Get Herald RSSBEIJING - By all accounts, I got to Beijing at least 10 years too late. The city's expatriates like to wax eloquent on the days before the streets became clogged with cars and an influx of foreign investment in the 1990s turned the city into an around-the-clock construction site. With 3,000 years of history, Beijing may still retain its status as a great symbol of Eastern antiquity, but by the time I arrived, the city so often romanticized as the seat of China's past grandeur looked to me more like a sprawling, heavily congested strip mall.
In a country that for centuries remained resistant to outside influence, it is curious to see how hungrily Chinese officials are courting the foreign dollar today. Once, the Forbidden City shrouded China's emperor in mystery; today, Starbucks does brisk business from within the city's towering gates. For years, China's emperors made it illegal for foreigners to learn Mandarin, for fear of spreading Western influences. Today, as Beijing prepares to host the 2008 Olympics, English is everywhere, from street signs to storefronts. Western-style shopping centers such as Wangfujing Street - a glitzy commercial hub showcasing international haute couture - are similarly omnipresent.
Rome may not have been built in a day, but the explosive construction in eastern Chinese metropolises like Beijing with the onset of economic liberalization in 1978 might make us re-evaluate that old adage. Over the past two decades, as skyscrapers and shopping malls have burgeoned throughout the city, only 2 percent of Beijing's original architecture has gone unchanged. Throughout Beijing there are miles of traditional hutong neighborhoods slated for demolition where the Chinese character chai - destroy - is spray-painted on every building, scrawled like some eerie scarlet letter.
During the Cultural Revolution, thousands of Mao's Red Guards stormed China, burning temples, books, artifacts and any other symbols of ancient culture they could lay siege to. Fast forward three decades, and, as centuries-old hutongs - some built as early as the Yuan Dynasty in the 13th century - are obliterated by the block and replaced by modern high-rises and sleek office space, it's hard not to feel that history is repeating itself. Beijing is a nexus of conflict between economic expansion and cultural preservation, a struggle that is being played out throughout all of China. Call it capitalism with Chinese characteristics, or Chinese socialism with capitalistic characteristics - either way, the city leaves you wondering in what image the country will be remade. And, furthermore, at what cost?
In a developing country of 1.3 billion people, it's not surprising that such questions are generally sidelined. Take Liaoning Province, a northeastern region in Manchuria where the urban unemployed make up nearly 26 percent of the population. Through the windows of an 11-hour train ride from Beijing toward the province capital, the view is a dreary watercolor of endless sorghum fields still withered from wintertime frost. Closer to the cities a rainbow ticker-tape of trash starts to litter the fields where cows stand tethered in dumps. The irrigation ditches turn stagnant and black, choking on their own fetid waters. Gray-wood shacks, like a sprawling monochrome of dull, brick grays and steel blues, punctuated only by the sight of factory smokestacks spewing fumes, encircle the province capital.
After leaving the glass-and-steel cages of Beijing's high-rises and the sleek countenance of its endless shopping malls, traveling through Liaoning's mountains and fields last week was a welcome change. But entering the capital of Shenyang, it began to feel as though I'd never left: the same ads featuring Chinese women with bleached hair, the same superstores and fast-food restaurants. The same cloying, noxious scent of smog and sense of urban dislocation.
Between ailing state-owned-enterprises and the demise of the iron rice bowl, Liaoning's officials are increasingly turning to foreign direct investment to bulwark the economy, buoyant over the fact that in 2004, foreign direct investment in the region increased by 52 percent. Nevertheless, it's hard not to feel bleak when the urban poverty of workers living in shantytowns is even uglier than the rural poverty they left behind, and the ever-present smog and anonymous high-rises of modernizing cities like Shenyang seem perhaps even uglier still.
And yet, back in Beijing, while some decry the city's changes as nothing short of cultural annihilation, people everywhere will tell you that life inside is improving. Xinhua reports that almost 80 percent of Chinese say they feel positively about their quality of life - though it's also worth noting that nearly four times as many urban residents as rural residents say otherwise, despite the fact that the average urban income is triple that in the countryside. Certainly, the eager throngs lining up in the McDonald's on Wangfujing Street make it clear that people have more money to spend. As Beijing's makeover speeds up in anticipation of the 2008 Olympics, who has time to mourn? In a city with an ever-changing skyline, where the lines between tradition and modernity, communism and capitalism and East and West are increasingly losing all relevance, this is what progress has come to look like. And perhaps it is good, after all, that things are changing. Riding the bus through Beijing, I tell myself that over and again like a mantra, watching the city pass itself by like a dream.
Te-Ping Chen '07 is still waiting for spring.
