Blitzed Beijing
Why the Olympic city is set on demolishing its past
When I first came to Beijing, seven years ago, I lived next to a building site. When I returned a year later, I lived next to a building site. This time round, I’m living next to a building site, in an apartment on the seventeenth floor of an eighteen-floor development. My tower block doesn’t have a fourth floor, or a thirteenth floor, or a fourteenth floor, because four is an inauspicious number to the Chinese (it rhymes with death) and the management is also worried about putting off Western triskaidekaphobes. So the lift ticks superstitiously up past floors 3, 5, 5A…12, 12A, 15, 15A…
Just east of us, a residential skyscraper is being built: one of the hundreds under construction across the city. I’m woken each day around six a.m. by the gong strokes of hammer on girder. This is the new dawn chorus of Beijing — the peal of hit steel, the crump of the piston hammer, the high song of the drill. Bicycle bells, jackdaws and the wind in the ginkgos have lost out in the decibel competition. The hammering rings on until ten or eleven p.m. as men smite metal with quota-filling diligence.
But I am relatively lucky. The bigger projects are attended to 24/7, with the workers toiling in a permanent halogen daylight. To entertain them, site managers erect speaker banks that would shame the Rolling Stones, and blast out Chinese radio. Nearby apartments cop the sonic backwash.
Right now, Beijing is probably the biggest building site on earth, with the possible exceptions of Shanghai and Dubai. Urban re-engineering has taken place on a greater scale, perhaps — Haussmann’s Paris, Lutyens’s New Delhi — but never so rapidly. Since Beijing was awarded the Olympic Games in 2001, the city has been pelting itself into modernity. By the opening of the Games, it will have added five new subway lines, 300 kilometres of road, thirty-seven new sports venues, and uncounted millions of square metres of retail, residence and office space. Hundreds of skyscrapers have been built in the past fifteen years. The dark and low-rise capital of the 1980s has become leggy and gaudied with neon.
Cranes have long been considered sacred in China, cherished by Buddhists,Taoists and the Manchu: black-necked, sandhill, red-crowned. Now a different type of crane dominates Beijing’s skyline: Positech, Manitowoc, Pegasus. Over half of the world’s construction cranes are presently in China. I can count thirty-four of them from the windows of my apartment alone, each with a red People’s Republic of China flag fluttering from its spire.
Human labour is so abundant here, planning restrictions so loose and safety regulations so scant that buildings can be knocked down and thrown up in astonishing times. Beijing’s population of migrant workers is estimated at five million; thousands more migrants arrive from the countryside every week. The majority are employed in the construction industry. You pass groups of them — yellow helmets, luminous tabards — smiling despite the hours, the distance from their families and the dangerous nature of the labour. Injuries are countless in the sense of unrecorded. The first year I came here, four men working on the building site next to my room were killed. Each was holding a corner of a sheet of safety netting. A gust of wind turned the netting into a sail, bellied it out and spinnakered the men into the air. Then the matting folded and they fell fifteen floors.
The full version of ‘Blitzed Beijing’ appears in Granta 101.To read on subscribe today.