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Games eroding Beijing's historic face
Rosie DiManno
COLUMNIST
BEIJING–To glimpse old Beijing is to peek through a knothole or push back green plastic netting or clamber over brick walls.
This is the new Forbidden City, sheathed: What Olympic organizers and government officials don't want visitors to see, beneath the glossy patina of a modernized metropolis.
Decrepit neighbourhoods semi-demolished, heaps of rubble, rats scuttling through garbage, shattered bits of roof tiling and red wooden lintels, scavengers squatting in abandoned shacks, cooking dinner over paraffin stoves.
It's where the poor people lived – slums that possess charm only to the squinting Western eye.
It's where some of the poor people have hung on, not out of sentimental attachment to their surroundings – the historically treasured (to preservationists) hutongs, twisting alleyways only a couple of metres wide – but with a shrewd eye on property values, dissatisfied with the compensation offered by government and developers.
Many, living still among the ruins, claim they can't afford to move, not on the paltry amounts they would receive, sufficient only for a tiny highrise flat on the outskirts of the city.
So they have refused to leave, an act of unprecedented defiance in this Communist country, despite the bulldozers that descend at dawn, often scooping up the house on either side.
There is nothing left, for instance, on either side of the hovel where two families have stubbornly held their ground despite massive pressure to relocate, only 20 metres away from the Olympic cycling course.
The families were sitting down for lunch yesterday, gathered around a rickety outdoor table just beyond a freshly planted border of topiary — bushes sculpted to resemble bicycle wheels. Green netting has been laid over piles of old brick, the remnants of crushed houses, creating a trompe l'oeil effect, the fakery blending into an expanse of newly sodded grass on the verge of the avenue.
"They wanted more green space,'' says a 53-year-old man, who did not want his name used, fearful of reprisal for speaking to a Western reporter. "So they destroyed all my neighbours' homes.''
Originally, there were 1,300 families in this sector, almost smack next door to the Temple of Heaven. Now, only a few remain, the once lively warren of teahouses and modest businesses shuttered, the hutongs eerily quiet.
"My family has lived here for more than a hundred years, over three generations,'' the man continues. "We are not squatters. We pay 30 yuan ($4.56) a month in rent. The government said they'd pay us 30 yuan a month to move. But the cheapest housing I could find anywhere else was 60 yuan a month.''
He served eight years in the army before poor health forced him to resign, subsists now on a meagre income from selling canvas shoes and other cheap articles.
"We all are proud that the Games have come to China. But they have made life even more difficult for many of us. To me, it feels like the government is robbing us of the little we have.''
Residents here exist as if in a post-apocalyptic landscape, most expecting they will be forcibly evacuated once the world looks away from Beijing, and the capital can get on with reinventing itself.
What's surprising is that so many have resisted this long, the government not dragging property dissidents away earlier, before foreign media scrutiny intensified. Instead, authorities have attempted – just in recent weeks – to camouflage the problem, erecting a Great Wall of Beijing along the city's central north-south axis.
Kilometres of bright screens – Olympic-theme decorated – have gone up, blocking what the government considers eyesore views of Beijing's true self, or at least a truth that stubbornly clings to the underbelly of a mighty city in transformation, $40 billion the tab for massive redevelopment keyed to the Games. Little can be seen of the ancient, dilapidated courtyard houses that sit just beyond, barnacled over the decades with add-on sheds and kitchens and bathrooms, so that some warrens are too densely clustered for the outsider to navigate.
Along some stretches, fencing and screens were deemed not view-obstructing enough.
On one block, in Chongwen District, a three-metre-high brick wall suddenly went up on July 17, with no more warning that a piece of paper affixed to some front doors.
Song Wei runs a shabby noodle shop and rents out space to small-time entrepreneurs, mostly immigrants from the provinces. All are now stuck behind that hastily erected wall, all pedestrian business lost.
"Business is very bad,'' Song admits. "But what can we do? We only hope the wall will come down after the Olympics are over. I don't think so, though. I think we will have to leave.''
That does seem the endgame.
In recent years, vast swaths of central Beijing – especially in the historic district of Qianmen – once a thriving hub just south of Tiananmen Square, home to artists and scholars and brothel madams – have been razed, sacrificed in the construction boom that has run parallel to Olympic preparation. Only belatedly did preservationists sound the alarm, warning the capital was losing a vital part of its soul with the disappearance of hutongs that date back to the 13th century.
The municipal government, in 2002, agreed to preserve 25 historic districts, including parts of Qianmen, but much of the damage was already done, entire neighbourhoods flattened, some 100,000 residents displaced, and reconstruction has continued apace. The land is enormously valuable and the area had fallen into ragged disrepair.
One sweeping component of Qianmen – the former calligraphy and silk-making colony of Dashan – has been partitioned by hoarding, scheduled to be destroyed and recreated in faux style, a mock version of the original.
On the edge of the site, Chang Yuan tinkers in his bicycle repair shop. "I was happy to have lived here all my life. But there's not much left of this place any more. Nearly everyone has gone.''
He'll go, too, when the price is right.
Pedalling up alongside, Huang Juan angrily accuses the government of browbeating Beijing's poorest citizens on behalf of developers covetous of prime property. "We have been targeted. Every day, at six in the morning, the bulldozers start their grunting. They've made it impossible for us to live here anymore – and that's exactly how it was planned.''
Beijing has undergone a remarkable metamorphosis in the past decade, from cocooned city to rather garish butterfly. The new capital sparkles, unwrapping itself before the world for these Games. But an ancient civilization is dying.
*****
Another Canadian perspective on Beijing's slum clearance/urban renewal... "Beijing Backlash" on CBC.ca
http://www.cbc.ca/national/blog/spe..._beijing/olympic_issues/beijing_backlash.html
Games eroding Beijing's historic face
Rosie DiManno
COLUMNIST
BEIJING–To glimpse old Beijing is to peek through a knothole or push back green plastic netting or clamber over brick walls.
This is the new Forbidden City, sheathed: What Olympic organizers and government officials don't want visitors to see, beneath the glossy patina of a modernized metropolis.
Decrepit neighbourhoods semi-demolished, heaps of rubble, rats scuttling through garbage, shattered bits of roof tiling and red wooden lintels, scavengers squatting in abandoned shacks, cooking dinner over paraffin stoves.
It's where the poor people lived – slums that possess charm only to the squinting Western eye.
It's where some of the poor people have hung on, not out of sentimental attachment to their surroundings – the historically treasured (to preservationists) hutongs, twisting alleyways only a couple of metres wide – but with a shrewd eye on property values, dissatisfied with the compensation offered by government and developers.
Many, living still among the ruins, claim they can't afford to move, not on the paltry amounts they would receive, sufficient only for a tiny highrise flat on the outskirts of the city.
So they have refused to leave, an act of unprecedented defiance in this Communist country, despite the bulldozers that descend at dawn, often scooping up the house on either side.
There is nothing left, for instance, on either side of the hovel where two families have stubbornly held their ground despite massive pressure to relocate, only 20 metres away from the Olympic cycling course.
The families were sitting down for lunch yesterday, gathered around a rickety outdoor table just beyond a freshly planted border of topiary — bushes sculpted to resemble bicycle wheels. Green netting has been laid over piles of old brick, the remnants of crushed houses, creating a trompe l'oeil effect, the fakery blending into an expanse of newly sodded grass on the verge of the avenue.
"They wanted more green space,'' says a 53-year-old man, who did not want his name used, fearful of reprisal for speaking to a Western reporter. "So they destroyed all my neighbours' homes.''
Originally, there were 1,300 families in this sector, almost smack next door to the Temple of Heaven. Now, only a few remain, the once lively warren of teahouses and modest businesses shuttered, the hutongs eerily quiet.
"My family has lived here for more than a hundred years, over three generations,'' the man continues. "We are not squatters. We pay 30 yuan ($4.56) a month in rent. The government said they'd pay us 30 yuan a month to move. But the cheapest housing I could find anywhere else was 60 yuan a month.''
He served eight years in the army before poor health forced him to resign, subsists now on a meagre income from selling canvas shoes and other cheap articles.
"We all are proud that the Games have come to China. But they have made life even more difficult for many of us. To me, it feels like the government is robbing us of the little we have.''
Residents here exist as if in a post-apocalyptic landscape, most expecting they will be forcibly evacuated once the world looks away from Beijing, and the capital can get on with reinventing itself.
What's surprising is that so many have resisted this long, the government not dragging property dissidents away earlier, before foreign media scrutiny intensified. Instead, authorities have attempted – just in recent weeks – to camouflage the problem, erecting a Great Wall of Beijing along the city's central north-south axis.
Kilometres of bright screens – Olympic-theme decorated – have gone up, blocking what the government considers eyesore views of Beijing's true self, or at least a truth that stubbornly clings to the underbelly of a mighty city in transformation, $40 billion the tab for massive redevelopment keyed to the Games. Little can be seen of the ancient, dilapidated courtyard houses that sit just beyond, barnacled over the decades with add-on sheds and kitchens and bathrooms, so that some warrens are too densely clustered for the outsider to navigate.
Along some stretches, fencing and screens were deemed not view-obstructing enough.
On one block, in Chongwen District, a three-metre-high brick wall suddenly went up on July 17, with no more warning that a piece of paper affixed to some front doors.
Song Wei runs a shabby noodle shop and rents out space to small-time entrepreneurs, mostly immigrants from the provinces. All are now stuck behind that hastily erected wall, all pedestrian business lost.
"Business is very bad,'' Song admits. "But what can we do? We only hope the wall will come down after the Olympics are over. I don't think so, though. I think we will have to leave.''
That does seem the endgame.
In recent years, vast swaths of central Beijing – especially in the historic district of Qianmen – once a thriving hub just south of Tiananmen Square, home to artists and scholars and brothel madams – have been razed, sacrificed in the construction boom that has run parallel to Olympic preparation. Only belatedly did preservationists sound the alarm, warning the capital was losing a vital part of its soul with the disappearance of hutongs that date back to the 13th century.
The municipal government, in 2002, agreed to preserve 25 historic districts, including parts of Qianmen, but much of the damage was already done, entire neighbourhoods flattened, some 100,000 residents displaced, and reconstruction has continued apace. The land is enormously valuable and the area had fallen into ragged disrepair.
One sweeping component of Qianmen – the former calligraphy and silk-making colony of Dashan – has been partitioned by hoarding, scheduled to be destroyed and recreated in faux style, a mock version of the original.
On the edge of the site, Chang Yuan tinkers in his bicycle repair shop. "I was happy to have lived here all my life. But there's not much left of this place any more. Nearly everyone has gone.''
He'll go, too, when the price is right.
Pedalling up alongside, Huang Juan angrily accuses the government of browbeating Beijing's poorest citizens on behalf of developers covetous of prime property. "We have been targeted. Every day, at six in the morning, the bulldozers start their grunting. They've made it impossible for us to live here anymore – and that's exactly how it was planned.''
Beijing has undergone a remarkable metamorphosis in the past decade, from cocooned city to rather garish butterfly. The new capital sparkles, unwrapping itself before the world for these Games. But an ancient civilization is dying.
*****
Another Canadian perspective on Beijing's slum clearance/urban renewal... "Beijing Backlash" on CBC.ca
http://www.cbc.ca/national/blog/spe..._beijing/olympic_issues/beijing_backlash.html
