SinoNet: The city that ate the world

[Jacqueline Winter]

> Source: The Observer (10/16/05):
> http://observer.guardian.co.uk/magazine/story/0,11913,1591270,00.html 
> 
> The city that ate the world
> By Deyan Sudjic
> 
> It's goodbye to mao and hello to Europe's top architects, all Australia's iron ore... and half
> the World's concrete. With its sights set on Olympic gold, Beijing is being rebuilt round the
> clock.
> 
> Beijing's new airport is rising from the dry plains east of the city so fast that, in just four
> years, China will have designed, built and opened a structure larger than all the terminals at
> Heathrow combined. That's rather less time than the lawyers spent arguing about Heathrow's
> Terminal 5. 'It's the world's largest and most advanced airport building,' says the project's
> architect, Norman Foster. With airports at Stansted and Hong Kong already under his belt, he
> should know better than
>  anyone. But it still looks more like a medieval battlefield conceived on the scale of a
> Japanese epic, rather than the sleek glass-and-steel bubble shown in Foster's glittering
> computer renderings. Swarming warrior armies cluster around giant cranes, more than 100 of them,
> ranged like ancient siege engines across a frontline almost two miles long. The dust swirling
> across the landscape makes it impossible to count more than a few of them before they disappear
> into the acrid haze. 
> 
> Touring the site in a Chinese-made Buick, it's hard as a spectator to grasp exactly what is
> going on. Eventually, all the furious activity crystallises into a pattern that begins to make
> some kind of sense. The banners flying from makeshift flagpoles sunk into the mud everywhere
> carry the names of individual work gangs, each with their own territory. The gangs move like
> disciplined cohorts of soldier ants, identifiable by the colour of their helmets, navigating
> blindly but effectively around the o
> bstacles that litter the site. Some are handling new deliveries. Others are preparing them for
> use. Others shift barrowloads of nuts and bolts across the site or, two at a time, carry steel
> bars by hand. In the foreground, groups of men in crumpled suits stack heaps of reinforcing
> steel, ready to be bent into the hooks that will keep them securely in place when they are
> finally buried in concrete. There are dumps of steel everywhere. So much steel, in fact, that it
> starts to become only too clear how the Chinese hunger for the metal has pushed up world prices
> to the point that British construction sites are rediscovering the art of building in concrete.
> There is enough steel here to explain why Australia has reopened iron-ore mines and why ship
> brokers have taken bulk carriers out of mothballs from their anchorages in the Falmouth estuary.
> 
> There are stacks of bicycles amid the welding stations and forests of concrete columns. Beyond
> them is a gigantic concrete raft, from whi
> ch intricate tufts of reinforcing steel protrude like basket work. Far in the distance more
> clusters of helmeted dots swarm around craters sunk six floors into the ground. Huge white
> concrete-mixer trucks wheel and turn in packs at the lip of the void, marshalled by men with
> whistles and batons, delivering loads in a continuous stream, day and night.
> 
> There are 35,000 men on this site, with another 5,000 due to join them by the end of the year.
> But from my vantage point, a kind of diving board projecting over the edge of the 500ft-wide
> channel that has been dug from one end of the site to the other, I can focus my mind only on two
> of them. One is dressed in a military tunic; the other is wearing a suit that must once have
> been his holiday best, but is now covered in stains. Both have yellow hard hats, both wear
> tennis shoes. The shorter man has a satchel slung across his shoulder, and holds a wrench.
> 
> At first I assume he is the more skilled of the two, and so the leader. The
> y are perched on a scaffolding tower 50ft high, rising from the bottom of a trench cut deep into
> the mud.
> 
> The taller man, who looks barely out of his teens, stands with his legs wide apart, feet
> splayed, one hand fully outstretched, clinging to the nearest secure piece of vertical
> scaffolding. He has his safety harness wrapped around his waist, but its clip dangles uselessly
> behind him. Without looking down, he pauses to steady himself for a moment, then, with a single
> effortless movement, uses his free hand to swing up another heavy steel scaffolding pole and
> drop it into the clamp that will keep it secure. His slender body forms a big X as he defines
> the diagonals in the steel rectangle that frames him. He holds the scaffolding in position just
> long enough for his partner to bolt it into place, and it becomes clear that he is the one who
> is taking the risks, and making the decisions. The task complete, they rest for a minute. Then,
> without a word, they swing themselves alo
> ng the scaffolding like tightrope walkers, to repeat the manoeuvre with balletic grace and
> precision.
> 
> Working without their harnesses, it is a death-defying performance. I can't take my eyes off
> them for fear that if I do, one will drop the scaffolding pole and fall. They are earning around
> $7 each a day, not enough for the taxi ride back into town.
> 
> Back in the site office (the hastily requisitioned ballroom of the current airport hotel, out of
> bounds now to the remaining guests) there is a winking red digital countdown to completion. When
> the 1,027 days remaining have flickered down to zero, the spot on which the two men are standing
> will be the track the shuttle train uses to whisk newly arrived passengers from the aircraft
> door to the baggage hall.
> 
> 'The airport will be the gateway to the city,' says Foster. 'It's advanced not only
> technologically, but also in terms of passenger experience, operational efficiency and
> sustainability. It will be welcoming and uplifting, a 
> symbol of place, its soaring aerodynamic roof and dragon-like form will celebrate the thrill and
> poetry of flight and evoke traditional Chinese colours and symbols.'
> 
> In short, the airport is not simply about shifting large numbers of people in and out of the
> city. Just as important will be its part in the conspicuous assertion of a new kind of China and
> its modernity. It is one of a dozen huge projects Beijing is building at furious speed to
> transform the city in time for the Olympic games of 2008.
> 
> For China, the Olympics are being used as the chance to make a defiant and unmistakable
> statement that the country has taken its place in the modern world.
> 
> The site works in three shifts, seven days a week. Nothing stops the cranes, the concrete
> mixers, the welders and the scaffolders. Not even the discovery of fossilised dinosaur bones
> that turned up in the mud ahead of the bulldozers one day, or a carved ancient stone, saved from
> the mechanical diggers and re-erected next to a
>  cluster of huts.
> 
> The site is still working on the May Day holiday, when the rest of China shuts down for a week.
> The workers here stop only for the Chinese New Year, when it gets too cold for concrete to set
> properly. The site comes to a standstill and the armies return to their villages until the thaw
> comes.
> 
> During the day they brave the dust storms and the summer heat. At night they work under arc
> lights. They sleep in ramshackle clusters of huts and green army tents in a series of shanty
> towns scattered around the site. The huts vary in size and shape. Some are made from plywood,
> with roofs of corrugated clear-plastic sheets, held down by bricks to stop them blowing away.
> There is no glass in the windows and nothing more elaborate than roofless latrine blocks for
> sanitation. These men are the 21st-century's version of the navvies who built Britain's railways
> and canals. They are the legal, the semi-legal and the illegal migrant workers, drawn from
> China's desperately po
> or hinterland in their millions by the prospect of jobs in construction and in the factories
> that the booming cities have to offer. One in every five of Shanghai's population of 20m is an
> illegal migrant. Beijing is not far behind. These migrants are Chinese citizens with fewer
> rights in their nation's capital than Colombians living illegally in California.
> 
> Everywhere you go in Beijing you can see clusters of spray-painted numbers scrawled over walls,
> on trees and gateposts, under flyovers and on lampposts. In Los Angeles or Harlesden they would
> be gang tags. But there is no graffiti in China. They are the mobile phone numbers of people
> looking for work.
> 
> The first time I went to Beijing was in 1992. There were no direct flights from London then, and
> the airport felt like a cold provincial bus station, with hard wooden benches. Its
> Sino-Stalinist architecture suggested the intimate connection between air travel in China and
> party privilege.
> 
> Flickering black-and-white televi
> sion screens signalled departures with erratic imprecision and a kiosk selling Napoleon brandy
> in bottles shaped like vintage cars, costing a worker three months' pay, stood in lieu of a
> duty-free shop. The two-lane road into town was clogged with carts bringing in mountains of
> winter-green vegetables to feed the city. And Beijing, once you finally got there, went dark
> after 9pm.
> 
> By the time I went back, 10 years later, there was a brand-new airport dripping with travertine
> and lined with gold-relief depictions of the country's major tourist attractions. A six-lane
> toll road took you into town. In the city centre, already sprouting skyscrapers, vast areas of
> the traditional hutong courtyard houses were being flattened. There were five-star luxury hotels
> with their Australian chefs and their cigar bars. And the main streets were beginning to
> delineate themselves with neon. But the pavement cycle-repair shops and the kitchen hands
> outside the cafes chopping up trays slippery w
> ith poultry entrails made it still an unmistakably Chinese city.
> 
> Now Norman Foster is building what amounts to the city's third airport, a vast structure that
> will handle 53m passengers a year, and Beijing is changing again. A decade ago, it still felt
> like a dim echo of the West. Now it looks disturbingly like the future. As part of the airport
> development, there will be a high-speed rail link to the city centre and a second motorway toll
> road. The government hasn't yet decided which rail system it will use, but it is likely to
> follow Shanghai and install Germany's Maglev, a low-flying aircraft of a train that'll reach
> 240mph on its 11-minute ride to the airport.
> 
> Beijing is the capital of the world's fastest-growing economy, provoking a titanic struggle
> between a totalitarian political system and the liberalisation that is the presumed product of
> its economic transformation. By some estimates, half the world's annual production of concrete
> and one-third of its steel output
>  is being consumed by China's construction boom. The second ring road that marked the city
> limits until the Eighties has been followed by the building of a third, fourth and fifth ring.
> The sixth is under construction. Cars move around disconnected clumps of newly completed towers.
> There are now more than 2m cars in the city - already enough to wipe out all the improvements in
> air quality achieved by the expulsion of heavy industry from Beijing's centre. The city map
> looks like a dartboard, with the void of the Forbidden City as its empty bull's-eye. And with
> the abruptness of a randomly aimed dart, entire new districts appear arbitrarily as if from
> nowhere. A city that, until 1990, had no central business district, and little need of it, now
> has a cluster of glass towers that look like rejects from Singapore or Rotterdam. And these, in
> turn, are now being replaced and overshadowed by a new crop of taller, slicker towers, the
> product of the international caravan of architectu
> ral gunslingers that has arrived in town to take part in this construction free-fire zone. Rem
> Koolhaas, Jacques Herzog, Zaha Hadid, Jean Nouvel and Will Alsop are all building, or trying to
> build here.
> 
> You can get some idea of what this new Beijing is going to be like in the brand-new museum of
> city planning, a suave six-storey structure faced in black marble, close to the southern end of
> Tiananmen Square. Cross the entrance hall and you find yourself slowly rising the full height of
> the building on a sequence of escalators. One wall of the atrium is dominated by a vast bronze
> relief map of Beijing as it was in 1949 when the People's Liberation Army made their triumphal
> entry. You can still see the Forbidden City where Mao spent his first night in a pleasure
> palace, and the Gate of Heavenly Peace from which he declared the foundation of the People's
> Republic also survives. But there is not much else left of the city lovingly depicted in
> miniature. Mao mutilated the ancient 
> fabric of Beijing to carve out the megalomaniacal scale of Tiananmen Square. He had mile after
> mile of the city's ancient walls, and the gates punctuating them, demolished. The destruction
> took a decade. But Mao's Great Hall of the People and the Museum of the Revolution, two huge
> hulks on either side of Tiananmen, are little compensation for what was lost. They were
> carefully aligned on the axis of the Forbidden City that still defines Beijing, to claim the
> legitimacy of China's imperial past for the People's Republic. Mao's buildings are also big
> enough to eclipse the palaces and to demonstrate the superiority of his own regime.
> 
> The main draw in the planning museum is on the top floor. A space the size of an Olympic
> swimming pool contains a vast model of how Beijing is going to look. You approach by walking
> over a huge series of aerial photographs taken from surveillance satellites that show you the
> city fringes. Lit from beneath and protected by thick sheets of glass, it 
> feels like flying over Beijing's suburbs. It's a disorientating prelude to the city centre and
> is modelled in jaw-dropping detail, demonstrating not only how much of the city shown in bronze
> downstairs has disappeared, but also that the city Mao built to replace it has itself vanished.
> 
> Tiananmen survives, along with the Great Hall of the People and the Museum of the Revolution,
> but everything else is up for grabs. And even the museum isn't what it was. The Museum of the
> Revolution became the Museum of China in 2003 and immediately closed for renovation and
> expansion. It will reopen, more than doubled in size, in 2007. In the meantime, there is a
> hallucinatory temporary display of waxworks. The first tableau portrays the astronaut China
> launched into space last year, accompanied by a schoolgirl in tartan skirt and pigtails. A
> sweeping curved terrace is populated by the founding fathers of the People's Republic. They are
> here enjoying a cigarette and a glass or two of whisky, 
> with Mao a commanding figure, standing at the centre. But it clearly implies that this stage of
> the foundation of the republic is over. Deng Xiaoping - purged by Mao for taking the capitalist
> road, rehabilitated, purged again, and then rehabilitated again in time to trigger China's
> opening to the world that led to the paroxysm of construction reshaping Beijing - stands apart
> from his comrades. He is portrayed against a backdrop of the skyscrapers from Shenzhen, rather
> than in a rest home for retired revolutionaries.
> 
> Immediately west of Tiananmen Square, hundreds of courtyard houses were flattened to build the
> national opera house, a megalomaniacal glass egg designed by Paul Andreu, a French architect
> specialising in airports. His contribution to Beijing is to put the opera house in the middle of
> an artificial lake. It's the perfect contemporary face for a regime that believes in the use of
> tanks as a modern instrument of crowd control.
> 
> Away to the north is the Olympic distr
> ict, with its 100,000-seat stadium, designed in the form of a giant bird's nest by Herzog and de
> Meuron, who were responsible for Tate Modern. Last time I was in Beijing this so-called Olympic
> Park was still being cleared of the acres of small-scale housing that had once covered it. Teams
> of bent old men were picking through the rubble to salvage what they could of the homes and
> shops and workshops that had just been destroyed. Now its circular shape has emerged from the
> ground, giving it the look of a ruined colosseum. Even China has been known to suffer occasional
> bouts of vertigo in its breakneck transformation.
> 
> There was a pause last year while the Politburo did its sums to see if it could afford
> everything. It decided that it couldn't, and axed the retractable roof on the stadium, saving
> some money. The area to the east of the city centre, where the new embassies were built in the
> Fifties, was the obvious place to build the first international hotels, and the commercial
>  towers followed. In the planning museum, this area gets a huge model all to itself. It is
> dominated by Rem Koolhaas's new headquarters for Central China TV, a single development that,
> with 6m sq ft of space, is as big as Canary Wharf. It is just one of 300 towers that will
> constitute Beijing's answer to Lower Manhattan. Building it has involved tearing down the state
> motorcycle factory that was once the pride of the Mao era.
> 
> The construction workers - from the same firm that is building the airport - have moved into the
> last surviving production hall. 'Long Live Workers' Self-Management' proclaim the fading slogans
> on the walls. The ground has already been prepared for Koolhaas's project, a colossus that takes
> the form of two leaning towers, 70 floors high, that prop each other up with links at top and
> bottom to form a gigantic Mobius strip.
> 
> The two main towers lean towards each other and are connected at the tip by a 10-floor L-shaped
> wing that juts out into space. To the
>  non-expert eye it looks as if the unsupported structure spanning the void is increasing the
> load on the two towers. In fact, it allows them to stabilise each other, so reducing the
> quantity of steel needed. Koolhaas has emerged as the most challenging of the crop of
> architectural celebrities working in China, and he has been the subject of bitter criticism for
> it.
> 
> His Chinese opponents complain that his building is ugly, inappropriate and wasteful. Westerners
> such as the critic Ian Buruma question the propriety of designing a building that can be seen as
> endorsing the propaganda arm of a repressive state that tells a billion people what to think. It
> is criticism which Koolhaas dismisses with growing impatience. 'Participation in China's
> modernisation does not have a guaranteed outcome,' he told one interviewer. 'The future of China
> is the most compelling conundrum, its outcome affects all of us and a position of resistance
> seems somehow ornamental.'
> 
> Beijing's new landmarks
>  promise a new China, one that is sophisticated enough to move beyond the traditional limits of
> totalitarian architecture and the banal expediency of its first attempts at modernisation. It
> promises a glossy future, but one which is being built with Stalinist despatch, very much like
> the old one. To ensure that everything is ready before the games start, the government has
> decreed that every crane at the airport, at the stadium, at CCTV and everywhere else in Beijing
> must be down by the end of 2007.
> 
> It may help lay the dust that hangs over the city to rest, but it is going to be bad news for
> the armies of construction workers from the airport, and the stadium, and the China TV towers.
> Their jobs will come to an end, and with the construction industry in Beijing effectively shut
> down for a year, there will be nothing for them to do. They will be shipped back to their
> distant villages, and two centuries back in time, leaving the glossy new city that they have
> built to the part
> y elite and the foreigners. The new Beijing will be a hugely impressive demonstration of China's
> newfound status as an economic superpower. But it will also serve to highlight the faultline
> that divides the country's rich and poor. 
> 
> Guardian Unlimited � Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005
> 
> 
>