This is Beijing?!

     Clear blue skies, wide open roads, clean streets and technology that would put Tokyo to shame...where is the backward, polluted industrial city I have heard so much? It strikes me that no tourist literature had ever described Beijing as "beautiful", but that is exactly the word that comes to mind as I wander through it. The paralympics is still ongoing, with western tourists and athletes crowding every corner of the city, and the whole city buzzes with excitement.

     The fireworks herald the end of the paralympics, and the last days of the olympic era come to a close. Gradually the tourists become less and less, and as they do, the threads begin to unravel. The roads, once relatively quiet, fill with cars, honking cars, making many streets a walkers' dream of gridlock. Construction, put on hold during the olympics, begins once more, from the giant cranes silently sliding around the sky to the ad-hoc welding, sawing and sledgehammering in the streets. And then one morning I wake up and the whole world is grey. Walking around, I find the once beautiful streets are now dank and lifeless, and sitting on top of a hill in the evening I watch the sun becoming dimmer and dimmer, disappearing behind a curtain of haze before it even gets close to the horizon, leaving me cold and depressed in the twilight.

     The subway system also goes through a dramatic transformation. When I first arrived during the Paralympics, I was amazed to see state of the art automatic ticket machines, escalators, and conveyor belts, and LCD TV's on every train, far surpassing the technology of even Tokyo's subway systems. Now, the subway begins to show its Chinese colours. The ticket system is completely incomprehensible to the locals, who just last year were using paper tickets, and each ticket gate requires several staff members to help the confused patrons. To make matters worse, every time they make a mistake the machines emit a piercingly loud high-pitched noise, ensuring that every station is a cacaphony of noise. There is one good thing about the transformation: locals have given up trying to work the ticket machines and buy their tickets from the staff instead, which means I never have to wait in line for the machine.

     On the trains themselves I am sometimes entertained by the regular propaganda screenings on the new televisions, with songs about the beautiful harmony of Chinese society, complete with video-clips of Tibetan people cheering and high fiveing Chinese visitors (I noticed that this particular ad campaign was never screened during the olympics), but for most of the time the TV's are simply quietly malfunctioning. To fill the silence, hawkers selling maps yell their way up and down the carriages, ocassionally replaced by duos invariably consisting of a pitiably disabled person singing sad ballads into a karoake microphone, and another running around the carriage asking for money.

     And while I reminisce about the pleasant days of the olympics when everything ran oh so smoothly, I am completely oblivious to a much greater chaos about to visit me. For next week is National Day, a week long holiday when ordinary Chinese people get a break from work and a chance to travel around their country. China is a country of 1300 million people, and when the majority of them decide to get up and go for a holiday, chaos inevitably follows shortly. Especially if you happen to be in China's most touristed city...

     On national day itself, I think to go to Tiananmen square, to watch the raising of the national flag and hopefully catch a glimpse of the Premier giving his speech. My hotel is only 20 minutes walk from Tiananmen square, it's the perfect opportunity, right? Well, my hotel used to be 20 minutes walk from Tiananmen square, it is now more like an hour. The streets are jammed full of people eagerly taking pictures of themselves in front of anything even moderately famous, tour guides waving little flags and wielding megaphones, and the occasional local looking murderously at the tourist invaders.

     The subway system becomes a complete nightmare, as any door, staircase or other bottleneck becomes a site of general pushing and shoving, and getting on and off trains falls only slightly short of mob violence on occasions. I resolve to simply sit in my hotel room and wait the week out, and I expect many locals are doing the same. Finally, the Chinese tourists leave as the foreign tourists had done only a few weeks ago, and Beijing is at peace once more. The newspapers triumphantly proclaiming that a new all-time record had been set for tourism during the week; in the period of one week, over 8 million people visited the city, including 2.8 million visitors to the olympic stadiums alone.

     No doubt Beijing has enjoyed its time in the spotlight, but most residents seem to be glad to see the tourists go. The locals wander the neighbourhood with no particular purpose, playing chess on the street, and spitting in the gutter. Sure, it's nice to be famous. But sometimes, it's nice just to be yourself...

                                            Nick Rennic (posted on 17-10-2008)