The omnipresent Chinese character , pronounced “chai” and meaning ‘demolish’, has been a leitmotif in the architectural rise and rise of China.
Using big-ticket international events to recast cities is not an exclusively Chinese phenomenon. For more than 150 years, World’s Fairs, the precursors of Expos like the one currently underway in Shanghai, have provided governments with the incentives to push ahead with public works and prestige projects.
But perhaps nowhere has a city been wrought anew to the extent of Beijing in the run-up to the Olympics. In total, the Chinese capital developed some 25 million sq mt of property between 2002 and 2008. The pace of the change was such that the municipal authorities were forced to release new maps of the city every three months for a number of years.
Beijing is a city steeped in a 900-year history, haunted by the ghosts of warlords and khans, revolutionaries and poets. In the years leading up to the Olympics, however, it seemed more like a city overrun by predatory cranes and bulldozers, as entire swathes of the ancient capital were torn down to make way for a slew of mega construction projects.
Consequently, for much of the last decade Beijing had all the charm of a construction site. Its architectural mishmash of styles lent it an atonal look. Concrete warehouses peeled in the shadow of zooming skyscrapers; a few unyielding traditional homes crushed up against white bathroom-tiled office spaces. Bauhaus, baroque and bathroom all jostled together uneasily and the only unity the city had was the omnipresent Chinese character
Painted in big red strokes on the walls and doors of select homes, its presence signified a place on construction death row. All of Beijing was filled with these marked buildings; it was less a city and more an execution ground. The most tragic victims of Beijing’s demolition spree were the hutongs, the narrow tree-lined alleyways that used to make up the entire 62 sq km area surrounding the Forbidden City. Hutongs have been the lifeblood of Beijing since Mongol times, or the 13th century, representing an organic connection between the present and multi-layered past of China’s capital.
Also Read
Hutongs are flanked on either side by traditional courtyard-style homes which were the quintessence of wealth and privilege in imperial China. They were obvious targets for the Communists who deplored them as symbols of feudal decadence. From 1949, following the Communist accession, all hutong homes were expropriated by the State and handed over to work units which then allocated accommodation to workers.
Over the next few decades, formerly grand homes became dilapidated with single dwellings coming to house a dozen or so families, But though the hutongs no longer exuded the elegance of imperial times, they continued to be the fulcrum of ‘lao Beijing’ or ‘old Beijing’ society. The Beijingers or ‘lao Beijingren’ that lived here were the inheritors and safe-keepers of all that made the city unique: the growling local accent, the warming street snacks, the sense of being connected to the city by roots that ran deep.
But following the Olympic-scented development frenzy of the last several years, up to three quarters of these hutongs were torn down. Estimates of families forced to relocate as a result of this redevelopment vary between 350,000 and 500,000.
Although government officials tend to characterise these relocations as popular, there was a spree of suicides in 2003 to protest the demolitions. In September of that year a Beijing resident Wang Baoguang set himself on fire while forcibly being evicted from his home. Less than a month later one hutong dweller, 43-year-old Ye Guoqiang, jumped off a bridge in the Forbidden City to protest the razing of his family's home and restaurant to make way for a shopping arcade. He survived the fall only to be arrested and jailed. Since the height of the protests in 2003 the situation has taken a turn for the better. The mass discontentment created by the evictions raised a red flag for the ruling communist party, which slowly began to clamp down on untrammeled property development.
Yet there was a ceaseless impermanence to life in Beijing which made living there a surrealist’s paradise. Old, bent men in Mao suits taking their caged song birds for a walk along an expressway or a group of elderly women practising Tai Chi surrounded by bulldozers were common sights.
More frightening was how Beijing’s remorseless embrace of modernity erased memory. Where once communal-style housing created dense networks of friendships with the elderly gathering in the evenings to waltz slowly or play mahjong into the long, summer nights, entire neighbourhoods were supplanted by glittering malls.
These new behemoths were usually context-less and place-less, tree-less, mahjong-less. Temples to consumerism, they were the core of the New Beijing that the Olympics created.
What was frightening was the ability to walk through these spaces and not find a single link to the thriving, organic clusters of people and places that had occupied the same geography for decades, only a year or so ago. A slate had been wiped clean.
For the Chinese government, this clean slate was a desired outcome; one that kept people from asking too many uncomfortable questions about the past, given that this past was now architecturally obliterated.
But for the “lao Beijingren”, who had been turned out of their homes and exiled to characterless new developments on the outskirts of the city that had once defined their very essence, the fact that the “New Beijing” of the Olympics had little place for them, was a constant, painful reality.
And so, while Indian visitors to modern Chinese cities might understandably marvel at the eye-catching architectural feats on display, the stories that lurk beneath their glittering surfaces are a sobering reminder of the social cost of these “new clothes”.