I woke up this morning in Ulaan Bataar and struggled my way
onto the airplane to catch a flight to Beijing. I fell asleep right when I got on
the plane, woke up for the meal, then passed out until we landed on the tarmac in Beijing.
When we were in the airport, one of the guys pulled up the air quality in
Beijing, which was deemed “hazardous”, the highest level. After we landed I
looked out the window and I could not see any of the landscape because it was
cloaked in the thickest layer of smog I had ever seen. When we got off the plane and into the airport it was filled with modern architecture that put all other airports to shame. We were in a single terminal,
yet it was expansive and we needed to get on an airtran just to go to baggage
claim. The ceiling had a wooden finish
and there were giant glass windows that gave the airport an even grander
feeling. Yet outside the glass windows was smog that looked so threatening that I felt as if I was
trapped in a fish bowl, with a toxic environment that could kill me
within a couple of breathes. Good thing I have my masks!
Welcome to Smog
We then got into a bus to Peking University,
the Harvard equivalent in China. The roads leading away from the airport were
well maintained and there were flowerbeds and green lawns, but with the
backdrop of smog it was impossible to appreciate any of the landscape. On our way into the
city, we would see the shadowy outline of buildings in the far off distance.
The whole scene looked not post-socialist, but post-apocalyptic as if from the
movie Book of Eli. When the buildings
were close enough to identify, I noticed they shared the same type of socialist
architecture that I saw on the periphery of Moscow, yet it was not as condensed
and there were pink and orange buildings that added a diversity of color as
opposed to the gray in Moscow.
When we got closer to Peking Univeristy, there were many
modern buildings. Peking University was in a gated community, but the
architecture was not too impressive and the housing for students was in
socialist style housing. We arrived at the Shaoyuan Guesthouse and when I looked up at the Chinese characters, I could
actually understand the string of characters from my Japanese knowledge of kanji characters! This had been happening to me all over Beijing where I could
understand bits and pieces of the language and identify buildings. Kanji are
definitely my weak point in Japanese, but being able to understand and think
only about character meaning was an incredible exercise and as I
move further east on this trip, the more I am beginning to understand. I can’t wait to arrive in
Japan where everything fits together!
When we went up to our rooms it was out of this world. It
was three person suite set up and our own bedrooms the size of a 4 person trans-siberian train compartment! There is even a shower with warm water! I then took the time
to open my bag and HANG five articles of clothing and EMPTY my backpack. I
think I’m in heaven. We then went down for an authentic Chinese dinner and the
Columbia Global Center. The Global Center was a modern building and the lay out
of iconic Columbia images, the beige wooden finish with silver letterings
reminded me of the Columbia Alumni Affairs Building and I definitely felt right
at home.
Already Home
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sYRm0Xyn328
We had an evening lecture by Lars, of Beijing Postcards,
on the history of Beijing as a city and how it has evolved into the city it is today. Today, Beijing has no major body of water near it or running through it unlike most other big cities (London, New York, SF), an in this respect it was similar to Ulaan Bataar. The
reason why Beijing became the capital of China was because of its strategic
location surrounded by mountains that serve as natural barriers and the three
major roadways that ran to the city and the waterway, which had actually dried
up in recent years. Beijing has served as the capital of China during even Mongolian and Manchu
rule, showing that its strategic importance has lasted the test of time. The
city had four different “cities”: The Forbidden City, The Imperial City, The
Tartar City and the Chinese City, with the Forbidden City in the center and
each city was further in the periphery. In the imperial periods, the city had many gates and curfews to be enforced. This
created small communities within the larger city and kept the people away from
each other so they could not easily mobilize on their own. From the hill behind the Forbidden City the rulers could see a view of the entire city, giving him or her perspective of unity that the commoner would have no access to. In 1949 when the
communist came to power, they created a road that cut directly through the center
of the city and took the gates down. Mao did this because he
wanted everything to go directly to the center of the city, yet the practical
issue was that as the population increased the city center became extremely congested.
The Four Old Cities of Beijing
Lars - The Excited Austrian Urbanist
At the end of the lecture Lars brought forth an extremely
interesting point about the sustainability of Beijing. Beijing has no major
waterways and bringing water into the city is a giant challenge. There are
people constantly moving into the city and pollution is raising serious health risks.
With these serious infrastructure issues, the party has suggested large scale
environmental projects to move water from the southern rivers to the north in
Beijing. Unlike other regimes, it cannot move the capital to a new city because
the political turbulence of that action would cause extreme regime instability.
It is interesting to see how the Chinese party will approach this issue because
of the looming time horizon and the radical solutions that they propose to avoid shocks like in the case of the Financial
Crisis of 2008.
BTW – the smog is so depressing. You can’t see the sun, you can’t breathe and you can't escape.
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