The 798 Factory
Whilst you are in Beijing, ask the rickshaw driver to take you to the Tense Space Studio of Factory 798 in Beijing's Chaoyang district, east from Yansha Bridge and left at the traffic lights.
Factory 798 is a relic, what remains of the massive North China Radio Equipment factory, which covered over 11 million square feet (one million square meters) and employed 20,000 people. At one time, these workers would have been summoned by martial music at the crack of dawn, to toil over valves and circuit boards until nightfall, with only a few hours off at midday for the famous Chinese Tai Chi exercise drills. Here and there in red painted Chinese script are entreaties to “construct the Factory into a Big School of Mao's Thought” and selected aphorisms from the now elusive Little Red Book.
Now some of the older buildings, made of beige square bricks, have become arts and crafts workshops, operating on a different, rather more relaxed, timetable. The factory was built with numerous courtyards and these are today places of tranquility with cicadas chirruping on the trees. Cafés and art galleries mark the landscape.
The most famous part of the complex is the Tense Space, 11,000 square feet (1,000 square meters), which offers both the red slogans and on one side the original factory machines. In the center are some life-size Chinese figures of monks sweeping—distinctive for their red hue. Today, as China experiments with capitalism, the space and these figures are popping up in advertising campaigns.
The European Union sent its Culture Commissioner to visit who commented, in the much translated form that it was released in, that it was fine to see that “in its endeavor to become an international metropolitan city, Beijing is also trying hard to explore the possibility of maintaining Its characteristics.”
It's encouraging to many to see the New China celebrating its history and also extending opportunities for individuals to express their own ideas and creativity. And we should not be too disappointed to see that, like almost all the interesting and unique buildings of this huge country, there is a plan to knock the whole lot down and put up new construction instead.
Typically, in China you can try to protest but you would run the risk of being considered “splittist,” and if you're not put in prison, you'll certainly be made to feel a little unwelcome. But just as typically, comes the realization that the artistic center cannot stay as it was, because its success contains the seeds of its own destruction. As the area becomes attractive, people want to move near to it, the property values rise, and the artists inevitably have to move on, and find new abandoned factories and marginal buildings.