Blitzed Beijing

The day I set out to walk Beijing’s axis — its skewer, its meridian — was bright and high. A steady northerly was blowing down the city, dispersing the pollution haze: a rare ‘blue-sky day’ in the phrase of SEPA, China’s environment agency. Cold and sharp; good conditions for a middle-distance walk. I reckoned the line — starting from Mao’s body in the south and ending at the new Olympic stadiums in the north – to be eight or so miles as a crow would fly it. Ten or twelve allowing for diversions and getting lost.

So I started walking. Out and past one of the six hairdresser’s on my street: as I approached, the coiffeur left the permhe was working on, walked out on to the street, cleared each nostril with an efficient clamp and a snort, shook his hands by way of washing them, then went back in to continue his work. Past the local restaurant specializing in Five Fragrance Donkey, and past its competitor, whose window-blazons were pushing a Dog Special for twenty-eight yuan: warming winter chow. Then south for a mile, down into the skyscraper-lined roads of the Central Business District: Beijing’s steel-and-glass canyonlands. Hundreds of feet up, plastic bags looped the loop and zoomed in the wind shears set up by the tall buildings. At Dawanglu, I caught the underground and surfaced atTiananmen Square, to begin the meridian proper.

Tiananmen Square is an open space that induces claustrophobia. It masquerades as a gathering place for the people, but the Party’s suspicion of unauthorized groupsmeans that surveillance there is of an exceptional density. Closed-circuit camera sight lines mesh invisibly. Public Security Bureau officers carry out stop-and-searches on people entering the square. Soldiers goose-step down its flanks. Blacked-out police vans park up in rows, ready for trouble. Plain-clothed PSB men mingle with the crowds.And there is not a single bench or seat in this, the largest civic plaza in the world. Moated by busy roads, cut across by the wind, and seatless: the square is designed to control presence and to thwart loitering.

So I didn’t dawdle. I walked up past supine Mao in his death hall — banking round the tat sellers who had locked on to intercept courses with me — past the friezes of the People’s Heroes, and then by the pedestrian underpass beneath Chang’an jie: the great avenue that runs east–west through central Beijing and cleaves Tiananmen Square from the Forbidden City.

In his book Seeing Like a State, James Scott discusses the fondness of absolute regimes for city-centre avenues.Why? Because, wide and penetrating, the avenue allows for the rapid deployment of tanks. Rangoon in 1996, Beijing in 1989: it was along avenues that tanks reached the protesters quickly and crushingly — another reason why Speer’s vision of a north–south avenue might have winningly appealed to the Party planners.

I chose the road that runs up the west flank of the Forbidden City and walked north along it for amile. It was cold out of the sun, in the shade of buildings and trees: ginkgos on the turn fromgreen to gold, acacias, poplars. For every tree I passed I saw two or more stumps,chainsawed off an inch above ground level. Beijing, a city once renowned for its tree cover, has been steadily deforesting itself for street-widening and parking.

Labourers were at work every few yards: smashing down, mixing up, cementing over. Men in shabby suit jackets — pinstripe, singlebreasted — and battered canvas plimsolls. Some stopped their work and leaned on their long-handled spades to watch me pass. No one stares at you in Britain or America now, since eye contact is a potential precursor to assault. In China, however, staring remains standard issue. Three men walked down the pavement towards me, the two outside men each with an arm flung round the shoulder of the one in the middle. They looked tired, but were smiling. They wore blue boiler suits spattered with white paint as thick as candle wax. Together, they made a Jackson Pollock triptych. Another man, spanner in hand, was bent over the innards of a Maoist-era tractor, its side panels gone and its body rusted horseback-brown. Further up the street, a cement lorry was piping its load into the foundations of a future building. I stood and watched the tube down which the liquid cement was spating, juddering with the force of the flow.

China now consumes more than half of the world’s cement. This is one of the reasons why air pollution in its cities is so notoriously bad. Fragments of particulate matter — ‘fines’, as they are called — hang in the air: soil dust, coal dust and above all cement dust. The Friday before my walk, I had woken to find visibility down to a hundred yards at most. A yellow smog, thick and diceable as tofu, filled the streets. Most flights were cancelled.A health warning was issued advising the old and the young to stay indoors.

It’s at night that you really notice the dust, because artificial light suddenly makes the fines visible. Car headlights show as swirling cones. Each neon sign gains a smoggish halo or projection of itself. This is what I am breathing, you think. Air that is raw against the eyeball and silty in the larynx. Recently, a new term was coined to describe the polluted air: wumai (see characters below), a portmanteau of fog (wu) and haze (mai ), a derivation that makes the smog sound considerably more benevolent than it is.