On Friday I took my day off class to walk around inner Beijing. I got to walk around the financial district near Xidan, the hutongs from Qianmen Xiheyan to Yangmeizhu Xiejie, the Dashilan commercial district, the surroundings of Tiananmen Square, the old legation district around Zhengyi Road, the shopping centres of Wangfujing and the touristified hutongs behind them. It was been a lovely day, although my feet were aching by the end of it…
I was struck by all the different parts of Beijng. There are the giant gleaming office blocks in the financial district, showing off their wealth and style and space. There are the run-down apartment blocks where people are happy to live but the landlords are not interested in keeping up appearances. There are new mansions for the new upper-middle classes with giant gates to keep out the riff-raff. There are the opulent hotels with lavish decorations for their important foreign guests. There are the old hutongs where families continue to live as they have for decades, sometimes hanging onto pre-revolution lifestyles that haven’t changed much for hundreds of years. There are hutongs that have been converted to new uses, such as shops, restaurants and tourist traps. There are commercial districts that are trying to be as Western as possible. There are commercial districts that are trying to be as Chinese as possible, pretending to be hutongs, but still modified subtly to make them comfortable for westerners. Then there are the amazing grand government buildings: Tiananmen Square itself, Mao’s mausoleum, the museum, the Great Hall of the People, the Supreme Court. The legation quarter has old European-style buildings repurposed for Chinese use. Then of course there are the ancient treasures: the Forbidden City, the Temple of Heaven, the Summer Palace, the Lama Temple…
China is a mixture of all kinds. There is the old and the new, there are people from all different provinces that can be so different, there is communism and capitalism… I was thinking of what bits I love most (mainly the old rather than the new) but realising what I love is all of it together, how it doesn’t make sense but all seems to work! Chinese people are a mixture inside of all of these things too. The same person can love the history, architecture, culture and ideas of ancient China, but still be strongly invested in the new China too, bringing together ideas from Confucius, communism, globalisation, science and commercialism. I can’t just separate China into separate packages, I have to try and get a grasp of the whole.