Beijing, Beijing, it's a helluva
town By Antoaneta Bezlova
BEIJING - For a city in the middle of
zealous Summer Olympic Games preparations, a
public debate over its future, set off by an
academic's call to shift the national capital out
of congested and parched Beijing, has been
baffling.
Late 2007 saw Beijingers
plunging into polemic, on the Internet and media,
over the merits and demerits of living in the
ever-modernizing center of the Middle Kingdom.
The list of grumbles were many. Beijing is
under attack from the advancing Gobi desert. It
lacks water for its swelling 17 million
population, expected to jump
to 20 million in 10 years. Spurred by Olympic
demand, life in the capital has become too
expensive. Land and property prices have been
rising faster than Beijing's skyscrapers. And the
entire construction boom has made the crispy blue
winter skies a thing of the past.
"Having
the capital in Beijing made sense during the Ming
Dynasty when China used the power of the imperial
seat to fortify its northern borders against
invasions," argued one netizen.
"For
communist China after 1949 it was essential the
capital was close to an important ally like the
Soviet Union. But we are in the 21st century now
and none of these apply any more. Shouldn't we
move the capital somewhere else with better
environment?" he asked.
But for every
posting of gripe there were defending arguments,
brandishing the rise of new Beijing as modern
China's glory.
"History chose Beijing as
China's capital and there are no rights and wrongs
to be settled," read an opinion published in the
weekly Southern Weekend. "But as much as old
Beijing represented ancient China, modern Beijing
is the perfect symbol of new China."
For
young people, the scale and pace of change has
been intoxicating. Gleam and glimmer define the
new Beijing where once only the imperial palace's
crimson colors stood out against the city's
omnipresent walls of gray. Many see the capital's
recent development as nothing short of
rags-to-riches transformation, which has brought
along the sophisticated air of an international
mega city.
"Hip. Beijing these days is
hip," quips Miao Li, 26, as she scours the Shin
Kong Place, the capital's new luxury-brand
hotspot. "There are some great places to shop and
cool places to party."
Fiercely proud of
their ancient civilization, Chinese people
perceive the Olympics as a rare chance to
demonstrate to the world they have embraced
modernity. For its part, the Chinese government
relishes the opportunity to shine in the
international limelight and has portrayed the
games as a symbolic coming-of-age party for the
entire country.
But the heady mixture of
pride and nationalism professed by many cannot
hide a certain sense of dislocation felt by the
capital residents that have witnessed the enormous
transformation brought to their city by
modernization.
In the run-up to the 2008
Summer Games, Beijing appears to have been
transformed into the world's largest construction
site. By some accounts, there are currently 10,000
building projects in the capital, albeit not all
of them Olympics-related.
So far, the
government has poured US$40 billion into such
Olympics projects as a futuristic "bird's nest"
national stadium, a high-speed train to the
airport along with a brand new terminal, a new
underground network and hundreds of kilometers of
new roads.
But some of the city's
architectural novelties like the twin towers of
the Chinese Central Television (CCTV), designed by
Rem Koolhaas, are causing more concern than stir
among Beijingers. When the precariously tilted
towers were joined into one structure in December,
many let out a sigh of relief.
"Call me
old-fashioned, but whenever I passed by that site
I always worried whether one of those towers was
going to collapse," said Cui Junxia who works as a
beautician in the vicinity of the new CCTV
headquarters.
"Traditional architecture is
better because you know it had endured a long
time. But these experiments - we don't know how
sound and long lasting they will be."
Architectural development is not the only
side of Beijing life being subjected to
experimentation.
Beijing's distinctive
social habits and attitudes have also been
targeted by wenming (or civility)
campaigns. Etiquette inspectors have been roaming
the city for months, trying to curb bad habits
like littering, cutting into line, foul language
and spitting in public before the city's etiquette
agency claimed "partial success" in December.
"Hosting the Olympics is not only about
building grand stadiums," Zheng Mojie, official
with Beijing's capital ethics development office,
told the China Daily.
"As tens of
thousands of foreign visitors are expected to
flood into the country next summer, both its
positive and negative sides will be amplified. So
we must change these bad local habits," she said.
An era of bad sanitation was declared over
too when swaths of ramshackle houses in the heart
of old Beijing were destroyed in recent years. But
while the days of sharing communal lavatories with
neighbors are gone, the change has entailed the
erasing of historical neighborhoods with warrens
of narrow crooked alleys and courtyard houses,
unique to this imperial city's landscape.
The people evicted during this
redevelopment process number at least 1.5 million,
according to the Geneva-based Center on Housing
Rights and Evictions.
"While many of these
displacements resulted from large-scale urban
redevelopment that would have occurred without the
Olympic Games, the scale of displacements has more
than doubled since Beijing was elected as an
Olympic host city," the center said in a report
last year.
The reconstruction of China's
capital had begun in earnest after 1998 but
accelerated in 2001 when Beijing won the bid to
host the games.
By choosing to seat the
center of government in Beijing, capital of past
dynasties over the past 1,000 years, every urban
planner in modern times has been confronted with
the question of how best to deal with the ancient
city. The communist leaders of China dealt with
this great symbol of the country's lustrous, and
backward feudal past as they knew best -
radically.
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