The Lost City
Coming in to land at Beijing, I always find myself thinking of the fitst time I came here, in 1973. The journey was interminable then. Commercial flights to Beijing did not fly over Soviet airspace but hopped across the Mediterranean and the Gulf States, stopped in the Indian subcontinent, then flew the last lap up over the Himalayas. Beijing was still, in those days, an exotic destination. As we approached, we all peered into the darkness, trying to make out the shape of the city. It was like landing on a deserted planet, with scarcely a light showing.
When the plane came to a halt, two PLA soldiers appeared at the door of the aircraft and looked over the arriving passengers. We disembarked into a small, deserted, dimly lit terminal, unadorned except for some slogans in English and Chinese that proclaimed such unlikely propositions as CHINA HAS FRIENDS ALL OVER THE WORLD. In 1973, China’s friends all over the world were few in number and eccentric in their views. The country was isolated, xenophobic and inward-looking.
Almost all that is left of those sensations is the smell that greets you as you disembark, in the autumn and winter at any rate. It is the smell of burning charcoal, still an important cooking and heating fuel. Everything else has changed beyond recognition. The slogans have gone, the PLA guards have different uniforms, the old airport is a neglected and soon-to-be-demolished annex of a large, modern terminal that overflows with passengers who do, these days, come from all over the world. The road into town, once a tree-lined country route more travelled by mule carts than by anything with an engine, is now a motorway. The city itself is a choking megalopolis, a maze of ill-planned and oversized high-rise developments, giant shopping plazas and hotels, cut through by urban freeways. The people who once inhabited the centre have been banished to distant suburbs. The intimacy of the city has been erased. It’s enough to induce nostalgia, even for those grim distant days of the Cultural Revolution.
I’ve landed at that airport so often since: in the Seventies, as the visitor numbers began to be swelled by the first burst of commercial tourism; in the Beijing spring of 1979, when Democracy Wall briefly became the forum for outpourings of political ideas and pent-up literary emotions; in the Eighties, when the pace of economic change quickened and the Maoist legacy was being dismantled; and in 1989, days after the Tiananmen massacre, when my taxi driver, still visibly shocked, pointed out the landmarks of the events—the crossroads where the people had managed to hold up an armoured column as it moved towards the square, the spot on a street where somebody had been killed, the bridge from which the troops had opened fire.
By 1989, the city had changed but was still recognizable. There were new hotels, even coffee bars. The authorities’ currency controls—their way of keeping a grip on the spending patterns of visitors and thereby monitoring the access of their own citizens to hard currency—were finally slipping. Young people were adopting bolder attitudes to fashion, music and personal freedoms. Many more of them were going abroad and not returning. Most headed for higher education opportunities in the United States where, after June 4, 40,000 Chinese students were immediately given green cards.
Ten years later, globalization and the market economy has changed the city so much that I struggle to recognize it. The city in my head, the map that is imprinted on my brain as clearly as the map of the London Underground, no longer corresponds to the Beijing I see around me. I try to superimpose this mental map on the dystopia in which I am trapped, and fail.
I learned this map on a bicycle—long, slow journeys, often in the teeth of cutting winds that penetrated the layers of clothing the city demands as the price of winter survival. The Chinese cycled slowly, almost meditatively, falling into conversation as they drifted along. There were horse-drawn carts, their drivers often asleep on top of their huge loads, and even, in the streets of the north-east quarter, where the colony of Uighur migrants from Xinjiang had made their homes, strings of moth-eaten camels. Now it is a city of cars and hardly a street that I once knew is recognizable, with the exception of those in the diplomatic quarter, where the embassies remain unaltered. The traffic patterns are so convoluted that on any journey by car I soon lose the sense of where I have been or where I am going.
My Beijing, and the Beijing of most of its residents, has disappeared. What was once the greatest walled city the world had ever known has been destroyed; a city that was the highest expression of a culture and a way of life has vanished under concrete.
Nostalgia is not an emotion to be trusted, but this visit gave me a chance to test out my own regrets for the vanished city against the feelings of those with greater rights over the place than I have: its residents, its artists, intellectuals, architects, writers and painters. I found them in mourning for the city they loved. Some were angry, some were simply grieving. None were celebrating a process that most of the people I talked to regarded as a triumph of barbarism. What pig-headed ideology had begun, globalization had finished.