Beijing Being Lost in Development

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun

BEIJING — Walking in one of the many new retail and office complexes that have sprung up here recently, this longtime visitor to Asia developed a sense of déjà vu.

Taking in the coffeehouses, shops, and huge series of signs stretching far up the sides of the buildings in a development called Soho, which happened to be the distribution point for Olympic tickets bought by Americans, I got the feeling I had seen the place before. After a few minutes, I realized it felt almost exactly like Hong Kong.

The feeling, it turns out, was no accident. The complex is now managed by Hong Kong’s MTR Corp., which owns that city’s privatized subway system and popularized a cool instant-payment system, the Octopus Card.

Another sleek shopping center MTR is running in Beijing, the Ginza Mall, is explicitly designed to let customers “feel like shopping in Hong Kong,” an MTR spokeswoman, Eve Cheng, said. She was also blunt about the demographic the company’s seeking: “Ginza Mall is positioned as a stylish and young shopping center while we target at the young generation in Beijing.”

Half of Beijing’s most popular hangout for foreigners, a bar street called Sanlitun, was demolished in advance of the Olympics, ostensibly to cut down on prostitution and public debauchery. It was replaced with a boutique hotel and an outdoor mall that contains the Chinese capital’s first Apple store. The main developer: a division of the Swire Group, which owns Hong Kong’s flagship airline, Cathay Pacific.

The transition that has swept through Beijing since I was stationed here as a foreign correspondent five years ago is perhaps most evident on the other side of the city in an area called Xidan. On weekends, thousands bustle through the broad streets, dashing in and out of malls and Western outposts such as Starbucks, KFC, and Sizzler. Entire sides of buildings light up in rhythmic patterns. The store signs are billboards that are so bright it is like daytime at night. The youthful crowd is seemingly endless, rivaling even legendary throngs such as those outside Tokyo’s Shinjuku Station.

Less than a block away from this commotion, a shirtless, middle-age man sits in front of a small shop in an alley that is largely empty, save for the occasional passing bicycle and wayward taxi. The dimly lit alley, also called a hutong, is dotted with produce stands, rice wine shops, a local Communist Party outpost, and a few small restaurants. A Muslim man stands in a window turning kabobs over hot coals.

For decades, this was where life was lived in Beijing, especially in the summer. No air-conditioning. Hot, humid evenings spent outdoors, perhaps in one’s pajamas, gossiping with neighbors about the rumors not published in the state-run newspapers.

Foreigners tend to over-romanticize hutong life. The homes most Chinese lived in here in recent decades bear little resemblance to the ornately decorated courtyards foreigners and some well-heeled Chinese have now taken to restoring. It’s also worth remembering that one of the hutong’s essential features is the unkempt public toilet residents had to use because they lacked facilities in their own homes. The forced socialization also promoted neighborhood snooping and helped keep the Communist Party in control. That Chinese who can afford it are moving to apartments with private bathrooms in high-rise towers should come as no surprise.

Still, where the hutongs offered character and perhaps the unexpected public argument after a few too many cheap beers, the new Hong Kong-style developments suffer from a certain degree of sterility. The hawkers that the British colonialists long ago forced into overcrowded, fluorescent-lit food courts are also gone from the streets in Beijing. The move was part of the Olympic cleanup, but it may be permanent.

Searching for a taxi in the rain following the beach volleyball match yesterday, I stumbled across a woman squatting inside the back of a van. She was selling, to the security guards and other low-paid workers, lunch consisting of a big roll and pig’s knuckles ladled out of a large vat. She was also looking around furtively, as just this sort of street vending is now verboten here.

I trundled on but felt a strong desire to cheer this woman on in her small act of retail defiance. She was striking a blow for the old Beijing, one steaming bowl of pig’s knuckles at a time.


The New York Sun

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