Beijing's Grey Shade of Red

As an avowed urbanist, I would venture that, with thanks to Will Rogers, I never met a city I didn't like. I can usually find something captivating in the crookedest medieval alleys, most absurd strip malls, and most squat skylines. I've been to Paris, Berlin, Dallas, and Des Moines, and I've loved them all. Until Beijing.

I had visited Beijing in 2002 and liked it well enough, wandering among the requisite icons: Tiananmen Square, Buddhist temples, the Forbidden City, old Mao in repose. They are an odd mix of tourist attraction and historical artifact, but whether capitalist, communist, or imperial, they draw just enough attention away from the unspeakable sprawl that surrounds them.

Ever since Marco Polo's journey, it's been fashionable to be fascinated by China, and understandably so. But whereas Marco Polo visited Beijing only once, I came back. There on business, I had neither time nor desire to dally with that which The Party would have preferred I see. I could have taken a gander at China’s new collection of modern architecture, gathered for the pleasure of NBC’s Olympic cameras, but I cannot fathom why I would travel 6,000 miles only to see buildings designed by Europeans. I’m certain that the Bird’s Nest is astounding, but it would be no less so in any other city – preferably one less dingy.

What the television and design magazines don't show—in those endless articles about those half-dozen buildings—is that Beijing trades on starchitecture because everything else in it is grey, lifeless, and oppressive, focusing singlemindedly on commerce. The city has hardly invested in anything so genteel as a proper streetscape (indeed, it has bulldozed most of its historic walkable hutong neighborhoods). Identical apartment towers stretch across the skyline, and thoroughfares that would qualify as minor freeways pass as everyday boulevards. I did not dare ride the vaunted subway alone, not because of the language barrier (of which there is none – signs and announcements are in English) but because I knew that upon emerging from the portal I would have no way of knowing whether I was facing Tibet or Mongolia.

At a glance, each intersection looks the same: massive boulevard, pedestrian tunnel, and towers. There isn’t a suitable point of reference (assuming you could see one through the smog, which is more like smoke than haze), and they’re not the sort of quaint mysterious blocks that you want to get lost in in Paris or Rome. There’s not even a CBD. Since the emperors built Beijing around the Forbidden City, the center is a void, meaning that everything is an edge city, with no meeting place or anchor.

Because I value my lungs more than my legs, jogging too was out of the question. So I was limited to my daily walk from my hotel to the office where I was working was a single resilient alleyway that had not yet been demolished in favor of something taller and uglier. There, in the lee of buildings with grandiose names like “World International Financial Tower,” old China kept watch over grills, crepe ovens, and oil pots full of egg, dough, and onions. There, a few pedestrians might stop for a bite and a brief word.

Beijing’s countless towers, the tiresome results of an even more tiresome joke about the “crane” being China’s national bird, look like a Corbusian fantasy come to life, but with none of the benevolence that Corbu at least pretended to ascribe to his towers and gardens. Beijing’s quarters are more like public housing projects, with crime and deterioration held at bay quite effectively by edict and martial law. Residents cannot demand control over their neighborhood when there is no neighborhood to control. They bring oppression in the guise of prosperity.

Rem Koolhaas’s CCTV tower, for all its European pedigree, is perhaps the most honest thing in sight. In a western city, the design would appear a ghastly attempt at irony, ultimately too serious and terrifying. But in China, it is appropriately, candidly totalitarian, just a few sketches away from the Death Star itself. With a façade that shifts with every new vantage point and a shadow as wide as it is long, it is menacingly inscrutable. While back in Rotterdam Rem may chuckle at the double-irony of a post-modern autocratic monolith that seems poised to trample the proletariat in order to save it, I am certain that Mao is as stoic as ever.

Beijing will always be politically prominent, but we must separate political prominence from urban prominence. If greatness requires only a big event and some fancy buildings, then so be it. I would hope, however, that we would not be so taken by China’s “progress.” Tourists and business partners alike must look beyond the headlines and starchitects and accept that even if China is not as red as it once was, it has become all the more drab.