbie culture. Witness
Yue-Sai Wa Wa. Yue-Sai is a Beijing Barbie, complete with designer jeans,
mobile phone, laptop and matching Louis Vuitton luggage. Yue-Sai, retailing at
150 yuan (about $18), is an invention of Yue-Sai Kan, a former talk-show host,
founder of the No 1 cosmetics brand in China and recently voted one of the
nation's most influential women by the Xinhua news agency. Beijing Barbie is
saying that your identity is just a fashion accessory. So when the market (or
"market socialism", as the party says) occupies the full spectrum of values,
there's only one possible strategy: never mind the Communist Party, let's
party.
The Olympic spirit
The Olympics are supposed to be first and foremost the party's party. Thus they
must proceed according to the inevitable politically correct slogan, in this
case the Three Concepts: "Green Olympics, High-Tech Olympics and People's
Olympics". The guidelines were recently reinforced by Liu Qi, member of the
Political Bureau of the Communist Party Central Committee. According to a
"scientific development outlook" (sic), the urgent tasks at hand in Beijing are
"constructing the facilities, exploring the market, organizing the publicity
work, servicing and guaranteeing as well as promoting humanistic Olympics".
All this will push ahead the success of the "People's Olympics". To get there,
the party is heavily promoting "education activities regarding civility and
decorum", "emphatically cultivating civil behaviors and habits among the
citizens in life, society, competition arenas, campus and foreign-related
activities"; it is "striving to considerably raise citizens' civilization level
in about three years in various ways". The concerted campaign to raise the
"civilization level" of the citizenry is an absolute success: everywhere in
Beijing there's a flurry of courteous locals welcoming foreigners at every
opportunity. Even acrid Beijing taxi drivers are now smiling behind the wheels
of their small red Xialis. More than 40,000 Xialis, by the way, will vanish
before the Olympics, replaced by Volkswagen Santanas with global positioning
systems (GPS).
For the Olympics, the party will be proud to project a powerful and
technocratic dimension of a booming China.
South of Chang'an avenue (Beijing's Champs-Elysees), in the future "financial
city" of Xizhimen in the west, in the central business district south of the
Sanlitun embassy quarter, in Zhonguancun (Beijing's Silicon Valley), dozens and
soon hundreds of steel and glass towers are sprouting. This is proceeding of
course parallel to and made possible by the systematic destruction of Beijing's hutongs
and their courtyard houses, their residents exiled to faraway suburbs.
Chateau Beijing
The most extraordinary aspect of this bodybuilding frenzy is that the symbols
of the Beijing of the future are being designed by foreign architects. The
soon-to-be-opened Opera House - a triple theater under a titanium dome facing
the Zhongnanhai, the Communist Party's seat of power - was designed by
Frenchman Paul Andreu. The future headquarters of Chinese Central Television
(CCTV), a deconstructed arch, is by Dutch master Rem Koolhaas: he even took a
group of Harvard students to analyze the impact of the masterpiece on Beijing.
The Museum of the City of Beijing is by Frenchman Jean-Marie Duthilleul. The
museum at the Tsingua University campus is by Swiss Mario Botta. The
80,000-capacity Olympic Stadium - a spectacular, stylized bird's nest - is by
Swiss firm Herzog & Meuron. And the Olympic pool - a liquid cube - is by
Australian firm PTW Architects.
Liu Jian, an urbanist at the Architecture Institute of Tsinghua University,
notes that as the Chinese have no experience in great projects, they need the
assistance of foreign architects. Meanwhile, she quietly deplores that Beijing
is becoming an Americanized city. The fact is it is becoming an architectural
mecca on a par with New York, Los Angeles, Barcelona, Moscow, Paris, London,
Berlin, Rotterdam, Tokyo and Hong Kong.
The most graphic illustration of architecture as an emblem of boundless
optimism has to be the first counterfeit, made-in-China French chateau. The
owner, Zhang Yuchen, is a former Red Guard reconverted to real-estate
development. In the early 1990s Zhang built the first high-class villas in the
suburbs of Beijing. To promote a new 1,000-villa complex, Zhang came up with
the fabulous idea of copying a 17th-century French chateau, Maisons-Laffitte.
Thus the Zhang-Laffitte - which is not only a replica, but also incorporates
such neat touches by Chinese architect Liu Peirong as a copy of the Vatican
colonnades, designed by Giovanni Bernini, and two symmetrical alleys "borrowed"
from famous Fontainebleau castle.
Zhang-Laffitte's interior is Disneyland China at its best: an orgy of golden faux
baroque with kitschy touches like a karaoke next to the wine cellar. The
Chinese anyway don't know the concept of kitsch: someone has to tell the girl
group at the ultra-chic Red Moon bar at the Grand Hyatt to scrap mimicking The
Carpenters. But Zhang-Laffitte's baroque Disneyland is a blast: dozens of
developers now want Liu Peirong to design their own Sino-French chateaux.
A 'brand-new form of capitalism'
Immersed in a high-contrast, high-contact vortex of micro-cultures and
inequalities, young, urban Chinese in Beijing are still discovering the 1960s.
Although there are record shops hidden in hutongs selling 1960s rock 'n'
roll anthems, most haven't even discovered The Doors. But they already know the
meaning of the situationist slogan, "Let's be realist - let's demand the
impossible." The city has its own Carnaby Street - the Ritan market - and is
flirting with having its own Greenwich Village and Quartier Latin - the area
near the TongLi studio. An array of galleries display cynical realism, pop art,
video art, conceptual art, multimedia and photography. There are plenty of
young filmmakers plotting to become the new Truffaut or the new Godard.
This is the absolute antithesis of the negative karma oozing from the Bush
administration and its gang of neo-con armchair warriors. A student at Peking
University moonlighting at the Suzie Wong bar nailed it perfectly: "Our
Politburo here has nine members. You tell me eight neo-conservatives control
the United States. So it's the same thing, right? How can they lecture us on
anything?" Young, urban Chinese increasingly feel that the US is losing its
hegemony. They feel that China is the new America: not a replica of America,
but a new socio-economic model far, far away from the Western paradigm (Bill
Gates, who's profiting handsomely from it, has just raved about China's
"brand-new form of capitalism"). They feel the 21st will, most definitely, be
the Chinese century. Just as were all but the last four. So why care about the
party? There are so many reasons to party.
(Copyright 2005 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us
for information on
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