Privatization and Potemkinization:
Composite Identity Spaces in Contemporary Beijing
The locus of our new reality and the cultural politics by which
it must be confronted is that of space.
Fredric Jameson[1]
When the Master went inside the Grand Temple, he asked questions
about everything. Someone remarked, "Who said that the son of the man from Tsou understood the rites? When he went inside the Grand
Temple, he asked questions about everything."
The Master, on hearing of this, said, "The asking of questions is in itself the
correct rite."
Confucius[2]
By the middle of January 2008, when the present article was drafted, the Games of the XXIX Olympiad – more familiarly known as the 'Beijing Olympics' – were scheduled to begin in less than seven months. A moment in human history, perhaps, but seven months is a long time in twenty-first-century Beijing. For several decades, the government and laborers of the People's Republic of China (hereafter PRC) – in collaboration with a variety of corporate 'sponsors,' local as well as multinational – have struggled to transform their nation's capital into an exemplum of civic planning, economic progress, and social stability. Beijing, of course, has been rebuilt many times; its ongoing metamorphoses have to some extent been anticipated in past developments.[3] Recently, however, the pace has quickened: what stands securely one evening may have been dismantled by the following morning. We know; we've seen it happen.
The ultimate success or failure of such rapid-fire (re)construction continues to be debated, but its scope cannot be denied. In preparing for China's 2001 Olympic bid, not for the Games themselves, Peter Hessler reported that China's Communist Party (hereafter CCP) – "which has a penchant for statistics," not all of them reliable – arranged for "142 bridges, 5,560 buildings, and 11,505 walls" within central Beijing to be painted or repainted before the judges' arrival. The paint was applied to some "26 million square meters" of surface spaces, an area larger than the state of New Jersey.[4] As Hessler puts it, nostalgia is "often just a year away" in "today's Beijing."[5]
What, however, of ongoing life in China's capital city? Of the everyday instead of the spectacular? Of 'average' apartment houses and shopping centers instead of attention-getting architectural events: the construction of Oriental Plaza, say, or the demolition of traditional hutong neighborhoods?[6] Drawing upon personal experiences as well as aesthetic, historical, and social phenomena associated with megacities everywhere, we have devoted a large part of the present article to identifying and describing the complex architectural, commercial, and (multi)cultural characteristics of a single Beijing neighborhood. What follows isn't definitive, nor can it be. Even while we lived and worked in China last year, several nearby buildings passed out of existence, only to be replaced with newer and ostensibly better structures. People came and went; we were two of them. Businesses opened or closed, flourished or failed. At best, our description of what we saw and learned represents an imperfect conflation of urban reportage and cultural criticism.
After compiling the information we collected last fall, we felt compelled to challenge two assumptions associated with the transformation of an entire pre-Olympic city into a 'Potemkin village.'[7] The first assumption is that this transformation is, in and of itself, extraordinary: a unique event masterminded by a Communist state which, "for better and for worse, knows exactly what it's doing."[8] We disagree. Instead, as Duanfang Lu contends, the truth is that Chinese "urban form, as it exists today, bears little resemblance to what Chinese socialist planners had in mind."[9] Or may still have.
The second assumption we felt compelled to challenge is that Beijing's brand of Potemkinization is primarily, perhaps even exclusively, the product of local (which is to say, political) forces. A desperate measure on the part of the CCP to present China
as a land of prosperity where everything is copathetic [sic], the goverment [sic] runs the show, and China marches forward to a glorious future. When, in all reality, China is impoverished, the land [is] ravaged by pollution, the government has enough [sic; 'to do'?] directing Beijing traffic, and the country is floundering around like a chronic drunk with a severely shrunken brain.[10]
We disagree. Not 'just' politics, but other factors – at one and the same time economic and cultural as well as political, radically capitalist as well as 'Communist' and traditionally 'Chinese' – have contributed to the city's emerging, extremely complex identity. Furthermore, much of what is happening in and to Beijing today is happening wherever conflicting interests are remaking megacities in their own images.
Make no mistake: we acknowledge that the PRC is an oligarchic dictatorship and that its government has inflicted agonies of various kinds upon millions of men and women. We are aware that human-rights violations and ecological disasters have plagued China since the CCP rose to power almost sixty years ago. We know that government flunkies censor internet sites and that police officers arrest and torture members of the Falun Gong. At the same time, we believe that blaming 'the Commies' for what's happening to Beijing overlooks or deliberately ignores the influence of commercial interests as well as multicultural realities. The political motivations that have spurred the construction of urban façades – 'real' as well as 'faked,' accidental as well as deliberate (and, in any case, illustrative of China's increasing international influence) – are inextricably bound up with global as well as local processes.
Ultimately, no single explanation exists for any city's inevitably variegated character. Anne-Marie Broudehoux, for example, has observed that "the metamorphosis of Beijing's material landscape, unprecedented in both pace and scale," is the result of "market mechanisms" that "cannot be isolated" from "global movements." Yet these mechanisms are also (multi)cultural, embodying as they do the "ambivalence of modernity" characterized by "the acceleration of time, the simultaneous shrinking of space," and "a sense of historical discontinuity."[11] In Beijing today, 'Westernization,' the presence of migrant workers, and issues of ethnicity and class collide as China grapples with its sudden wealth, its minority peoples, and new models of family life.
Not all of Beijing has been remade in equal modernist measure; there are plenty of 'traditional' treasures (and trash heaps) left if you know where to look for them. Nevertheless, as Allen Cunningham explains, urban space is everywhere becoming a "commodity working within the logic of the market economy."[12] And, as David Morley and Kevin Robins add: "a process of spatial restructuring and reconfiguration" lies at the heart of urban accumulation and social organization.[13] As it continues to be physically restructured and reconfigured, Beijing increasingly presents itself as a composite of commodified (multi)cultural identity spaces rather than a set-piece of Potemkinized political control.
'Our' Beijing Neighborhood: Location, Location, Location
Between 29 August and 19 December 2007, author Michael Saffle lived in Bejing at the Jasper Hotel (Su she gong yu[14]; hereafter 'Hotel'), itself the north wing of the International Culture Plaza (hereafter 'Plaza'), a high-rise residential and educational complex belonging to Capital Normal University. Saffle came to Beijing with the encouragement and financial support of two overseas exchange programs: CET (a profit-making business located in Washington, D.C., that, for several decades, has arranged study-abroad programs for American undergraduates) and SASASAAS (the South Atlantic States Association for South Asian and African Studies, a non-profit association of college and university area-studies programs in Virginia, the Carolinas, and so on). Consisting mostly of dorm rooms reserved for international students and university guests, the Hotel also contains a number of two-bedroom apartments. As partial payment from CET, Saffle and his wife Sue lived in one of these apartments on the building's sixteenth floor.[15] As a guest of CET, co-author Hon-Lun Yang spent four days during November 2007 in a dorm room on the ninth floor of the eastern bridge (there is also a western one) that connects the Hotel proper with the Plaza's south wing or "College of International Education" (Jiao xue luo). Previously, Yang had several times worked as a researcher in Beijing, and she maintains professional connections with Beijing's Central Conservatory of Music and the Beijing Symphony Orchestra.
The Plaza is located at the southeast corner of Capital Normal's 'international extension' campus (hereafter 'Campus'), which lies about a half-mile north of the university's principal plant. The campus (2 , 3) itself is located at the intersection of Beijing's North Third Ring Road (Beisanhuan beilu) to the east, and Beiwa East Street(Beiwadong jie) to the south. Zizhuyuan Road (Zizhuyuan lu) and Beiwa Road (Beiwa lu) are, respectively, the closest motorways of any importance north and west of the Campus. A canal (Yin shui qu) bisects the area enclosed by these motorways, but automobile traffic along its south side is scanty, and what begins as a road on its north side rapidly degenerates into an unpaved footpath. The entire area (hereafter 'Block') meets one definition of 'neighborhood': that of a "small sector of a larger urban area, provided with its own shops and other facilities."[16] See Diagram 1. The Block may not seem 'small' to pedestrians – Beiwa Road stretches for almost half a mile along its western edge – but it occupies only a tiny fraction of urban Beijing.
When Americans think of their own cities and towns, phrases such as 'neighborhood school,' 'neighborhood watch,' and 'neighborhood park' come to mind. Other than the Campus, however, the Block possesses no school. Nor, apparently, does it boast a citizens' group concerned with safety and crime. A few local apartment complexes are equipped with signs warning residents to be on the lookout for criminals; and almost every residential area is walled, with security officers manning entrance gates. Instead of providing protection for the Block as a whole, however, these walls and guards serve primarily to define the spaces they enclose and protect as mini-neighborhoods, some of which also contain their own "shops and other facilities." The Hotel, for example, possesses a Western-style convenience store, a stationer's shop, a snack bar, and a travel agency (on the second floor) as well as two restaurants (on the ground floor) and a gymnasium (in the basement). The Campus as a whole possesses other dormitory buildings as well as an indoor athletics arena, tennis courts, a library, and two canteens. Past generations of exchange students, so we were told, have spent weeks inside the Plaza or at least on Campus without so much as venturing outside.
If we, too, had never left the Campus's confines, the present article could not have been written. But we did leave – to purchase fresh fruit, new clothes, and books, and to see something of the city. Within the Block can be found almost all of life's necessities as well as a variety of luxuries: medical centers, grocery stores, three or four strip malls,[17] and a host of miscellaneous enterprises – including (but not limited to) cafés, a car wash, a florist's stall, liquor and cigarette vendors, and a sex shop that dispenses contraceptives as well as "synthetic apparatus" fangzhen qiqu). The Block also contains two public green spaces: a larger park outfitted with exercise equipment and located on the south side of the canal, and a 'pocket' park located at the intersections of Beiwa East Street and Beiwa Road. See Diagram 2.
Nor is this all: cross any of the motorways at the Block's periphery, and on the far sides are music stores, furniture stores, and large public parks as well as convenience stores, several good-sized supermarkets, a dental clinic, and more restaurants. A short distance to the south, for example, a narrow road known locally as 'the Alley' (Qiziancun lu) offers eateries specializing in porridge, noodles, seafood, and traditional Muslim dishes. On the far sides of both the Third Ring and Zizhuyuan Roads are Kentucky Fried Chicken outlets, one of them close to a branch of Bonjour, the international supermarket chain. Finally, a branch of the Bank of China, located a few steps from the Block's northwest corner, provided Automated Transfer Machines (ATMs) that accepted Western credit cards without 'eating' them and exchanged Western currencies for yuan–known officially as 'the people's money' (renminbi) and colloquially as 'bucks' (kwai). Other branches of the Bank were scattered throughout the city, but this one was the easiest for us to reach on foot. This last detail is a telling one, especially for North Americans: neither of us possessed or rented a car in Beijing. Except for long-distance bus and taxi trips, we walked everywhere we went.
Taking all of these factors into account, we adopted the Block and its immediate surroundings as 'our' Beijing neighborhood. We consider this significant for two reasons: because the Block exemplifies many aspects of Beijing's emerging complexity, and because neighborhoods – the "'global urban form' most characteristic of twentieth-century cities"[18] – are characteristic of emerging twenty-first-century megacities too.
Districts Real and Variously Represented:
Beijing's Variegated Civic Character
Beijing is no longer 'closed' to foreigners, either literally or metaphorically. Nor is it 'unknown.' Instead, some of its landmarks have become familiar throughout the world. Tiananmen Square is one of these iconic sites, the Temple of Heaven another. So too, in a sense, is the City's "archaic" symmetrical organizational scheme, which consists of a chessboard-like "urban road network" laid out according to rules established centuries before in the Kao Gong Ji, a classic Confucian text devoted to "ideal city form."[19] Proclaimed China's capital for the first time in 1403 C.E. by Zhu Di – the Ming Dynasty's Yongle Emperor, who was also responsible for building the Forbidden City – Beijing was surrounded for centuries by fortified walls that defined its borders.[20] As late as the 1950s, much of the city was still 'medieval,' but recent decades have seen most of its low-lying courtyard homes (sileyuan) replaced by offices and apartment houses outfitted with electric power and running water. Unquestionably, "the last decade … [is] the one that brought the greatest physical change" to Beijing.[21] By the time the Olympics begin, a new subway line will connect the inner city with its airport, which itself will boast the world's largest and most efficient air terminal. Already Beijing's CCTV Tower is one of the globe's most talked-about skyscrapers.[22] Like the Tower, other of Beijing's futuristic architectural wonders – including the egg-shaped National Theater and the 'birds-nest' Olympic Stadium – were designed by Western architects. Just as the CCP once used public buildings and spaces to embody 'Chinese' identity, so Beijing's ongoing surge of supermodern structures and spaces are accepted by many of its Chinese inhabitants as embodying an increasingly global identity.[23]
After 1949, when the victorious Communists named Beijing capital of the PRC, Mao Zhedong and his confederates tore down almost all of the city's walls, towers, and gates. By 1993 the walls had been almost entirely replaced with a quasi-circular, limited-access urban highway known as the Second Ring Road.[24] The larger Third Ring Road was completed in 1981, the even larger Fourth sometime in the early 2000s. As these words are written, portions of three additional concentric suburban beltways – the Fifth, Sixth, and Seventh Ring Roads – are under construction or being planned. Inevitably, as the city expands, its meaning shifts. 'Beijing' is itself becoming increasingly problematized as a geographic and cultural signifier: today, that name is invoked on behalf not only of the Old City (Beijing cheng: the area that lies today inside the Second Ring Road[25]), but of both an ever-expanding urban area (Cheng qu) and the enormous Municipality of Beijing, a city-state in itself and one of China's thirty-odd provinces and autonomous regions.
The Old City was long ago divided into four metropolitan districts, all of them today entirely artifactual rather than natural.[26] What we call 'New Beijing' is divided among four additional and much larger districts, all of them – as this is written – partially natural as well as artifactual. Of these eight districts, Haidian is the second largest; it covers an area of 431 square kilometers, considerably larger than the City of Los Angeles, and in 2000 it was said to have some 2,240,000 inhabitants.[27] 'Our' Block is part of this district. Only after Deng Xiaoping opened China in 1978 to international visitors and investment, however, did the district begin to fill with people and buildings. The two oldest apartment houses on the Block, located at Changyungong 9, opened in 1978. Both buildings are six stories high, as are the three buildings immediately east of them, which opened in 1984. Only after the mid-1980s did taller apartment houses become common.
Historically, Haidian's greatest distinction were the processions that shuttled back and forth across its fields between the Forbidden City and the district's premiere attraction, the Summer Palace.[28] A short distance north of the Block and east of the Third Ring Road stands the Temple of Longevity (Wanshou si), built in 1578 C.E. by a Ming Dynasty emperor as a birthday present for his mother. There, members of imperial entourages rested on these annual journeys. Several miles farther north, and on the north side of the Third Ring Road, stands the Big Bell Temple (Dazhong si) and Museum – which, like the rest of the district, lay only a few decades ago "among quiet farms."[29] More 'recent' tourist attractions include Beijing's Zoo, which opened in 1905, some two miles east of the Third Ring Road and close to the location of the vanished city gate that gave Zizhuyuan Road its name.[30]
Aside from these monuments and a few others, however, Haidian today possesses little 'antique' allure, and even the Temple of Longevity is occasionally ignored in guide books.[31] Altogether overlooked by many foreigners are most of Haidian's shopping centers as well as almost all of its remaining fields and farms.[32] What visitors mostly want to see lies elsewhere: Houhai and Beihai Parks, for example, are located in Beijing's Xicheng District, the night clubs and bars of Sanlitun (also known as the 'embassy area') in Chaoyang District, and 'Culture Street' (Liu Lichang) in Xuanwu District. If foreigners do think of Haidian, they probably think of its student hangouts. One recent and self-confessedly "Completely Oversimplified City Guide" depicts northern and (mostly) eastern 'Beijing' within the Fourth Ring Road as a commodified playground of high-rise living, big business, and "Ikea furniture." To the west, however, lies Haidian, where – as the Guide puts it – the "alcoholic heart" of Wudaoku holds sway.[33]
During the mid-1980s, the "Peking University" area Paul Theroux visited "lay at the edge of the city, in a park-like setting, with pines and little man-made hills and a lovely lake."[34] Haidian has long been known as Beijing's 'university district,' containing as it does the University of Peking, Tsinghua University, the People's University of China, Beijing Normal University, and several other institutions of higher learning, Capital Normal among them. Today, clusters of restaurants, apartment houses, and office complexes – on the Block as well as several miles to the north – have replaced almost all of the pastoral spaces Theroux admired. At the same time, Haidian has also become more prosperous. A number of electronics enterprises, including the Zhongguancun "high-technology" area launched in 1984, have proven themselves successful.[35] Yet not 'merely' successful: some of the district's electronics companies combine capitalism's enthusiasm for profiteering with "many of the features" associated by Corinna-Barbara Francis with pre-1990s Chinese collectivism.[36] In other words, large parts of Haidian have also been modernized, although by no means simply or altogether 'Westernized.'[37] The Block is Haidian in miniature: a comparatively well-to-do, comparatively obscure university district without much tourist appeal. Increasingly modernized and 'high-tech,' but "with Chinese characteristics" as well as distinctively foreign and perhaps increasingly diverse ethnic traits.[38]
'Our' Neighborhood Redux: Work Units, Microdistricts, Superblocks, and Storefront Enterprises
As of December 2007, the Block incorporated all or parts of three 'ideal,' quasi-experimental socialist communities: work units (danwei), microdistricts, and superblocks. It also contained a great many 'Chinese' and 'Western' commercial ventures. Because of these remnants and ventures, the Block became for us a living museum of China's recent 'past' as well as a constantly evolving 'present' neighborhood to live in.
Work units are self-contained communities of men and women dedicated for the most part to single forms of production: bookbinding perhaps, or medical research, or manufacturing machine tools. The Chinese name for work units is 'danwei' – and, in "common parlance" (as Xiaobo Lü and Elizabeth Perry explain), that name also refers to such "other forms" of manufacture as "retail shops, hospitals, and schools."[39] The importance of China's danwei, especially prior to the early 1990s, lay primarily in each unit's "unique combination of social, political, and economic" elements, with each functioning "much like an 'urban village'."[40] In certain respects, individual units resembled early twentieth-century Appalachian coal-mining towns. Like the companies that ran those towns, unit leaders assigned living quarters, parceled out food, and saw to it that medical care, schooling, and other social services were provided to their subordinates. Once people were born, married, grew old, and died within the danwei that defined much of their lives. Recently, however, many units have either been disbanded or re-organized. Today, far fewer urban Chinese men and women live either (literally) 'in' their units or (figuratively) 'for' them.
Two fragments – or perhaps all – of the work unit known as the Foreign Press Paper Company stand on the southern side of Bewa East Street, opposite the Campus: a 'dormitory' (Wai wen chu ban she zhi zhang gonsi su she) built in 1973 and, next door, a newer administrative building. After the CCP began selling off most of Beijing's 'public' housing to individual and corporate purchasers, the dormitory became a 'private' apartment building. We spoke with one resident, who knew little about the Paper Company; she had sublet her flat only a year ago and from a previous tenant. Another work unit, the Beijing Water Works (Beijing zi lai zhui ji tuan), occupies a walled compound of its own at Beiwa Road 22. Organized in 1999, the Water Works looks more or less 'complete.' Last fall, however, it also looked deserted, and piles of rubbish near its gate made it look like a slum. Finally, the Campus itself is or was a work unit. Like other units, "isolated" Chinese university campuses too were run as "relatively closed systems, dependent upon higher levels [of administrative responsibility] for the source of their power and authority over members."[41] Today, the Campus is supervised by Capital Normal University (itself supervised by CCP cadres), but other characteristic aspects of danwei life have largely disappeared. Certainly the intrusion of 'foreign elements' in the form of CET faculty, staff, and students contradicts Mao's dream of a perfectly organized 'Chinese' urban proletariat beholden to Communist Party 'authorities.'
The hospital in the neighborhood – officially entitled the "Hospital Affiliated with the Aviation Research Center" (Hangkong yixue yanjiusuo fushu yiyuan), which opened in 1957 near the north end of Beiwa Road – exemplifies a second (and, in this case, an architectural as well as a productive) socialist experiment: the microdistrict. Invented in 1935 in conjunction with Stalin's first Moscow Plan, each Soviet microdistrict (mikrorayon in Russian) was at once a work unit and a planned community, with factories, lodgings, and markets characteristically clustered around a common recreational area. (The Water Works boasts a decorative fountain as its centerpiece.) Unlike Chinese work units, however, Russian microdistricts operated as clustered 'parts' of later industrial and manufacturing projects. The Hospital's grounds incorporate most of these characteristics, which 1950s China borrowed from its Soviet allies. Seen from the street, dormitories flank an entrance gate. Beyond this, a large open area once served as a playground or park. Scattered throughout the rest of the district are clinics and operating theaters, maintenance facilities, and a canteen.[42] The complex, including its colorful gate, is almost entirely hidden from view behind trees, sidewalks, a service road, and walls lining Beiwa Road. Not long before our arrival in Beijing, however, the northern edge of the hospital's grounds became the site of a new, high-rise apartment building. The bright color and luxurious details of this building's façade clashed violently last fall with the Hospital's stark concrete dormitories.
After the PRC broke with the Soviet Union in the early 1960s, Chinese urban planners abandoned microdistricts in favor of other schemes. After the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution ended in the later 1970s, they turned increasingly to 'superblocks.' Like America's 'bedroom communities,' superblocks are built to house, not to employ or entertain. Unlike the single-family tract homes of post-World War II America's suburbs, however, superblocks are composed entirely or almost entirely of clustered high-rise apartment buildings. Much of contemporary Beijing, including the Block, consists of superblocks. The six apartment buildings at Changyungong 1-6, north of the canal on the western side of the Third Ring Road, are a case in point. Built in 1992, most of this complex is partially hidden from Third Ring Road traffic 'behind' the cloverleaf interchange at its intersection with Zizhuyuan Road. ('Changyungong' refers to a service road that runs along the southern side of this interchange.) Unlike some superblocks, this complex is 'accompanied' by a cluster of shops outfitted with its own parking lot. Larger and newer superblock clusters lie north and west of the Block, at least one of which incorporates a playground and other athletic facilities. Still another superblock was recently erected south of the canal on Beiwa Road; its 'walls' include rows of trees and bushes.
Whether deliberately or accidentally, many Beijing superblocks approximate aspects of the Radiant Cities proposed by Le Corbusier during the 1930s. Nature may not be 'omni-present' within their precincts, but green space is a "distinguishing and perennial feature" of many complexes.[43] So is the almost complete absence of internal automobile traffic, which Corbu considered "a cancer."[44] Too large for pedestrians, 1970s and 1980s Beijing was mostly about bicycles and buses. Small wonder that many older superblocks lack through roads. Today, however, motorized traffic of every kind has become an omnipresent urban malady in Beijing, and many of the 'security officers' who watch over individual residences and offices – the Campus is a case in point – spend much of their time collecting fees from motorists desperate to park their vehicles wherever possible. Only outside the Fourth Ring Road do gated communities – China's newest (sub)urban experiment – combine 'Westernized' through roads and plenty of parking with the walls and guards that turn them into "fortified" 'Chinese' residential enclosures.[45]
Aside from work-unit structures and apartment buildings, the Block is almost entirely taken up by commercial structures. Smaller shops line much of its northern, western, and southwestern edges, while larger businesses line its eastern edge. Some Block businesses are entirely 'local': what Americans would call 'mom-and-pop stores.' The beauty salons on Beiwa and Zizhuyuan Roads are cases in point. As are a few news and candy kiosks on the Third Ring Road. Other businesses are franchise outlets. The 'porridge restaurant' (Hong zhuang yuan zho pu) at the mouth of the Alley is but one example of a Chinese-originated and –organized corporate chain; the carwash on Beiwa Road another. The China Petroleum gas station (Zhongguo shiyou), also located on the Third Ring Road, is run by a larger corporation. Still other ventures are multinational. Consider the LensCrafters outlet on Zizhuyuan Road a little to the northwest of the Block. Or the Shangri-La Hotel, which is owned by SynXis, a global firm headquartered in Southlake, Texas. Almost all of these enterprises are recent undertakings. The porridge restaurant, for example, opened in 2006, although the building it occupies was constructed in 1984.
Finally, street vendors can be found at least occasionally on almost every corner and pedestrian overpass. The products they sell – baked sweet potatoes, skewers of grilled meats, trinkets, children's clothing, and the like – make life possible, or at least much more affordable, for migrant workers to whom cost is all-important. Last fall a pancake covered with egg and filled with rice and vegetables cost as little as 1.5 yuan on Beiwa Road: just over 14 American cents. By comparison, a single buffet lunch at the Shangri-La cost upwards of 250 yuan, or US$35.50.
The Block thus contains six more or less distinctive kinds of work units, communities, and businesses: 1) the Paper Company and Water Works, small-scale units located on the Block's western and southern edges; 2) the Campus, a large-scale unit of a different kind occupying the Block's southeastern corner; 3) the Hospital, a microdistrict located on the Block's western edge; 4) several apartment complexes, some of them superblocks, located on or close to the Block's northern and eastern edges; 5) a miscellany of smaller shops, offices, and other commercial undertakings – including street vendors –located for the most part on or close to Beiwa Road; and 6) the hotels, gasoline station, and large office complexes located along the Block's eastern edge on the Third Ring Road. It is these last two commercial categories, together with the Third Ring Road itself, that exemplify the increasing privatization (and Potemkinization) of contemporary Beijing.
On a Clear Day You Can See Progress Forever … At Least in Some Directions
To gaze down from a pedestrian overpass upon the Third Ring Road is to behold one of Beijing's most important venues of multinational commodification and car-enculturation. Several years ago a Chinese artist devoted an ironic video installation to this enormous urban freeway, but there is nothing amusing about its size, scope, and function as an economic and social force. Because of the path it follows, the Second Ring Road was 'dated' even before it was finished: a memorial to vanished walls as well as valiant progress. The Third Ring Road, however, is altogether new – in the vistas it offers motorists as well as in terms of its overall design, decoration, and modernizing impact. Increasingly, directions within Beijing are given with reference to the Road's innumerable bus stops, shopping venues, and 'bridges' (or overpasses). The Old City's iconic tourist sites, the Olympic stadia, and the newest skyscrapers (including the CCTV Tower) may have attracted more attention, but the Third Ring Road gets people to and from most of these venues.
From the north side of Zizhuyuan Road at the north end of the Block to the area immediately south of its southern edge, the western side of the Third Ring Road contains just seven significant individual or clustered structures: the Shangri-La Hotel, the 1992 Changyungong apartment complex (described above), the Jin Long Tan (or "Golden Dragon Pool") Hotel and China Petroleum station, the Campus, the International Finance and Economy Center (Guoji caijing zhongxin; hereafter "IFEC"), and the China Foreign Language Mansion (Zhongguo waiwen dasha; hereafter "Mansion"). Again, see Diagram 2. If anything built in Beijing prior to 1987 is 'old,' and anything built between 1988-1997 'middle-aged,' six of these seven individual or clustered structures are 'young' or 'very young.' The gas station, the oldest of them, opened in 1998 but was later remodeled. The Plaza, containing the Hotel in which we lived, opened in 2004. The Mansion (or at least the Gome outlet on its ground floor) opened on 30 April 2006. The four-star Jin Long Tan opened on 1 February 2007, as did the Valley Wing of the Shangri-La. (The Garden Wing, another part of this hotel, opened in 1987 and stands a bit closer to the Third Ring Road than its companion.) As of December 2007, the IFEC remained unfinished.
By the same standards, the rest of the Block is mostly middle-aged or old: the Hospital and Paper Company dormitory (very old), almost all of the restaurants and shops at its northern end (old or middle-aged), other parts of the Campus (middle-aged), and some apartment buildings (middle-aged or old).[46] On the other hand, more than a few businesses and several apartment buildings, all of them located toward the southern end of Beiwa Road, are young. Except for the IFEC and, possibly, for the new high-rise on the Hospital grounds, only one building – a shop or restaurant on Zizhuyuan Road (even the workers we spoke with weren't certain what they were remodeling) – was under construction at the end of last year. A foyer to the "Changfeng Kangchang Realty" office, built in traditional style, was remodeled during September and October 2007, and a small restaurant near the western end of Beiwa East Street opened at the beginning of December. The foyer became part of a strip-mall that lines the northeastern side of a narrow diagonal through-road (Beiwa xili) near the Block's southwestern edge. Appearances are often deceiving in Beijing, and a few of the Block's more youthful enterprises look older than they are. On the other hand, almost everything seems brand-new when compared with: 1) a few workers' shanties situated out of sight, near the middle of the footpath on the north side of the canal; 2) a shoddy, multistory apartment building immediately north of the shanties; and 3) small pockets of motel-like lodgings, some 'traditional' in style and all of indeterminate age at the northern end of the Block. These structures, known collectively as "urban corners," are considered eyesores by CCP officials–especially in light of the slogan "New Beijing, Great Olympics" (Xin Beijing, Xin Aoyun) – because they exemplify sub-standard living conditions. Filthy and unsafe, these hovels lack plumbing; most of them were built for low-income migrant workers.[47] Almost all of these 'corners' have been deliberately hidden from view.
Unlike Beiwa and Zizhuyuan Roads, both of which are interrupted by pedestrian crosswalks and traffic lights, the Third Ring Road is 'wide open,' built for efficiency and ease. A divided highway, it boasts three and even four lanes running in each direction. Entrance and exit ramps turn it and Beijing's other ring roads into freeways, unimpeded by stop lights or enforced speed limits.[48] 'Frontage roads' provide room for bicycle traffic as well as places where buses and taxis can pick up or drop off passengers. All these factors, combined with the glamour of automobile ownership, constitute an open invitation to 'drive Beijing': frequently, farther, and – if at all possible – faster. Small wonder that, by the end of last year, the city's citizens were purchasing some 40,000 'new' vehicles a month,[49] without regard for road-construction programs that, a decade ago, had already fallen behind "the demands of development."[50]
In spite of their planners' intentions, however, Beijing's inner ring roads are becoming increasingly unpleasant places to drive. City planning, or lack of same, has made things worse.[51] Enormous areas of the city – many of them, like the Block, defined on one side or another by comparatively narrow motorways (like Beiwa East Street) and penetrated by none – possess little on-road parking. Garages are few and far between. So are gas stations; in this respect the Block is exceptional. Twenty years ago, Haidian was farmland punctuated by a few campuses and hamlets. A cyclist's paradise. Today, dozens of its square miles are turning into something like Southern California: a world where motorized transport rules. No wonder traffic jams, gridlocks, and pileups are becoming daily, even hourly events. On a Sunday afternoon in October 2007, the Saffles rode the No. 300 bus around the Third Ring from 'end' to 'end.' The journey took over three hours, only nine minutes of which were spent changing vehicles at the Road's southeastern 'corner.' As Timothy Beatley and Kristy Manning put it, China "appears to have embraced the principles of the American car culture."[52] And not necessarily the best of those principles either.
Inevitably, urban congestion contributes to, as well as results from, the commodification of vision associated with automobiles. As Cunningham puts it, cities everywhere are being "sliced into linear spaces for the car driver whose experience ... is limited in the interests of speed, legibility and convenience." It is the eyes of these drivers that, in Beijing, are becoming "the sole arbiter[s] of the urban environment." Not through "spatial abstractions,"[53] though (as Cunningham would have it), but as one aspect of an increasingly commodified landscape. In order to locate many addresses on Beiwa Road, one needs to drive slowly. Or, better, walk. Shops on such roads are small and signage intricate, occasionally interesting in and of itself. One Block restaurant, for example, employs carefully painted, American-style 'graffiti' to attract clients. But one can locate businesses more rapidly on the Third Ring Road (if traffic permits) because its signage is simple, even simple-minded. It isn't only that the CCP decides which businesses to locate themselves there (or anywhere else, for that matter). It's also that only successful businesses – mostly large ones – can secure enough frontage on such roads to appeal to and attract 'car custom.' Nobody but us walked to the Shangri-La, whose logo is visible for half a mile in several directions. They drove, or took taxis.
Today, as Jean Baudrillard theorized more than twenty years ago, the postmodern individual – 'Chinese,' we would think, as well as 'Western' – has in some circumstances become, or is becoming, "a pure screen, a switching centre for all the networks of influence." When he wrote those words, Baudrillard was thinking of television, but aspects of his argument also apply to Beijing's emerging car culture. Transport can itself Potemkinize external reality, covering up (which is to say, bypassing) facts that slower and more careful examination may reveal. Trapped in a taxi gazing out upon a series of commercialized 'opportunities,' many of them indistinguishable from offerings in other megacities, postmodern men and women experience the "absolute proximity" of commerce as well as a feeling of "no defense, no retreat."[54] We know that feeling. Beijing is not Las Vegas, where – as Robert Venturi and his associates pointed out decades ago – parking lots provided automobiles with almost instant access during the 1960s and early 1970s to the glories contained within the casinos and other decorated sheds they fronted.[55] Like 1970s Las Vegas, however, Beijing's ring roads are rapidly being transformed into commercial 'surfaces' that cannot be penetrated immediately or easily, and (for 'Westernized' consumers) don't need to be. These surfaces, together with the switching centers perceiving them, sometimes seem to be all there is in Beijing. Especially at rush hour.
Dancing Cheek to Cheek:
Potemkinization and Privatization in New Beijing
The Chinese, it seems, have always been fond of walls, and walls are built to conceal as well as protect. The Campus is walled, and so are nearby apartment complexes and office buildings. Elsewhere, too, the Block is interpenetrated by walls: around parks, in front of shops, separating pedestrians from traffic and patients from Hospital doctors. The Third Ring Road is itself a wall paralleled by still other walls: sidewalks, hedgerows, trees. So is Beiwa Road; so, to a lesser extent, is peaceful Beiwa East Street. The center of the Block seems impenetrable to drivers: on the north side of the canal there's simply no way in, except on foot – and, if in, nowhere to park. All this may seem threatening, especially to visitors. It may even be threatening. As Chinese film director Jiang Wen explains, walls need guards, and guards inevitably turn into oppressors. "It doesn't have anything to do with the person; it's the system, the environment."[56]
But what is 'the system'? For decades the CCP has oppressed the nation's minority peoples. Unlike the Campus's glossy gates, the Muslim canteen is located in back of a building far from any motorway. Potemkinization? Perhaps. The Muslims are kept safely out of sight, at least while they're eating. On the other hand, Capital Normal's Central Asian students – privileged in large part because they are students – do have a canteen of their own. Cheating abounds in China. Consider the stickers that continually (re)appear on sidewalks and fence posts close to the Campus. Some of these stickers advertise college diplomas 'for sale.' Others offer forged identity cards, receipts (for expense-account padding), and certificates 'proving' hospitalization. Government employees regularly scrape, scrub, or burn off the stickers they discover. Potemkinization? Or protection against confidence tricksters? Sometimes a little interference does a lot of good. Last August there were no protective fences on Beiwa Road to discourage people from jaywalking across that overcrowded street. They went up the following month. A year ago none of the benches that now make the same street a more pleasant place to visit had been installed. All these things may have been done to 'look good' rather than 'work well,' but they also work. After a point it becomes impossible to 'improve' a city without improving life for its inhabitants.
Of course Beijing is about politics. Every city is. It's also about economics in one way or another. An increasing number of successful corporations in China are 'Chinese' rather than 'multinational' in origin and operation. Most of these enterprises cater primarily or even entirely to 'local' rather than 'global' customers. Pretty buildings, of course, are preferred by customers of almost every kind, and more customers means more income. In this way successful businesses themselves increasingly Potemkinize Beijing, often along different cultural lines. Critics sometimes assume that only 'Western' façades can disguise 'the truth' behind contemporary China. But 'Chinese' façades also 'disguise' even as they provide their customers with ethnic spaces of identity all their own. The Third Ring Road is one example of a wall that commerce is building, but so is much of Beiwa Road. The surfaces are quite different. And whatever lies beneath those surfaces – whether 'Chinese' or 'Western' – is hidden from view.
Yet, even as they sometimes hide truths from passers-by, Beijing's increasing commodification sometimes reveals realities of its own. One of which is that people – not just tourists, or traders, but customers (and this includes 'Chinese' customers, which includes members of China's fifty-six officially recognized minority groups) – spend more and more money in multinational hotels, eat multinational food, and drive around town – especially on major arteries like the Third Ring Road – in foreign vehicles. The multicultural possibilities are becoming mind-boggling. The point, though, is: it's for sale. Not: where it's made or who buys it. Gome may be headquartered in Hong Kong and Ikea (on the other side of the city) in Stockholm, but electronics and furniture are sold everywhere. Wu-Mart which recently acquired several other Chinese supermarket chains, is headquartered in Beijing. But convenience stores are everywhere. A large sign on the north side of Zizhuyuan Road, across the street from the Block, advertises Motorola, which boasts corporate offices in Guadalajara, Mexico, as well as Jordan, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Lebanon, Oman, Pakistan, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Yemen, and Schaumburg, Illinois.[57] You can purchase Motorola products in Berlin. Or Bangkok. Or Boston. In Beijing, however, the establishment of that firm coincided with the emergence and development of both the Haidian District and the Third Ring Road. In March 1992, eight years after Motorola executives decided to explore marketing possibilities in the PRC, the corporation was given permission to open an office on its present site; the building on Zizhuyuan Road opened a few years later.[58]
Like merchants everywhere, Chinese businessmen and -women understand "that the value of a tourist lies in his attention-span…. The tourist visits, sees the sights, and when they've all been seen it's time to go." Only people like us, the non-sightseers, linger, mostly ignore the museums (at least the official ones), "and ask awkward questions."[59] While checking out "a best-selling high-rise luxury" Chinese condominium complex, journalist Robert Hsu discovered that, once past the lobby, everything turned out to be "cheap imitations of old buildings in Paris."[60] On the other hand, not everything in Beijing is shoddy, pointless, or corrupt. Hotels increasingly depend upon return customers, local businesses on their reputations for decent treatment and reliable service. In these last senses it isn't only the Shangri-La and Campus that 'work.' So do the Alley restaurants. So did the excellent watch-repair stand in the foyer of the Hypermarket south of the Block on Beiwa Road. And the tiny Photo Shop (Beida zhao xiang) at the western end of Beiwa East Street that, time after time last fall, delivered stacks of photocopies, correctly collated and numbered, for remarkably low prices.
Of course Beijing has problems. In her best-selling memoir Foreign Babes in Beijing, Rachel DeWoskin claims she "never met anyone, Beijinger or not, who did not seem like an outsider."[61] But alienation is part and parcel of (post)modern life. In China, this phenomenon is being exacerbated by the rapid-fire replacement of extended families with nuclear families. As one of the CCP's own publications explains, because Chinese "households containing aged persons" are being "emptied," whether "in villages or in cities," the children those households nurtured increasingly
prefer to live separately as much as possible. Even for the children, their time of living in families is getting shorter due to study or work…. [T]raditional blood-tied families are changing into modern marriage-tied families. The proportion of the parent-offspring relationship is being reduced, whereas the husband-wife relationship is becoming the only lasting tie in the family relationships.[62]
But this problem isn't just China's It's ours too, and has been for decades. And, at its worst, alienation in contemporary China is quintessentially economic as well as political. We refer especially to migrant workers and their many problems.
The number of 'outsiders' – including members of minority groups, but mostly Han Chinese – living illegally and making money in Beijing is unknown. Word-of-mouth estimates run as high as 5,000,000 men and women. Some of them earn high salaries, but most outsiders are migrant workers: refugees from countryside poverty who, in Beijing, are also poorly paid (when they're paid at all). Crowded into makeshift housing, many of them are hidden much of the time by corporation directives as well as political decrees.
Our most significant encounter with these workers came in early November. One afternoon, the foyer of the IFEC was torn down, together with part of a nearby fence. For a few hours the jerry-built workers' housing on the IFEC lot was clearly visible to passers-by. At least one journalist took a photograph, only to be hassled by foremen. The following morning a new fence had gone up, and within a few days the housing had itself been demolished. (In other parts of the city, as we mention above, we've seen similar housing, always hidden from view and inaccessible to the general public. Remnants of worker housing from the late 1970s and early 1980s located at the north end of the Block are (or were), as one resident told us, "still waiting to be torn down.") After the IFEC site had been carefully tidied up, a new fence was erected and decorated with an artist's rendition of what the structure will look like once it is or has been completed sometime in 2008. We doubt that many of the workers who helped build it will be able to shop there.
L'envoi: A Walk Around the Block
A stroll westward on Beiwa East Street from the gates of the Campus past the Dong Ting Liu Ye 'Hotel' – actually a restaurant with a karaoke bar attached – to the stone marker identifying 1995 as the date two apartment houses were built: this takes 450 steps. Turn right at the corner and walk past the Wu-mart shopping complex: another 100 steps, more or less. Next comes Beiwa Road, the Water Works with its new concrete wall, more apartment houses, and the west end of the canal: another 300 steps. Past the canal begins the Hospital, with its large central gate; almost 300 steps more. Plus 125 steps in front of some of the Block's oldest stores at the corner of Beiwa and Zizhuyuan Roads. It takes almost 500 steps before most of the north end of the Block (including the sex shop mentioned above) is 'over,' and the Third Ring Road begins. Turn south and there are more apartment buildings – another 200 steps – before the canal reappears at the Block's eastern edge. Then the Jin Long Tan Hotel, the gas station, and the eastern edge of the Campus wall (500 steps more). Finally, it's around the corner and back to the gate from which we left (a final 150 steps). Include an additional 200 steps for crossing drive-ways and both ends of the canal (the last some 80 steps each), and you have a total of 2745 steps: approximately 1.3 miles at 2.5 feet / step. The stroll takes about half an hour at a comfortable pace.
What one sees, however, is more than what one passes or counts off. DeWoskin reports that, by "the end of the 1990s," the city she knew had become
modern enough to be unrecognizable as the place I moved to in 1994. There were no more donkey carts. Street kiosks made way for sleek boutiques and cafes, where Chinese and foreigners lounged together, drinking lattes and Italian sodas. The city flaunted brilliant sushi, served in loftlike raw bars with full-wall water fountains and names for Beijing's specialty rolls: 911 dynamite, Beijing duck and roll, sweet pea. Latino's Club offered salsa lessons and The Big Easy served up fried chicken with New Orleans Jazz [sic] belted out by a St. Louis singer named Jackie…. [The city] had everything from sprawling suburbs and Montessori schools to summer raves on the Great Wall, complete with tiki torches, neon jewelry, and designer drugs.[63]
All this may have been true 'back then' for DeWoskin and the expats she spent most of her time with. But it wasn't true last fall on the Block. We found no stylish sushi or tempura for sale there, not even in the Hotel's quasi-Japanese café, and the only nightclubs we saw were a couple of KTV places near the west end of Beiwa East Street. The fried chicken came from KFC outlets, and donkey carts could still be seen on the west side of Beiwa Road. (Unfortunately, we never had our cameras with us on the days the carts appeared. More often, workers gathered there to talk.) After dark the kiosks of street venders seemed to be everywhere, especially just outside the Campus's gate.
What we did see were poor people and rich, young and old, foreign and domestic. We saw squalid shops and tended plots of grass and – just visible from the roads at each end of the canal – a concrete wall covered with graffiti. Not political (that wouldn't be tolerated), but not exactly patriotic either. We saw monuments to international enterprise and homes without reliable electricity or hot water. Signs mostly in Chinese, but also in English – and, occasionally, in Arabic or Korean or Japanese. The kinds of things that might show up in pretty much any big city anywhere in the world. Even urban China's exploitation of its rural inhabitants is 'typical' of that nation's increasingly global economic orientation, as well as of its political problems. As Jordi Borja and collaborators have it, the "most significant thing" about megacities everywhere "is that they are externally connected to global networks yet also internally disconnected from those sectors of their local populations that are regarded as unnecessary or as forces for social disturbance."[64]
Instead of investigating this composite of variously conceived and commodified identity spaces, many Western commentators fall back on predetermined answers, "polarized" tales that "demonize China" as a regime while romanticizing the Chinese people. For decades, as Timothy Weston and Lionel Jensen have observed, "China [has been seen] either … as a threat to U.S. security or as a candidate for 'Americanization.'" Which means: for economic exploitation by multinational corporations rather than local businesspeople. These tales, as Weston and Jensen point out, may have "begun as fantasy, but they have now embedded themselves in U.S. culture."[65] Furthermore, according to Jeffrey Wasserstrom, "pundits, journalists, policy makers, the creators of works of popular culture, and even scholars … can end up working together (albeit in most cases unconsciously) not just to create but also to bolster the hold of illusory utopian or dystopian visions" like those Weston and Jensen describe.[66] The truth is rather different: Beijing is as good as it looks. It's also much worse. Certainly it's far more complex than many foreigners realize. It is the capital of a country rapidly "transforming itself and being transformed," often in altogether novel ways.[67]
Richard Slotkin explained several decades ago that Americans tend to associate progress "with perpetual social mobility (both horizontal and vertical) and with the continued expansion of … power into new fields or new levels of exploitation."[68] In other words, they prefer dynamic capitalism to static authority. Increasingly this has become true for 'Westerners' everywhere: not only in Europe, North America, and Oceania, but in Japan, Korea, and Singapore. What happens, though, when the statists themselves become capitalists? When 'communists' buy into the profits (and problems) associated with privatization? All too often, Westerners look for straightforward, black/white answers to questions like these. "Obviously," they tend to reply, "China's oppressive rulers were (or are) one thing" – i.e. 'Commies' – "and now China's oppressed citizens are trying to become something else" – i.e. rich. If this were the simple and entire truth, governments everywhere should already have abolished Potemkinization in favor of 'open' markets and fiscal 'accountability.' Because that's what capitalism is all about. But wait a minute! Have Western governments and corporations abandoned their own forms of Potemkinization? Of course not. Multinational economic forces, not to mention other contemporary manifestations of 'free' enterprise, continue to hide behind walls of deniability and privilege.
This doesn't mean that commerce is synonymous with coercion and deceit. What it does mean is that skim milk often masquerades as cream. Because everyone, it seems, has something to hide. Since the present article was drafted, China's leaders have struggled to cover up Tibetan unrest and contain criticism in the aftermath of the Chengdu earthquakes. Just as America's leaders continue to cover up the real reasons behind the invasion of Iraq and contain criticism in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Perhaps, as Simon Winchester recently suggested, what China's present leadership really wants is simply to be left alone. As long as that happens, Winchester quipped, Chinese entrepreneurs may be able to 'get away with anything.'[69]
A walk around 'our' Block provides ample evidence for Potemkinization of several kinds, political as well as economic and cultural. Furthermore, certain of the Block's aspects support the very myths that Jensen, Slotkin, Wasserstrom, Weston, and Winchester have attempted to unpack. China's rulers can indeed be big and bad, the Chinese themselves meek and good. Certainly politicians of every stripe – be they members of the CCP or the Republican Party – continue, throughout the world, to pursue new fields and levels of exploitation. It's a challenging, highly composite place, the Block. And far from an altogether happy one. So is Beijing. Where walls hide the truth most effectively, though, is wherever we fail to look behind them. Whenever we refuse to ask questions.[70]