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BEIJING—I
knew that moving from Paris’s 7th arrondissement to a
dorm room in northwestern
Beijing
would be a jolt akin to waking up in a body cast after
falling asleep at the wheel. I had been to the Chinese
capital a decade ago, so I packed surgical masks for the
pollution, thermal underwear for the cold and enough
antibiotics to open a pharmacy. I weaned myself away
from Laduree macaroons and French Bordeaux, got a visa
that identified me as a student and changed my e-mail
address. I was prepared to be sick, scrutinized, hungry
and miserable. Instead, I found Beijing far more
electrifying than Paris, unrecognizable from the city I
had visited 10 years ago. Where I had once seen
construction workers using hammers to break stone on
Chang’an Avenue,
there were skyscrapers, shopping malls, pedestrian
underpasses, park benches and rosebushes. Children no
longer pointed and giggled when I passed. As the cold,
dark Beijing winter yielded to spring, I often woke up
to perfectly clear, blue skies.
So, I
suppose I should not wonder when people ask me about
poverty, traffic, pollution, xenophobia, strange food
and a host of other unflattering clichés born of
previous encounters with the city. I must be patient
when they grieve for the old hutong neighborhoods
supposedly swept away by development, when they marvel
at my ability to get around without a guide and when
they ask whether my cell phone was tapped.
The
truth is this: There was the polluted, awkward,
unfriendly Beijing I visited 10 years ago, and there is
Beijing now, physically and psychologically transformed.
Shortly
after the 1978 economic opening of China, Shanghai, the
sophisticated financial hub, seemed to be leading the
country into the future. But things changed in 2001,
when Beijing, historically the nation’s stodgy
government and education center, won its bid to host the
2008 Summer Olympics, which will be from August 8 to 24.
The
government has gone on a $40-billion building spree to
make these the best Games ever and to turn this into a
colossal coming-of-age party for a world-class capital.
In
preparation for the Olympics, expected to draw half a
million spectators from abroad and 4 billion TV viewers
worldwide, the government planted 2.7 million trees last
year alone and has urged people to correct such bad
habits as spitting in public, talking too loudly and
cutting in line. Taxi drivers are deodorizing their
cars, and meteorologists are searching for high-tech
ways to make sure it doesn’t rain on the Beijing Olympic
parade.
Tourists
who come here for a few days to see the
Forbidden City,
Summer Palace and Ming Tombs are bound to notice these
developments. In the four months I spent here studying
Mandarin, I came to fully appreciate how far Beijing had
come since my last visit, and how much further it plans
to go in the months leading up to the opening
ceremonies. I had no illusions about mastering the
language in the short, intensive course, but I wanted to
explore the city with more confidence than I felt on my
first visit.
Neighborhoods differ
I stayed
in a dorm on campus partly to meet people.
I grew
especially fond of my teachers, three Chinese women too
young to have been affected by the Cultural Revolution
and other upheavals that are as much as some Westerners
know about the country’s modern history. We never
discussed politics, although on a field trip to the
Great Wall, I asked one of them what she thought was
wrong with China. She frowned and shook her head, then
said the country had too many people.
Greater
Beijing has a population of about 15 million, including
30,000 migrant workers building Olympic facilities,
subway lines, highways, luxury apartments, shopping
malls, airport terminals and skyscrapers. Construction
has left some districts haphazard and rough-edged, but
other neighborhoods are ritzy and well-groomed.
Development seemingly has overlooked no city block, and
many unfinished structures already are attracting
tourists, who crowd near construction fences to gaze at
the futuristic CCTV Tower in the Central Business
District (designed by Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas ) and
the National Stadium, better known as the “bird’s nest.”
The opening and closing ceremonies of the Olympics will
be staged in this massive ring of interwoven steel
girders.
I never
passed the new stadium without rubbernecking. But I also
couldn’t fail to notice that almost every major
construction site was ringed by jury-rigged, temporary
housing for workers, who squatted in the dirt playing
cards and drinking tea when not on the job.
Much has
been made of the widening gap between the rich and the
poor in China. But income disparities in Beijing seemed
no sharper to me than those I saw on the train to
Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris, which provides the
only glimpse tourists are likely to get of squalid
housing projects in the suburbs.
In the
area around the Mandarin school I attended, I met mostly
middle-class people who had the same desire to buy and
consume that Americans have. The only difference is that
most Beijingers couldn’t dream of owning a car or going
out to dinner until just a few years ago.
Beijing
has been accused of plowing up history in the city’s mad
rush to modernize.
But
during my months here, I realized that that was not the
whole story. The number of foreign visitors is expected
to increase exponentially during and after the Olympics,
so the government is pouring money into renovations at
such popular tourist sites as the
Forbidden City, Confucius
Temple and the Summer Palace.
The more
subtle hand of preservation is at work in some of the
city’s beloved old hutong neighborhoods, where
generations of families lived in traditional Chinese
courtyard houses, gossiped from their stoops, shelled
chestnuts, aired bedsheets and sent their children out
to play.
Preservationists estimate that two-thirds of
Beijing’s
hutongs have been lost to redevelopment. But old
Nanluogu Lane lined with guesthouses, shops and
restaurants thrives, because Chinese businessmen have
discovered that foreign tourists love hutongs.
To get
from my language school in Haidian to central Beijing on
the subway took about 45 minutes. The mass transit
system is easy to navigate and cheap, and by August it
should be ready to take spectators to the threshold of
the Olympic Green and travelers from the city to the
airport.
I tended
to take cabs, which are almost as cheap as the subway,
although subject to epic traffic jams.
In
Beijing the number of cars is rocketing. As in US
cities, this rising level of vehicle ownership has
coincided with a decline in transit ridership.
Moreover, auto proliferation has exacerbated
environmental degradation as much as if not more than
industrial pollution, the use of coal as a household
fuel, the spread of central Asian deserts partly driven
by global warming and the influx of smog from other
regions.
Having
vowed to make the Summer Games a fully green Olympics,
the government has launched campaigns to curb auto
emissions, replace diesel-powered public buses with
vehicles fueled by cleaner natural gas and move heavily
polluting industries out of the city.
It’s not
clear whether such initiatives will be effective or how
long they will last after the closing ceremonies. No one
knows whether Beijing will become a soulless
megametropolis with all the old ills or a Chinese
capital for the 21st century.
But
already, it’s a pure joy to venture out in Beijing on a
crystal-clear morning, with 15 million people apparently
pulling with one oar toward the Summer Games. The city’s
not a finished product, not by a long shot. But for
travelers who want to see how the present is becoming
the future, Beijing far outshines the City of Light. |
