Letters From Beijing
Waiting for George
Our man in Beijing, JONATHAN BELL intended to report this week on the Olympic city’s architecture. Then he discovered President Bush was staying in his hotel.
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PHOTOGRAPH BY GARY SHAFER
China is understandably jittery about the global scrutiny it will receive during the Olympics, when 27,000 members of the foreign media will savor every aspect of the Chinese experience. Just days away from the opening ceremony, a thick blanket of smog—although the International Olympics Committee calls it “mist”—covers Beijing. In the far west of the country, Muslim separatists are reported to have killed 16 local policemen, while Beijing’s security forces remain on high alert lest any kind of protest is seen to disrupt the Games. “Failure is not an option” is the oft-quoted official attitude.
It might seem that Beijing is in a perpetually failing state, just keeping itself away from the brink. With five broad ring roads constantly thronged with jostling taxis and private cars, and the humid, clammy heat of the summer pushing temperatures into the 90s, the haze disguises even the spikiest of the city’s new architectural wonders, blending the distinguished and the banal together beneath a thick atmospheric gunk. Walking is a chore, let alone a 110-meter dash with a few hurdles thrown in for good measure.
There are roughly 3.3 million cars in Beijing, with an estimated 1,000 new cars added to the roads each day. Although monumental taxes on imported models (up to 150 percent of the purchase price) do little to discourage sales, the vast majority of cars on the road are built locally, including familiar Western models like Audi and BMW, all of whom have tailored their designs to the local markets, adding a trunk or even slightly stretching the wheelbase to satisfy the local preference for saloon cars over hatchbacks.
Smog and congestion have been designated as the one of the main enemies of a smooth-running Olympics, so in late July the Government effectively halved the number of cars on the road with a license plate lottery. Special “Olympic lanes” are markedfor whisking the athletes around and emergency measures were put in place to take away even more cars, should the need arise. Plates ending in odd numbers are allowed to drive on one day, evens the next, and so on. For some reason the odd days are worse. Drivers drift in and out of lanes looking for ways to get ahead, cursing theatrically when the road ahead is a sea of stationary cars. In the end, the haze persisted right up until the opening ceremony, although it had cleared considerably by the time the Beijing sky was rent with fireworks.
Back at the hotel, it soon transpires that the hotel’s extreme security measures haven’t been put in place for the protection of humble athletes, journalists, and spectators. Shortly after arriving, I’m casually informed by a fellow guest that this cordon is in place for a very special VIP, in town to attend the opening ceremony of the Games and, while he’s at it, cut the red ribbon at a new diplomatic outpost that’s recently been completed just down the road. Things are starting to make a lot more sense.
To the casual Western observer, China can seem like a giant machine for generating writerly clichés. This is a country usually seen through a mist of statistics. You probably know a few—maybe you’ve even quoted or misquoted them at family and friends, marvelling at the superlatives, the ironies, the juxtapositions, and the relentless, unstoppable drive. It would be easy to add another dollop of plasticized comment to the global platter, offloading a portfolio of statistics about scale, economics, growth, population, speed, expansion, dynamism, culture, industry; in short, continue to play the numbers game that keeps China at arm’s length, an “economic powerhouse” that either challenges, threatens, or enhances our own way of life.
“The Party has its hand in everything,” an American expat informs me, even though, he added, its ideology “is always three steps behind the reality.”But the reality is more complex. To describe China as a traditional society in the throes of rapid modernization is to ignore the contradictions inherent in the current Communist system, the self-imposed complexity of modern Chinese architecture, or even our own inadvertent collusion with the country’s new brand-driven value system. Clay Risen recently denounced in this magazine the tendency for Western critics to goggle unreflectively at Beijing’s new architecture while failing to comment about the political motivations and social upheavals that enabled them. It’s a fair point, but I think that the blinkers—if that’s what they are—don’t just belong to the West.
A few days before the opening ceremony I walk up to the National Stadium. The pavements are thick with Chinese tourists, posing for family photographs against the wire fences that kept us all a good half mile from the threaded-steel structure of the stadium itself. There are no signs—no memory—of the 2,000 houses that once stood on the site, eradicated for the greater good. Everywhere in the city, there are official souvenir shops, already doing great business to the largely local crowd. Brightly colored Olympic merchandise is pored over by people keen to buy a symbol—a plush toy, T-shirt, mug or countless other items—of this remarkable time in their country’s history.
China’s modern identity is a relatively recent construction that demands its people believe a new story about national identity, one that has evolved from the original party line. No longer is the Communist Party deemed to be fighting for the rights of the poor and the oppressed. In an originally subtle but now chasm-like rhetorical and ideological shift, the Party is in thrall to the country’s new entrepreneurial classes—read, Party members and their families—and the new expanded middle classes who are enjoying the trickle-down benefits of a superheated economy.
What drove China to this point? Analysts point to the country’s opening up to foreign investment in 1978, bringing in a flood of money that initially served to benefit only the ruling classes. The unrest that culminated in the Tiananmen Square Massacre of 1989 merely set back the reforms, having been generated by the economic dissatisfaction of the silent majority as much as by the student-led democracy movement. Since that black date, Party ideology has been tweaked to siphon some of the imported wealth into the open market. Western brands—particularly luxury brands—are now ubiquitous. Nevertheless, business must still work the Chinese way. “The Party has its hand in everything,” an American expat informs me, even though, he added, its ideology “is always three steps behind the reality.”
In this way, Chinese Communism has enabled the creation of a hugely flexible society, an elastic structure willing to bend this way and that to accommodate the inevitable change brought about by consumer capitalism. The flipside is that corruption is endemic. Poorly paid government officials are practically expected to top off their earnings through a system of quasi-official backhanders. No one questions what has to be done to get ahead. “You can’t do business here without distributing red envelopes every year,” says another expat, practically tapping his nose as he does so.
Architecturally, deconstructivism has become the de facto national style. What originally began as an obscure aesthetic and intellectual exercise in the West has been enthusiastically applied to everything in China, from shopping malls to stadiums to office blocks. The steel mesh of the National Stadium’s and CCTV’s structurally expressive façades are perhaps the most widely published examples, their expressive, almost calligraphic style is no longer the preserve of high-minded Swiss and Dutch architects.
“Decon” can be found everywhere, with folded surfaces and slashes and streaks blended into the neo-Baroque, pseudo-historicist, and straightforward Modernist forms that are the stylistic lingua franca of every fast-tracked global metropolis. The propagandist aspect to all this new construction is hardly concealed, and the new architecture remains explicitly and literally aligned with the past. The Olympic stadium—the Bird’s Nest—and aquatic center—the Water Cube—are located due north of the Forbidden City, an axis of power and wonder that was anything but accidental. The imposition of the Olympic park on the city grid further illustrates the Chinese talent for deliberately undermining any straightforward “truth.” Ancient Beijing is a rigorous grid, yet it is fractured into pieces by the cold gray loops of the ring roads, each imposing a new set of chaos via the Brownian motion of Chinese driving, a linear but intersecting puzzle of improbable complexity.
Economists lament that the Chinese dream will falter eventually, as the country has no ability to create its own brands and no apparent desire for innovation, only duplication. That’s probably just wishful thinking. The five mascots for Beijing 2008, Beibei the Fish, Jingjing the Panda, Nini the swallow, Yingying, the (politically expedient) Tibetan Aantelope, and an Olympic flame called Huanhuan, are perhaps the most successful Olympic character designs for a generation. The opening ceremony was, as predicted, breathtaking, a totalitarian Broadway show on an unimaginable scale. I pity the poor organisers of London 2012 who have to follow it. More importantly, the new architecture itself also demonstrates a talent for branding, distilling the city’s image down to a few iconic symbols. The tourist maps given out by the hotel exploit this perfectly. Without a scale or useful detail, the map is literally a stylized diagram, over which are placed a series of cute little building caricatures, the Disney babies of ultra-modern architecture, complete with their cute little nicknames—Pearl, Water Cube, Bird’s Nest.
In barely 20 years, the Chinese cultural landscape has gone from practically zero brands—Coke was the first U.S. company to enter the market back in 1979—to a whole new value system.Though the Chinese are credited with understanding the importance of the building as sign—a continuation of that old architectural trope, the Bilbao Effect—it’s the innate sense of disorder presented by the new architecture that is its most significant legacy. Instead, commentary seems to focus on figures, rather than the figurative. British Airways’ in-flight magazine trumpets Beijing Airport’s new Terminal 3 as having 1.3 million square meters of space (equivalent, it claims, to 200 soccer pitches, or 14 million square feet). The Architectural Record, on the other hand, says it measures only 10.8 million square feet. What price accuracy? All that’s important is another set of figures confirming China’s apparently innate obesity. The news feeds relentlessly pile on story after story on the architectural majesty of Beijing and Shanghai, with practically the same, carefully rehearsed argument trotted out each time—this brave new world makes Western planning look timid.
In the West, successful architecture is invariably described as an art, transcending commercial and political restrictions to create something that is transformative and uplifting. The Chinese relationship to contemporary art begins from a far more compromised position. I visited an Adidas-sponsored exhibition where all the paintings have the company’s logo prominently featured on their canvases, woven into the subject matter. Is this a blatant post-ironic gesture? Or is simply indicative of a different attitude? In barely 20 years, the Chinese cultural landscape has gone from practically zero brands—Coke was the first U.S. company to enter the market back in 1979—to a whole new value system, the structure of which has largely been sloppily cut and pasted from the rest of the world. Corporate collusion has always been considered part of the package.
It’s not that there are no values, but that the tenuous structure of the Chinese market makes them confused and contradictory. The supermarket across the road from our hotel carries bottles of vintage French wine for around $5,000 each, with bottles of Chinese Great Wall-brand wine down the aisle, priced at around $2. In the depths of the bargain malls, the labels might be familiar but the prices bob up and down like a cork in a bathtub. China is the world’s workshop, where luxury goods and bargain basement knock-offs presumably share similar if not identical factories, where nothing need be imported and, away from official concessions, every price is open to negotiation. Designer goods sell for literally hundreds of times more than their identical bootlegged equivalents.
Values might be in flux, but the West still feels the need to be here. In Beijing, the West’s still totemic fashion brands—Hugo Boss, Armani, Dolce y Gabbana, Prada, etc.—line up in a display of retail might that would shame Bond Street or Fifth Avenue. In one analysis, China is the future, a billion eager consumers poised to continue the next stage of late capitalist development. One can only hope that the West’s late conversion to sustainable development is adopted in China with more enthusiasm, although nothing I saw in Beijing suggested this was the case.
I see several trolleys of scuffed yellow flightcases being wheeled through the lobby. The Xeroxes are here.Nevertheless, we must be present at the feast. From my room, late at night, I see the glowing glass box that forms the heart of America’s new embassy compound, a 10-acre complex completed just in time for the Olympics and the impending official visit by President Bush. A prime example of the Neocon-Brutalism that has become the signature style of U.S. diplomatic architecture, the construction of the $434 million complex is already the stuff of local legend. A team of imported American contractors apparently spent months in the city, laboring on a closed site to ensure that the compound’s thick walls didn’t succumb to the kind of electronic infestation that condemned the U.S. embassy in Moscow in the late ‘80s. The opening is timed to coincide with the opening of China’s new embassy in Washington, a neat little piece of international diary matching.
I’m not really waiting for George. If the rumors are correct, our paths won’t even cross at the airport. In truth, I’m slightly disappointed. Using the hotel’s unsecured wireless connection, I casually email my friend that “GWB” is due here the day after I leave, and the security is simultaneously fascinating and frustrating. He replies instantly:
This email has been scanned for security reasons and you will be arrested shortly. Thank you for your co-operation.I get jittery. This reply is frighteningly plausible. The previous night I watched a fawning documentary about Beijing’s new system of “unsupervised facial recognition technology,” a network of 100,000 CCTV cameras linked to a database capable of holding every face in the entire world. This technology, the American voiceover reassured us, was being used to protect the city from 21st-century threats. Surveillance is implicit, although the “great internet firewall” isn’t at obvious as one might have expected, with just the occasional page load error implying that someone, somewhere, is frantically blocking something.
Enjoy your stay.
The Authorities
Later that day, I overhear two tall American men in the lift muttering about a “culture clash.” “We’re getting somewhere,” one says. “They’ve requested photos and passport details for all the agents. Which is better than what we had yesterday.” His colleague nods. Another friend emails: “Did you know [the Americans] take their own photocopiers with them when they travel, whereas the British government borrows photocopiers when abroad? Fact.” Later I see several trolleys of scuffed yellow flightcases being wheeled through the lobby. The Xeroxes are here.
As the week progresses, more and more people arrive, with “U.S.A.” in bright red letters on white plastic cards attached to lanyards around their necks, not the distinctive yellow badges for Olympians and their support teams. The bag and body scanners in the lobby are certainly not just for show. Each and every time we come inside, we must put our belongings through the machine and get scanned once by machine and then by hand.
Amongst my largely European colleagues there is a growing sense of outrage at these impositions and inconveniences. On our final day, all cars are cleared away from the front of the hotel. To reach the taxi queue we must board a golf cart and get zipped around the rear of the building and back down the service road. Along the way we see a small truck unloading large sheets of what is presumably bullet-proof glass, overseen by a hulking man in a gray suit and sunglasses. A menacing black armored car has been parked alongside the lobby, next to a black minivan with a collection of foot-long spikes protruding out of its flanks. Both have a smart white “Beijing S.W.A.T” logo painted on the side and gun-toting sunglasses-wearing soldiers sitting inside, swigging mineral water in the heat.
On my final day, breakfast is a sea of buzz cuts and polo shirts. Some of these guys are so young, yet pumped up, strong-jawed and serious. As they eat their scrambled eggs and freshly cut fruit, the buzz cuts give off an air of studied, teeth-gritted determination. This is, after all, what they do, day in day out, in countries all around the world: sweeping, securing, photocopying, installing new glass and redirecting traffic, all before hunkering down to an international breakfast. The location is irrelevant, although presumably the machinations of China’s multi-leveled bureaucracy hasn’t made their jobs especially straightforward. The diplomatic advance party likes to deal in certainties, imposing a sense of order upon the unfamiliar. While the innate but inevitable complexity of the new China continues to twist itself into unfamiliar forms, right here everything appears serene. These guys are just marking time, waiting for George.
—Published August 12, 2008
