Beijing's Revolution
By Simon Elegant/Beijing
Lu Hao is putting the finishing touches on his latest work, a huge portrait of a pigtailed young girl. Dressed in slacks, a pink polo shirt and loafers, Lu chats casually with a string of visitors who drift in and out of his studio. Some are fellow artists and dealers from the community several thousand strong occupying the courtyards and alleys here in Songzhuang, in Beijing's eastern suburbs. The conversation ranges from gossip about colleagues through the sources of artistic inspiration to the merits of colleges in Australia, where Lu's son is studying. Later, Lu and I hop into his brand-new, lime green Jaguar and drive over to the site of the sprawling house he is having built overlooking a small lake. Proudly showing off the view from the second floor, Lu extols the virtues of living in Songzhuang. "All my friends and colleagues have moved here, so we can get in contact easily. And it's cheap here too. This whole house is only costing me $800,000 to build. Imagine what I would get for that in New York. Nothing!"
This Olympic summer, Beijing is buzzing. All over the city, iconic buildings designed by some of the world's best-known architects are changing the skyline--here a stadium like a bird's nest, there a media-company headquarters built in such crazy elevations that you wonder how it will stand up. But for me, it is the casual prosperity so evident in Songzhuang that proves that this is a city going through a revolution. For I can remember precisely the situation faced by artists when I visited Beijing for the first time, in 1994. Then the art scene was still underground, and most artists were poor, often living in squalid conditions. Meeting with foreign reporters could be a problem, I was told, because the authorities had just come down particularly hard on artists, who were still (as if Mao Zedong had yet been alive) seen as a source of "spiritual pollution." Many artists weren't even in Beijing, having fled the city after the bloody suppression of the Tiananmen Square demonstrations in 1989.
Nowadays, many of those exiles have returned home and joined one of the most exciting contemporary-art scenes in the world. But the explosion in Beijing's arts world is only one aspect of a broader cultural, social and even commercial flowering of the capital, until recently a symbol of authoritarian conformity to many outside China. Much has been written about the transformation of Beijing's hardware ahead of this summer's Olympic Games--both the whirlwind of development that has swept away huge swaths of the old city and the waves of cars that are choking its roads and poisoned its air. But to those of us who live here, it is the metamorphosis of the city's "software," as it hurtles toward becoming one of the globe's great cities, that is really striking. "It is a horrible place to live, but I wouldn't be anywhere else on the planet" is how Kaiser Kuo, a Chinese-American rock star turned digital guru, describes Beijing today. "You get addicted to the excitement, speed and change. There's nowhere else like it."
Beijing today is a vibrant, increasingly confident metropolis of nearly 20 million, the proud leader of a national social and cultural transformation that is developing hand in hand with China's amazing economic boom. In culture, the blossoming encompasses performance art, painting, sculpting, rock 'n' roll, experimental music, film, poetry and literature. Commercially, where once it conceded all to Shanghai, China's longtime economic powerhouse, Beijing is now at the forefront of a wave of entrepreneurship in telecoms, media, software and the Web. Socially too, Beijing is on fire, with new clubs, bars and restaurants opening every day. The city, which can still mark the year its first privately owned restaurant opened (1980), now boasts some 20,000 dining establishments, whose fare ranges from increasingly refined cooking from all corners of China to haute cuisine from world-renowned chefs like New York City's Daniel Boulud, who has been in the capital to supervise the soft opening of his first restaurant outside the U.S. Recently, Boulud and I toured one of the city's bustling wet markets, then dined on our purchases at the new eatery, in a building off Tiananmen Square that housed the American embassy until the communist revolution in 1949. "Beijing has been slow in catching up, but now it is going through a renaissance," says Boulud.
If there is any one group that is the driving force behind the metamorphosis of Beijing, it is outsiders like Kuo. Be they born somewhere else in China or half a world away, a flood of migrants has peacefully occupied the capital in recent years, drawn to Beijing to seek fame and fortune or simply out of a burning desire to watch history unfold. The city I first visited--where the lights were out by 9 p.m. and creativity was a dirty word--is gone.
There is, of course, one area where little has changed: politics. Despite allowing Beijingers (and indeed all Chinese) vastly more freedom in their personal lives, the Communist Party still suppresses any public discussion of the legitimacy of its rule or talk of alternatives to the current authoritarian system of government. And there's no doubt that the same party cadres that allowed Beijing's cultural flowering to happen still have the ability to smother the creative explosion if it gets out of hand.
That reality has been vividly illustrated in recent months as the authorities made final preparations for the Games. Instead of ushering in the new openness the Olympics were supposed to foster, the government has clamped down on almost every aspect of life in the name of security. Thousands of foreigners living in China have been unable to renew their visas; many would-be tourists have been equally unlucky, leaving hotels that had expected to be bursting at the seams with occupancy rates under 50%. Organizers have been told unofficially that all outdoor gatherings in the months before the Games are banned. Clubs that had operated with impunity are suddenly having trouble with their licenses. Human-rights activists, public-interest lawyers and other dissenting voices have been jailed or harassed. Police even detained and interrogated members of the Hash House Harriers, a beery running club, suspicious that the flour they used to mark their runs might be part of a terrorist attack.
Such excesses by the authorities will almost certainly diminish once the Games are over. And in any case, it's increasingly obvious that as the capital's creative sectors bloom, so does the ability of those working in them to circumvent or ignore the rules. That has helped shape a second city hidden under the bland fac,ade of broad boulevards and marbled ministries, argues Hu Xudong, a noted poet, columnist and professor of literature at Peking University. "Underneath the official Beijing we have another Beijing that's more like Latin America than China," he says. The city's other art scenes are supercharged as well. "Ninety percent of China's film directors live here, and so do most of our writers." Today, Hu concludes, "Beijing is a place of real magic."
Perhaps the best place to experience Beijing's special energy is Zhongguancun, a western region of the city where numerous universities and colleges are located, including China's two top academies, Peking and Tsinghua universities. When I first visited Peking University, the area surrounding the campus consisted of grimy single- or double-story brick buildings and open fields in what was then the outskirts of the city. Now it is a bustling commercial hub of shopping malls and glass-and-steel office buildings filled with China's leading media and technology companies--giants like Microsoft and Google and hundreds of tiny start-ups. Victor Koo, a thirtysomething Internet pioneer, moved the headquarters of his company, Youku, China's most popular YouTube equivalent, to the area in April. "You have to be here," Koo says. "From a recruiting standpoint alone, this is where everyone is."
Maybe I'm a little too old to appreciate a heaving mosh pit screaming for an encore, but there's no doubt they're nurturing their own kind of dream down the street at D-22, Beijing's bleeding-edge rock club. Its fans say the unassuming club, right between Tsinghua and Peking universities, houses one of the most exciting music scenes in the world, a hothouse for new talent that rivals London's or New York City's. From the crimson walls of the second-story balcony hang 13 portraits that have become the club's hall of fame--local bands like P.K. 14, Joyside, Hedgehog and Carsick Cars. D-22's sophistication and huge variety--one night it featured a performance of classical Chinese opera between sets--trigger memories of the stultifying Beijing of the old days. Back in the early 1990s, I was proudly escorted to the happening place at the time: a poky bar in the diplomatic neighborhood, featuring plastic stools and rickety tables. My memory of the entertainment is hazy, but I think it involved someone crooning syrupy ballads while accompanying himself on an acoustic guitar. On a typical Saturday night at D-22, by contrast, the jam-packed crowd sways and screams, with drunken German exchange students moshing alongside long-haired Chinese musicians checking out the competition. A young Chinese woman in tight denim shorts dives from the stage onto the crowd and is passed hand to hand around the room before being unceremoniously dumped onto the floor. Carsick Cars launches into the song Zhongnanhai--the name of both the central government compound and a popular cigarette brand. In what could pass for political commentary--or possibly following some critical impulse obscure even to themselves--people in the crowd shower the band with loose cigarettes.
The godfather of this scene is Michael Pettis, 50, a former Wall Street bond trader who is now an economics professor at Peking U. A longtime music fan, he began to investigate the Beijing rock scene when he moved here in 2002. He wasn't impressed. "Beijing at the time was a provincial city. It was not that interesting," Pettis says. "Bands could only get an audience to the extent that they copied New York or London." Pettis, who ran a club in New York City in the early 1980s, decided to open his own place. "I figured, if we do it, after four or five years we're going to get an audience, and there will be an explosion in Beijing," he says. "We were shocked. Two years later, I would say that Beijing is one of the top five or 10 cities in the world for music."
To be sure, some old habits linger. On July 4, Pettis was told that though his club had previously not needed a license, he now had to apply for one and could not stage any shows until he received it. He hopes and expects that such stringency is temporary and that when the Olympics have come and gone, things will return to normal. "I can't wait until they're done," he says with a sigh.
That's a common refrain. Beijing may have been put in a straitjacket for the Games. But it's come too far too fast to be closed down for good. The day after the closing ceremony of the Olympics, watch out for cigarettes and girls in denim shorts flying through the air.
With reporting by With Reporting by Austin Ramzy/Beijing