China’s concrete welcome mat
In the name of Olympic hospitality, Beijing is sacrificing its soul
BY Dave Bidini
Photograph of Pingyao by moniquz (Flickr)
In 1999, my wife and I went to Pingyao, in northeast China. It took us the better part of a week to find someone, anyone, at the state travel office in Beijing who knew where Pingyao was, let alone sell us a ticket, but eventually, we were pointed in the right direction and told to board a train in the late evening for a journey up country. We asked the iron rooster’s porters and attendants, “Pingyao?” parroting our question at every stop. Finally, a fellow traveller told us to sleep—Pingyao was hours away—but, at dawn, we heard the hollering of voices outside our berth: “Pingyao! Pingyao!” We bolted out of bed, threw our packs to the platform and stood dazed and half-asleep in the quiet of the old station.
As we walked into town, the citizens Pingyao were rising to meet the day. We navigated the city’s century-old walls and peered into the city as if looking into a terrarium: a myriad of courtyards busy with life; the town’s dry cleaner feeding clothes into an old backyard steam press; ragmen hauling manure pots through the muddy streets; singing farmers with baskets of produce cycling door to door; and workers collecting spent lanterns and fireworks from New Year’s celebrations. Further below, young women smoking menthol cigarettes and dressed in wild purple coats and cat-eye glasses sped through the streets on mopeds. Outside endless rows of small restaurants, mandarins in great beards hunched over soup bowls while kids leaned on sidewalk pool tables, waiting for unsuspecting and affected hosers like me to hustle.
We ended up staying at the only place in town, a ten-storey concrete hotel that, outside, possessed a grim Scarborough-projects facade, but, inside, bustled like a Cotton Club of the Far East, with brilliant chandeliers and young female attendants wearing ’70s-era taupe and mauve stewardess outfits serving gold-seal white liquor and countless exotic dishes to small tables horseshoed around the glittering lobby. It was like being dropped through a strange fissure in time—’70s fashion meeting ’40s China meeting a futuristic tourist idyll; a backwater Plaza on a quilt of ricepaddies—and our time in Pingyao—we stayed for three days, until the next train passed through the town—is my most sustaining memory of my first trip to China.
I’ve thought of Pingyao across all of my susbsequent travels, wondering if I’d ever come across as place as strange and great and secret. Then, last month, I picked up a copy of Vanity Fair magazine with an article about Robert Frank’s final road trip to an international exhibition of photography in China. As I started reading, I discovered that Frank—along with a few dozen of the world’s most accalimed photographers—had convened not in Xian, Shanghai or Guilin, but Pingyao, the city out of time where, in 1999, there were no radio stations and only one TV channel, a state UHF frequency where English and Mandarin were taught with red chalk and a blackboard on a hissing grey screen.
In ten years, Pingyao had gone from being a small, uncharted hamlet without a stop on the state rail line to a hub of international photography. Back in 1999, women in the post office had used glue pots to fix stamps and an abbacus to total the stamps’ cost. On another occassion, when we asked one of the hotel clerks—using guide-book Chinese—to help us buy a train ticket, he produced the only person in Pingyao who knew English: a local school teacher whose grasp was no better than a few hundred words. But in 2008, noted Western and Chinese photography scholars had come to Pingyao to lecture for pass-holding attendees in ironic gallery spaces—old factories, storage depots—drinking coffee and fine wine and comforted by amenities in this gleaming 21st-century version of the old town.
Ten years ago, it was hard to imagine cable television in our Pingyao hotel room let alone the notion of the world’s biggest arts and culture festival—the Summer Olympics—encamped in a city eight hours away. It’s astonishing that the upcoming Olympics have arrived in China so quickly after the country’s economic rise, and while dissenting voices over Chinese human rights abuses in Tibet and Darfur is probably reason enough to protest their right to stage the Games, the most troubling part for me is how the Olympics have raced to validate this rate of change, no matter what gets lost in the process. When I last visited Beijing in 2006, huge tracts of the hutong, the city’s ancient enclave, were being razed for Games’ development—some days, unlucky residents would wake up to find a single Chinese character (“reassignment”) chalked across their doors—and a sea of concrete was being poured over surrounding fields, marshlands, and prairie: an asphalt welcome mat for the Games’ league of nations.
Like Pingyao, Beijing, despite its Forbidden City and Tianammen Square, once possessed an almost parochial charm, harbouring historically busy markets where, in cities like Shanghai, apartment and office towers would have been staked. But with the Olympics as its carrot, Beijing has grown closer to its lurid southern cousin, engorged by commerce and heavy with economic expectation and the burden of prosperity. While Beijingers have more economic freedom than ever before, the average worker’s standard of living is still well below early 20th century America, and the subways, come five o’clock, are still the vessels of the living dead. City transit lines may have been repaired, lengthened, and improved, but they’re still filled with hundreds of thousands of exhausted, sleeping workers going from factory to home at the end of their days.
Because of economic progress and change, something that existed in Pingyao doesn’t exist anymore, and while our hotel room in Beijing in 1999 was dank and reeked of cabbage, at least you could stare out of the bottom-floor window and see merchants riding bikes to market with bouqets of live chickens hanging upside down on their handlebars. Now, that shitty hotel is a Best Western, and the market has been steamrolled into a paved throughfare. Beijing, for the most part, is clean and new and rising to exploit its economic strength, and Pingyao is hosting important worldwide artistic events. For two weeks this August, China and the rest of the world can pretend that this is simply a great and wonderful thing.
