Xiao Hong's New Beijing
by Greg at 06:17PM (PDT) on June 20, 2005 | Permanent Link | Cosmos
http://gregwalton.civiblog.org/blog/_archives/2005/6/21/958565.html
Ma Jian's next project is said to be a novel about a coma patient --
for now, lets call her Xiao Hong -- injured in Tiananmen Square, who
awakens in the twenty-first century to find that in her absence
Beijing too seems to have been in a coma.
Traumatic Brain Injury has resulted in both Post-Traumatic Amnesia
and Retrograde Amnesia . .
the doctor elaborates:
. . . mechanical force to the brain has caused damage to Xiao Hong's
neurons and impairs her ability to form new memories, thus causing
post-traumatic amnesia. The extent of disruption of memory is a
function of the severity of the force --
-- in this case the motorized infantry of the 27th Group Army that
slammed into her on the night of June 03, 1989 --
Xiao Hong's ability to form new memories may slowly increase with the
recovery of her diencephalon, and will be reflected in both a gradual
decrease in the level of amnesia, and an increase in her sense of
spatial awareness. .
during this process of recovery she will attempt to interpret or give
meaning to fragments of memory, just as we all do with our dreams,
but all about her the city of her student days is busy forgetting.
Private developers have razed her grandparents neighborhood,
replacing the conviviality of the hutong with sterile apartment
blocks. More than 300,000 people have been displaced, some of them in
the middle of the night. Her own grandmother watched as they leveled
the house she had built with her own hands - when she protested she
was charged with "obstructing a public official".
..the poor old woman's health deteriorated and she developed
arteriosclerosis.
Floating lazyily above us in the summer sky is a vast blimp. Through
its unblinking eye she can make out the ideogram ’Zhong’. It says
‘middle’, and also ‘realm in the middle’. In her dreams, she no
longer marches through Beijing from one closed site to another
(family, school, barracks, prison, coma etc.) but feels herself
subjected to free-floating, nomadic forms of control (Deleuze 1995:
178); she is swept along the meridian, her feet like flowing water.
The orthogonal city structure of the Ming Dynasty intersected by a
central axis - this grand boulevard that now connects the Olympic
village to the city's imperial past. Zhong. This is the basic
principle of Chinese urban planning, and it reflects traditional
centralism in Chinese social thought.
The provenance of the architect has given the ideogram another
interpretation. This boulevard was designed in the early-21st century
by Albert Speer, son and namesake of the man who would build Hitler's
Germania. Here is the 17-mile-long east-west axis running through the
new Beijing -- just as there would have been for Germania. There the
workers' houses ring the factories - just like Germania -- and at the
centre, a vast railway station to link all of China, just as Hitler
planned to link all of the conquered lands of the Reich to his new Rome.
... only time will tell, but in severe cases such as Xiao Hong's, not
only is memory retrieval and reconstruction impaired, but the neurons
forming the basis of the memory stores themselves may have been
permenantly destroyed.
On 8 Nov 2005, at 23:20, Anthony Townsend wrote:
The city that ate the world
It's goodbye to mao and hello to Europe's top architects, all
Australia's iron ore... and half the World's concrete. With its
sights set on Olympic gold, Beijing is being rebuilt round the
clock. By Deyan Sudjic
Sunday October 16, 2005
The Observer
Beijing's new airport is rising from the dry plains east of the
city so fast that, in just four years, China will have designed,
built and opened a structure larger than all the terminals at
Heathrow combined. That's rather less time than the lawyers spent
arguing about Heathrow's Terminal 5. 'It's the world's largest and
most advanced airport building,' says the project's architect,
Norman Foster. With airports at Stansted and Hong Kong already
under his belt, he should know better than anyone. But it still
looks more like a medieval battlefield conceived on the scale of a
Japanese epic, rather than the sleek glass-and-steel bubble shown
in Foster's glittering computer renderings. Swarming warrior armies
cluster around giant cranes, more than 100 of them, ranged like
ancient siege engines across a frontline almost two miles long. The
dust swirling across the landscape makes it impossible to count
more than a few of them before they disappear into the acrid haze.
Touring the site in a Chinese-made Buick, it's hard as a spectator
to grasp exactly what is going on. Eventually, all the furious
activity crystallises into a pattern that begins to make some kind
of sense. The banners flying from makeshift flagpoles sunk into the
mud everywhere carry the names of individual work gangs, each with
their own territory. The gangs move like disciplined cohorts of
soldier ants, identifiable by the colour of their helmets,
navigating blindly but effectively around the obstacles that litter
the site. Some are handling new deliveries. Others are preparing
them for use. Others shift barrowloads of nuts and bolts across the
site or, two at a time, carry steel bars by hand. In the
foreground, groups of men in crumpled suits stack heaps of
reinforcing steel, ready to be bent into the hooks that will keep
them securely in place when they are finally buried in concrete.
There are dumps of steel everywhere. So much steel, in fact, that
it starts to become only too clear how the Chinese hunger for the
metal has pushed up world prices to the point that British
construction sites are rediscovering the art of building in
concrete. There is enough steel here to explain why Australia has
reopened iron-ore mines and why ship brokers have taken bulk
carriers out of mothballs from their anchorages in the Falmouth
estuary.
There are stacks of bicycles amid the welding stations and forests
of concrete columns. Beyond them is a gigantic concrete raft, from
which intricate tufts of reinforcing steel protrude like basket
work. Far in the distance more clusters of helmeted dots swarm
around craters sunk six floors into the ground. Huge white concrete-
mixer trucks wheel and turn in packs at the lip of the void,
marshalled by men with whistles and batons, delivering loads in a
continuous stream, day and night.
There are 35,000 men on this site, with another 5,000 due to join
them by the end of the year. But from my vantage point, a kind of
diving board projecting over the edge of the 500ft-wide channel
that has been dug from one end of the site to the other, I can
focus my mind only on two of them. One is dressed in a military
tunic; the other is wearing a suit that must once have been his
holiday best, but is now covered in stains. Both have yellow hard
hats, both wear tennis shoes. The shorter man has a satchel slung
across his shoulder, and holds a wrench.
At first I assume he is the more skilled of the two, and so the
leader. They are perched on a scaffolding tower 50ft high, rising
from the bottom of a trench cut deep into the mud.
The taller man, who looks barely out of his teens, stands with his
legs wide apart, feet splayed, one hand fully outstretched,
clinging to the nearest secure piece of vertical scaffolding. He
has his safety harness wrapped around his waist, but its clip
dangles uselessly behind him. Without looking down, he pauses to
steady himself for a moment, then, with a single effortless
movement, uses his free hand to swing up another heavy steel
scaffolding pole and drop it into the clamp that will keep it
secure. His slender body forms a big X as he defines the diagonals
in the steel rectangle that frames him. He holds the scaffolding in
position just long enough for his partner to bolt it into place,
and it becomes clear that he is the one who is taking the risks,
and making the decisions. The task complete, they rest for a
minute. Then, without a word, they swing themselves along the
scaffolding like tightrope walkers, to repeat the manoeuvre with
balletic grace and precision.
Working without their harnesses, it is a death-defying performance.
I can't take my eyes off them for fear that if I do, one will drop
the scaffolding pole and fall. They are earning around $7 each a
day, not enough for the taxi ride back into town.
Back in the site office (the hastily requisitioned ballroom of the
current airport hotel, out of bounds now to the remaining guests)
there is a winking red digital countdown to completion. When the
1,027 days remaining have flickered down to zero, the spot on which
the two men are standing will be the track the shuttle train uses
to whisk newly arrived passengers from the aircraft door to the
baggage hall.
'The airport will be the gateway to the city,' says Foster. 'It's
advanced not only technologically, but also in terms of passenger
experience, operational efficiency and sustainability. It will be
welcoming and uplifting, a symbol of place, its soaring aerodynamic
roof and dragon-like form will celebrate the thrill and poetry of
flight and evoke traditional Chinese colours and symbols.'
In short, the airport is not simply about shifting large numbers of
people in and out of the city. Just as important will be its part
in the conspicuous assertion of a new kind of China and its
modernity. It is one of a dozen huge projects Beijing is building
at furious speed to transform the city in time for the Olympic
games of 2008.
For China, the Olympics are being used as the chance to make a
defiant and unmistakable statement that the country has taken its
place in the modern world.
The site works in three shifts, seven days a week. Nothing stops
the cranes, the concrete mixers, the welders and the scaffolders.
Not even the discovery of fossilised dinosaur bones that turned up
in the mud ahead of the bulldozers one day, or a carved ancient
stone, saved from the mechanical diggers and re-erected next to a
cluster of huts.
The site is still working on the May Day holiday, when the rest of
China shuts down for a week. The workers here stop only for the
Chinese New Year, when it gets too cold for concrete to set
properly. The site comes to a standstill and the armies return to
their villages until the thaw comes.
During the day they brave the dust storms and the summer heat. At
night they work under arc lights. They sleep in ramshackle clusters
of huts and green army tents in a series of shanty towns scattered
around the site. The huts vary in size and shape. Some are made
from plywood, with roofs of corrugated clear-plastic sheets, held
down by bricks to stop them blowing away. There is no glass in the
windows and nothing more elaborate than roofless latrine blocks for
sanitation. These men are the 21st-century's version of the navvies
who built Britain's railways and canals. They are the legal, the
semi-legal and the illegal migrant workers, drawn from China's
desperately poor hinterland in their millions by the prospect of
jobs in construction and in the factories that the booming cities
have to offer. One in every five of Shanghai's population of 20m is
an illegal migrant. Beijing is not far behind. These migrants are
Chinese citizens with fewer rights in their nation's capital than
Colombians living illegally in California.
Everywhere you go in Beijing you can see clusters of spray-painted
numbers scrawled over walls, on trees and gateposts, under flyovers
and on lampposts. In Los Angeles or Harlesden they would be gang
tags. But there is no graffiti in China. They are the mobile phone
numbers of people looking for work.
The first time I went to Beijing was in 1992. There were no direct
flights from London then, and the airport felt like a cold
provincial bus station, with hard wooden benches. Its Sino-
Stalinist architecture suggested the intimate connection between
air travel in China and party privilege.
Flickering black-and-white television screens signalled departures
with erratic imprecision and a kiosk selling Napoleon brandy in
bottles shaped like vintage cars, costing a worker three months'
pay, stood in lieu of a duty-free shop. The two-lane road into town
was clogged with carts bringing in mountains of winter-green
vegetables to feed the city. And Beijing, once you finally got
there, went dark after 9pm.
By the time I went back, 10 years later, there was a brand-new
airport dripping with travertine and lined with gold-relief
depictions of the country's major tourist attractions. A six-lane
toll road took you into town. In the city centre, already sprouting
skyscrapers, vast areas of the traditional hutong courtyard houses
were being flattened. There were five-star luxury hotels with their
Australian chefs and their cigar bars. And the main streets were
beginning to delineate themselves with neon. But the pavement cycle-
repair shops and the kitchen hands outside the cafes chopping up
trays slippery with poultry entrails made it still an unmistakably
Chinese city.
Now Norman Foster is building what amounts to the city's third
airport, a vast structure that will handle 53m passengers a year,
and Beijing is changing again. A decade ago, it still felt like a
dim echo of the West. Now it looks disturbingly like the future. As
part of the airport development, there will be a high-speed rail
link to the city centre and a second motorway toll road. The
government hasn't yet decided which rail system it will use, but it
is likely to follow Shanghai and install Germany's Maglev, a low-
flying aircraft of a train that'll reach 240mph on its 11-minute
ride to the airport.
Beijing is the capital of the world's fastest-growing economy,
provoking a titanic struggle between a totalitarian political
system and the liberalisation that is the presumed product of its
economic transformation. By some estimates, half the world's annual
production of concrete and one-third of its steel output is being
consumed by China's construction boom. The second ring road that
marked the city limits until the Eighties has been followed by the
building of a third, fourth and fifth ring. The sixth is under
construction. Cars move around disconnected clumps of newly
completed towers. There are now more than 2m cars in the city -
already enough to wipe out all the improvements in air quality
achieved by the expulsion of heavy industry from Beijing's centre.
The city map looks like a dartboard, with the void of the Forbidden
City as its empty bull's-eye. And with the abruptness of a randomly
aimed dart, entire new districts appear arbitrarily as if from
nowhere. A city that, until 1990, had no central business district,
and little need of it, now has a cluster of glass towers that look
like rejects from Singapore or Rotterdam. And these, in turn, are
now being replaced and overshadowed by a new crop of taller,
slicker towers, the product of the international caravan of
architectural gunslingers that has arrived in town to take part in
this construction free-fire zone. Rem Koolhaas, Jacques Herzog,
Zaha Hadid, Jean Nouvel and Will Alsop are all building, or trying
to build here.
You can get some idea of what this new Beijing is going to be like
in the brand-new museum of city planning, a suave six-storey
structure faced in black marble, close to the southern end of
Tiananmen Square. Cross the entrance hall and you find yourself
slowly rising the full height of the building on a sequence of
escalators. One wall of the atrium is dominated by a vast bronze
relief map of Beijing as it was in 1949 when the People's
Liberation Army made their triumphal entry. You can still see the
Forbidden City where Mao spent his first night in a pleasure
palace, and the Gate of Heavenly Peace from which he declared the
foundation of the People's Republic also survives. But there is not
much else left of the city lovingly depicted in miniature. Mao
mutilated the ancient fabric of Beijing to carve out the
megalomaniacal scale of Tiananmen Square. He had mile after mile of
the city's ancient walls, and the gates punctuating them,
demolished. The destruction took a decade. But Mao's Great Hall of
the People and the Museum of the Revolution, two huge hulks on
either side of Tiananmen, are little compensation for what was
lost. They were carefully aligned on the axis of the Forbidden City
that still defines Beijing, to claim the legitimacy of China's
imperial past for the People's Republic. Mao's buildings are also
big enough to eclipse the palaces and to demonstrate the
superiority of his own regime.
The main draw in the planning museum is on the top floor. A space
the size of an Olympic swimming pool contains a vast model of how
Beijing is going to look. You approach by walking over a huge
series of aerial photographs taken from surveillance satellites
that show you the city fringes. Lit from beneath and protected by
thick sheets of glass, it feels like flying over Beijing's suburbs.
It's a disorientating prelude to the city centre and is modelled in
jaw-dropping detail, demonstrating not only how much of the city
shown in bronze downstairs has disappeared, but also that the city
Mao built to replace it has itself vanished.
Tiananmen survives, along with the Great Hall of the People and the
Museum of the Revolution, but everything else is up for grabs. And
even the museum isn't what it was. The Museum of the Revolution
became the Museum of China in 2003 and immediately closed for
renovation and expansion. It will reopen, more than doubled in
size, in 2007. In the meantime, there is a hallucinatory temporary
display of waxworks. The first tableau portrays the astronaut China
launched into space last year, accompanied by a schoolgirl in
tartan skirt and pigtails. A sweeping curved terrace is populated
by the founding fathers of the People's Republic. They are here
enjoying a cigarette and a glass or two of whisky, with Mao a
commanding figure, standing at the centre. But it clearly implies
that this stage of the foundation of the republic is over. Deng
Xiaoping - purged by Mao for taking the capitalist road,
rehabilitated, purged again, and then rehabilitated again in time
to trigger China's opening to the world that led to the paroxysm of
construction reshaping Beijing - stands apart from his comrades. He
is portrayed against a backdrop of the skyscrapers from Shenzhen,
rather than in a rest home for retired revolutionaries.
Immediately west of Tiananmen Square, hundreds of courtyard houses
were flattened to build the national opera house, a megalomaniacal
glass egg designed by Paul Andreu, a French architect specialising
in airports. His contribution to Beijing is to put the opera house
in the middle of an artificial lake. It's the perfect contemporary
face for a regime that believes in the use of tanks as a modern
instrument of crowd control.
Away to the north is the Olympic district, with its 100,000-seat
stadium, designed in the form of a giant bird's nest by Herzog and
de Meuron, who were responsible for Tate Modern. Last time I was in
Beijing this so-called Olympic Park was still being cleared of the
acres of small-scale housing that had once covered it. Teams of
bent old men were picking through the rubble to salvage what they
could of the homes and shops and workshops that had just been
destroyed. Now its circular shape has emerged from the ground,
giving it the look of a ruined colosseum. Even China has been known
to suffer occasional bouts of vertigo in its breakneck transformation.
There was a pause last year while the Politburo did its sums to see
if it could afford everything. It decided that it couldn't, and
axed the retractable roof on the stadium, saving some money. The
area to the east of the city centre, where the new embassies were
built in the Fifties, was the obvious place to build the first
international hotels, and the commercial towers followed. In the
planning museum, this area gets a huge model all to itself. It is
dominated by Rem Koolhaas's new headquarters for Central China TV,
a single development that, with 6m sq ft of space, is as big as
Canary Wharf. It is just one of 300 towers that will constitute
Beijing's answer to Lower Manhattan. Building it has involved
tearing down the state motorcycle factory that was once the pride
of the Mao era.
The construction workers - from the same firm that is building the
airport - have moved into the last surviving production hall. 'Long
Live Workers' Self-Management' proclaim the fading slogans on the
walls. The ground has already been prepared for Koolhaas's project,
a colossus that takes the form of two leaning towers, 70 floors
high, that prop each other up with links at top and bottom to form
a gigantic Mobius strip.
The two main towers lean towards each other and are connected at
the tip by a 10-floor L-shaped wing that juts out into space. To
the non-expert eye it looks as if the unsupported structure
spanning the void is increasing the load on the two towers. In
fact, it allows them to stabilise each other, so reducing the
quantity of steel needed. Koolhaas has emerged as the most
challenging of the crop of architectural celebrities working in
China, and he has been the subject of bitter criticism for it.
His Chinese opponents complain that his building is ugly,
inappropriate and wasteful. Westerners such as the critic Ian
Buruma question the propriety of designing a building that can be
seen as endorsing the propaganda arm of a repressive state that
tells a billion people what to think. It is criticism which
Koolhaas dismisses with growing impatience. 'Participation in
China's modernisation does not have a guaranteed outcome,' he told
one interviewer. 'The future of China is the most compelling
conundrum, its outcome affects all of us and a position of
resistance seems somehow ornamental.'
Beijing's new landmarks promise a new China, one that is
sophisticated enough to move beyond the traditional limits of
totalitarian architecture and the banal expediency of its first
attempts at modernisation. It promises a glossy future, but one
which is being built with Stalinist despatch, very much like the
old one. To ensure that everything is ready before the games start,
the government has decreed that every crane at the airport, at the
stadium, at CCTV and everywhere else in Beijing must be down by the
end of 2007.
It may help lay the dust that hangs over the city to rest, but it
is going to be bad news for the armies of construction workers from
the airport, and the stadium, and the China TV towers. Their jobs
will come to an end, and with the construction industry in Beijing
effectively shut down for a year, there will be nothing for them to
do. They will be shipped back to their distant villages, and two
centuries back in time, leaving the glossy new city that they have
built to the party elite and the foreigners. The new Beijing will
be a hugely impressive demonstration of China's newfound status as
an economic superpower. But it will also serve to highlight the
faultline that divides the country's rich and poor.
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