To the Chinese of centuries past, Beijing was both the centre of the imperial
state and an architectural expression of the spiritual order uniting man and
heaven. To the Chinese of today, old Beijing is but a memory. Part elegy and
part indictment, Jasper Becker’s book on “this ancient, magical city” tells
of its disappearance in just six decades since the communist victory in
1949.
A capital that survived the collapse of the empire, invasion by Japan and
China’s civil war, has been conclusively doomed by the 2008 Olympic Games
and by planners, speculators and foreign architects hungry for prestige. “It
was filthy, beautiful, decadent, bustling, chaotic, idle, lovable, it was
the great Peking of early summer,” wrote the novelist Lao She, the Dickens
of the city, as late as 1933.
Lanes of flowers and willows still led to quarters where courtesans
entertained their admirers and painted boys sang operas as old as the Ming
dynasty. Becker guides us to crumbling pleasure domes and gardens, turning
each excursion into a pen portrait of characters who in turn animate a
history of cruel splendour. He tells of a mighty general, dragged to an
execution post where a man awaited with a razor to inflict death by a
thousand slices, of an imperial concubine tossed down a well to die and of
the sad end of Lao She himself, found dead in a lake during the Cultural
Revolution.
Near Tiananmen Square, Becker traces the spot where the severed heads of
would-be reformers tumbled amid the cabbage leaves of a vegetable market
more than 100 years ago. In a pure Bertolucci moment, Becker discovers the
last court eunuch eking out his days near the palace of the last emperor, Pu
Yi, whose brother he finds living in a courtyard where wild flowers grow
amid broken bricks.
For all its grim past, Becker clearly enjoys the sharp humour of old Beijing,
relishes the bitter toffee apples sold on the street stalls, likes its
raucous individualism, its humming alleyways, its ferment of poetry and
politics. His lyrical lament for its passing prepares the way for a scathing
attack on the architects of its demise.
Glossy magazines tend to rave about the new Beijing skyline. Becker, a
resident critic of the Chinese dictatorship for almost 20 years, treats it
as a cultural crime.
Chinese philosophers say that Beijing was different from any western capital
because it expressed its culture in spatial harmony and stone. Its geometry
illustrated the view of the historian John K Fairbank that while western
civilisation was dynamic, driven by trade and warfare, Chinese civilisation
was stable, agricultural and bureaucratic. With the Forbidden City of the
court at its centre, Beijing supported a huge cast of aristocrats, soldiers,
merchants, scholars, entertainers and common folk all woven into a rich
urban fabric which lay essentially unchanged for 500 years.
Becker’s unapologetic opinion is that the communists, as a peasant
revolutionary movement, set out to break the capital and its people. He says
that a succession of party leaders sanctioned the demolition of the old city
out of political vindictiveness and a numbing lack of aesthetic judgment.
Mao Tse-tung first swung the wrecker’s ball in 1950, destroying the medieval
walls. Grandiose party buildings arose. Ranks of apartments mimicked the
cities of eastern Europe. Factories spewed contamination over carved dragon
friezes.
It was President Jiang Zemin, a provincial engineer, who completed the
reordering of the urban landscape. In 2001, the International Olympic
Committee handed him a perfect excuse for radicalism by granting the 2008
Games to Beijing. Jiang discarded plans for conservation, ignored the pleas
of the Chinese-American architect IM Pei (who, alone of his peers, emerges
with honour) and razed whole districts to make way for broad, windy avenues
lined by buildings of no distinction whatsoever.
Becker calls this a “collective punishment” for the Beijingers’ rebellion of
June 1989, saying that Jiang presided over “the greatest act of historical
vandalism in Chinese history”. It was also an act of vanity to compare with
that of any spendthrift emperor.
Baron Haussmann’s restoration of Paris in the 19th century left 40% of that
city’s urban fabric intact: just 5% of old Beijing remains. Only the
Forbidden City, a few famous monuments and a small area of traditional homes
are preserved. The cost has been human, too. A million people have left
their homes. More than 1.3m peasants laboured on 7,000 building sites in the
city, often cheated of their pay and obliged to work in dire conditions. At
least 10 perished to build the Olympic stadium known as the Birds’ Nest, but
officials have admitted to only six fatalities during the entire Olympic
construction programme.
Becker’s writing reaches its best when he scorns the foreign architects who
scurried to collaborate with the Chinese authorities. The recipients of
official patronage make up a distinguished list — Jacques Herzog, Pierre de
Meuron, Sir Norman Foster, Zaha Hadid, Rem Koolhaas and Paul Andreu, among
others. At one point the Chinese consulted Albert Speer’s son about the
Olympic landscaping, which seems perfectly fitting.
Becker quotes the German architect Ole Scheeren, charged with executing
Koolhaas’s design for the new headquarters of China state television, on the
professional morality of working for the Chinese government instead of
American clients. “It’s a choice between associating yourself with a regime
that is on the brink of opening up and propelling itself into a positive
thinking future, or associating with another nation that is at the end of
its height, propelling war plans into the world,” said Scheeren. No doubt
his choice was helped by the £300m on offer to house a state television
network that, as Becker says, “had a record of putting out propaganda worthy
of Goebbels”.
The westerners held no monopoly on crassness. The Hong Kong billionaire Li
Ka-shing devastated the Wangfujing district to erect a concrete and glass
shopping mall which he named Oriental Plaza. Becker cannot resist observing
that “there was nothing remotely oriental about it”.
A hundred and eight Chinese architects protested against Andreu’s egg-like
design for the National Theatre, to no avail. The building, which drew
rhapsodic acclaim abroad, is known to locals as “the big turd”.
The two lessons of Becker’s evocative, story-packed book are that public
opinion counts for nothing against authoritarian whim and that the emperors
had better taste than the present dynasty of suits.
Any inquiring travellers going to Beijing for the Olympics will find City of
Heavenly Tranquillity a provocative, saddening companion. If their curiosity
is whetted, they can turn to Jonathan Fenby’s 800-page history of modern
China, rather a marathon run through 158 years of famine, war, revolution
and reform.
Fenby, a former editor of the South China Morning Post and a biographer of
Chiang Kai-shek, has evolved a taut, anecdote- studded style to tell a
complex story in a fluent, direct way. He treads a well-worn path from the
decaying 19th century to the communist revolution of 1949, stating that most
of China’s flaws date to the imperial era and that violence has settled
political disputes for most of its modern history.
Fenby has a good eye for a quote and repeats with relish the words of Robert
Hart, the Ulsterman who ran the imperial customs, that in the late empire
“the comical and the tragical have dovetailed”.
The later chapters, completing the saga from the death of Mao to the Tiananmen
massacre and beyond, contain echoes of this refrain as “reformers” replace
revolutionaries to a chorus of obedient propaganda.
The book is a great introduction for a general audience, well-paced, with
vivid scene-setting and character sketches. If it has a weakness, it is an
absence of Chinese primary sources, although Fenby draws extensively and
with generous acknowledgement upon recent scholarship. Perhaps for this
reason, however, while the facts are told with skill, the perspective
remains that of an enlightened liberal European.
For example, Fenby says that the People’s Republic, politically, is in an
authoritarian time warp that can be traced back to 221BC. He is referring to
an era when the first ruler to unify China buried the scholars alive. Even
ardent Chinese democrats would probably concede that the governance of
modern China is a little more subtle than that.
The late 1990s saw the start of the demolition and rebuilding of Beijing — at
an estimated cost of £100 billion. About 3m inhabitants have been evicted.
In 1980 there were still 6,000 traditional courtyard homes, known as hutong:
now just a few hundred remain. Only one of the 44 princely palaces, or
wangfu, still exists in its entirety. “Imagine the outcry,” Becker writes,
“if in less than a decade London underwent a similar transformation. If the
West End, Notting Hill, Knightsbridge, Holland Park and the City of London
were to be levelled and replaced by giant residential and commercial blocks.
If every landmark — Oxford Street, Piccadilly, Pall Mall, Regent Street,
Covent Garden, the courtyards of the Temple, the alleys of Soho — were to
disappear at once.” There has been no international outcry to save old
Beijing — nothing compared to the protest, say, which greeted the
destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan. And now it is too late.
City of Heavenly Tranquillity Beijing in the History of China by Jasper
Becker
Allen Lane £22 pp383
Buy from BooksFirst
for the price of £19.80 with free delivery in the UK
The Penguin History of Modern China: The Fall and Rise of a Great Power
1850-2008 by Jonathan Fenby
Allen Lane £30 pp810
Buy from BooksFirst
for the price of £27 with free delivery in the UK
