Beijing Welcomes You

The geographic and symbolic heart of Beijing’s plans for 2008, the Olympic Green, was both centered and uncentered: it was being built on the city’s north-south axis, aligned with Tian’anmen Square, the Forbidden City, and the Drum Tower, but the site lay on the outer edge of the Fourth Ring, in the zone of pure development, beyond historic landmarks. My first attempt to see the construction, in 2005, had failed; I had told a cabdriver, in rehearsed Mandarin, that I wanted to go to the Olympic Green, and he told me that it didn’t exist yet.

I did not have the necessary command of the subjunctive to explain that I wanted to see the place the Olympic Green would be, if it were finished. My formal Chinese instruction had been a few semesters of oncea-week conversational Mandarin in American night school, in a class divided mostly between retirees planning to see more of the world and couples preparing to adopt Chinese babies. Class was led by a woman called Teacher Wang, who had fled the revolution, and whose teaching was extemporaneous and discursive, laced with cryptic anecdotes and parables. The first-, second-, and third-person pronouns—wo, ni, ta—reminded her of her aged mother’s bemusement, in English class, at meeting a woman named Juanita. Teacher Wang had been back to the mainland, to the capital, which was, in her telling, a rough, heartless city, full of price gouging and deceit and sand, everywhere sand. If you bought food off the street (already a reckless proposition), you could count on a mouthful of grit. She made a face at the memory.

But the capital was where people spoke standard Mandarin, or Putonghua, which was what Teacher Wang was there to teach. Proper pronunciation required a curling and tightening of the vocal apparatus till a hard-edged r sound hummed through everything and your tongue was tired after class. I was deaf to the four separate tones of the language, and what few words I had picked up—the numbers one through ten, a few body parts, some food names, and, from Cult. Rev. class, “Long Live Chairman Mao!”—came out with a lax Taiwanese accent. I tried to learn more on my own, but had maybe a hundred words under my belt when I ran aground on the shoals of subordinating conjunctions, which came in confusing mandatory pairs: because had to be trailed by a therefore; although required a corresponding however. I settled for copying out characters by hand—the old-fashioned ones still used in Taiwan, not the simplified versions introduced by Mao. So I had arrived in China with surprisingly good penmanship, but all the other language skills of an infant.

Immersion in China had raised my ability level to that of a fairly bright three-year-old. To help guide me around the city, in the spring of 2006, I had recruited an assistant, an abstracted and slightly sardonic Wellesley graduate named JiaJing. Looming digital clock boards, forty-five feet tall, had been cropping up around town—on Tian’anmen Square, in front of the airport, alongside the ring roads—counting down the days, hours, minutes, and seconds till 8/8/08. The readout for days was down below 900. Over tea in an expat bookstore, JiaJing explained that while she still had her native Chinese passport, she had grown up mostly in Queens. In China, she had done research and handled logistics for American and other international reporters in the past.

So I hailed a taxi, and JiaJing did the talking. I was visiting the city, she said, and I wanted to see the Olympic sites. I lost track of the spiel early on and settled back to watch the scenery, occasionally getting updates from her about what we were saying about our mission. When the cabdriver noticed we were scribbling in notebooks, she told him we were doing research on architecture, which was more or less true. And that we were academics, up from Shanghai, which was not true at all.

However she explained the trip, we made our way to the north side of the Fourth Ring Road, passing complexes of apartment towers—built in the nineties, JiaJing said, and already weeping and mottled on their façades. To the left of the roadway was a building with a swooping, if dingy-looking, concrete roofline: a swimming center left over from the Asian Games of 1990. Then, to the right, came a glimpse of monumental latticework, the exterior of the half-built National Stadium.

This was to be nothing like the twentieth-century stadiums around the world, the grounded flying saucers of the old Space Age. When the National Stadium was finished, it would be an abstract-organic woven bowl—nicknamed the Bird’s Nest—a design created in a collaboration among the Swiss firm of Herzog & de Meuron, the China Architecture and Design Research Group, the global Arup engineering firm, and Ai Weiwei, the conceptual artist and godfather-impresario of Chinese contemporary art. At the moment, twenty-eight months before the Games, the lattice was in separate, fingerlike segments, running up the sides of the structure and curling inward at the top.

Soon, after a jaunt through a series of shadowy exit ramps, we were looking up close at a blue, corrugated-metal construction fence. Finding the Olympic site, in the City of Walls, was not quite the same as getting a look at it. Our taxi traced the perimeter of the grounds, driving slowly. Along the west side, over the top of the fence, we could see the rectangular shape of the future aquatics center, the Water Cube. When it was finished, it would be another marvel of engineering, its frame and walls built entirely of polygonal cell-like strutwork, each cell framing an inflated plastic membrane, so that it presented a solid surface of different-sized bubbles. For now, it was a big plain box of scaffolding, swaddled in green mesh.

The fence continued, offering a view only of what could poke above it. The north edge revealed treetops. We drove down the east edge, passing horse carts full of bricks or cinder blocks. There were hills of dirt, draped in green mesh to keep the dust down. Then came the top of the stadium again, and we were back to the Fourth Ring. That was the Olympic tour.

JiaJing guided the cabbie east and south, toward the Central Business District, the other focus of the Beijing-to-be. The district was less central even than the Olympic Green, and it was far from being in business, but it was the place where the city’s other principal landmark of the future, Rem Koolhaas’s loop-shaped headquarters for Chinese Central Television, was supposed to rise. The angled O of the CCTV building—its top segment hanging some 750 feet in the air, linked to two leaning-tower legs—was to be the definitive example of the everything-goes architectural style.

Until recently, even the new buildings in Beijing had been stolid; Stalinist architecture lingered through the 1980s, then gave way to a mandatory “Chinese” style, in which the mayor decreed that high-rise roofs had to be built according to traditional designs. The result was a bizarre parallel to the most affected American postmodern construction, with chinoiserie rooflines in place of Chippendale ones.

The newest generation of construction, though, was to be aggressively innovative. There were still po-mo decorative schemes going up—Moorish spires on apartment towers, mansard roofs—but the prestige projects were sculptural. The emerging skyline was a collection of improbable shapes: hatboxes, flashlights, sardine cans standing on end, a titanic topiary garden in steel and glass. We drove by a geodesic dome, overshadowed by a mass of concave curves, and a sort of concrete cheese Danish, tipped on end, its center filled with a sheer wall of glass.

The CCTV project was barely visible from the roadway of the Third Ring, its twin tower bases only beginning to rise. In the foreground was an aging masonry wall and behind that a middle-aged five-story apartment building with a red-brick façade and tattered green awnings. The windowpanes were marked in white with a single Chinese character: chai, meaning “tear down.”

Chai markings were ubiquitous in pre-Olympic Beijing, as ubiquitous as the construction fences, which followed close behind them. Week by week, month after month, new ones appeared on windows, door frames, inner and outer walls. I bought a T-shirt from a rock club that used chai as its logo, printed in black on orange. To get there, you had to clamber across a construction trench.

The most common color combination was probably a white or orange chai, spray-painted on the old gray hutong brick. Formerly modernized hutongs, covered in white tile in a bygone push for improvement, got black or orange ones. The markings spread through whole neighborhoods at once.

In the interval between the coming of the chais and the closing off of the construction site, views could open up. A few days before the taxi tour, I walked back to our apartment from the expat terrarium of the bookstore. The neighborhood in between, around the old Workers’ Stadium, had just been profiled in an English-language Beijing lifestyle magazine as the site of the next residential boom. The streets were lined with new construction fences and old walls that were being repurposed as construction fences.

Through an archway in a wall, I spotted a worn-out pool table sitting in a field of rubble. Beyond the arch lay a neighborhood that was two-thirds, if not three-quarters, demolished. The perimeter wall, along the street, was propped up by iron braces; the houses immediately behind it were gone and cleared away. The rest were smashed where they stood, or half smashed, or still standing, hedged in by the rubble of their neighbors.

Elaborate graffiti, shaded and multicolored like New York graffiti art, had been painted on the exposed white plaster of the walls: snarling orange and blue monsters; a naked man facing a green dog with jaws like a crocodile’s, both with chains around their necks, and each urinating toward the other. A man walked by and, seeing me taking a picture, showed the way down a narrow lane to even more graffiti. In black silhouettes on the white, a man with a club and a man with a pistol herded a family through a doorway. The air around them was peppered with ¥’s (the sign for the Chinese currency, the yuan), and big black characters read “Renmin bi”—Execute the people—a pun on renminbi, “the people’s currency” (often abbreviated as RMB).

What was left of the neighborhood was still occupied. People moved about in the shade of mature trees, and children threw chunks of debris at the rubble fields. An electrical box dangled in midair between poles, feeding wires to the standing houses. A barbershop was open, the pole outside lit up. The adjoining building had been knocked down; its front wall was sheared off knee-high.

From the CCTV site, we rode south and toward the city’s interior, inside the Second Ring, to the Dashilan district. Dashilan, just below the foot of Tian’anmen Square, was a popular 600-year-old shopping neighborhood; it was also officially a slum, designated for clearance before the Olympics.

Some portion of the existing Dashilan would be preserved and renovated, as a tourist attraction—like other rehabbed neighborhoods, with their bicycle-rickshaw tour guides. The hutongs had become inextricable from the hutong tours. But Dashilan was preparing for much more than a spruce-up. From the main street, most of it was out of view already. I added a new type to my mental list of construction barriers: these were freshly erected sheets of galvanized steel ten feet high, turning the old lanes into mirrored passages. Behind the shiny walls, as customers picked their way around the intruding strutwork and bracework, the stores were still doing business. Bright yellow paper signs announced clearance pricing, while electronic squawk boxes called out in Mandarin, “Emergency teardown—must sell everything—emergency teardown.”

Down a side lane, Langfang No. 2 Street, there were fewer steel walls. The buildings were mostly made of wood, with low-ceilinged upper stories; tufts of plants sprouted from the roof tiles. Though it had been weathered into uniform antiquity with the rest of the neighborhood, this section had once been a redevelopment project itself, nearly a century before, under the new and shaky Republic of China. Small restaurants and shops lined the street: Sichuan food, Dongbei food, silk, outstanding leather goods. Vendors squatted by the roadside with their wares spread on blankets. Three blankets held jade carvings and other trinkets, one held assorted cell-phone batteries. A man rubbed a finger around the wet rim of a bowl, making it sing.

Along the lane’s wall, the Beijing Construction Company had pasted a notice. JiaJing read it over. It said that a developer had applied for permits to tear down certain buildings in the area, and that residents would have two weeks to submit a written appeal. The notice was dated early March; it was now late April. On Langfang No. 2 Street, the affected addresses would be numbers 1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 11, 13, 15, 17, 19, 21, 27, 39, 41, 43, 45, 47, 49, 51, 53, 55, 57, 59, 61, 63, 65, 67, 69, 71, 73, 75, 77, 79, 81, 83, 85, and 87. Fourteen other streets were listed on the sign, some with fewer addresses and some with more.

One of the buildings on the north side of the street—the odd-numbered side—had an ancient-looking, battered door, with carved and painted words on it, black on a peeling pink background. It was a poem, JiaJing said; it told the reader to value loyalty over profit, and to prosper. Tucked under the right-hand door handle was a business card from a moving company.

A short walk east and north was the Beijing Planning Exhibition Hall, a shiny museum with exhibits dedicated to the city that was to come, the city of By 2008. By the escalators, overhead and to the right as we ascended, there was a giant bronze relief map of the city circa 1949. The old Ming wall ran around the edge, and the Forbidden City sat in the middle, with each hall and palace distinct. And then, filling the space between, were the hutongs—all of the hutongs, with every twist and turn, and all of the buildings in the old city, the whole past cast in metal, clear as a photograph taken from above. I thought it was one of the most astonishingly meticulous things I had ever seen, and it held that distinction for maybe forty-five seconds, till we got off the escalator on the third floor and turned left.

The third floor of the Beijing Planning Exhibition Hall was the home of a model of Beijing that made the bronze 1949 city look like one of those cheapo train sets street-fair vendors sell. It filled a vast room. The floor, around the edges and inward, was made up of large squares of glass-topped aerial photographs, starting at the far outer reaches of the municipality. A visitor would walk inward, with fields and housing developments and golf courses underfoot, across the Sixth, Fifth, and Fourth Ring Roads. Little photographs of buildings disappeared under my shoes. More or less around the Third Ring was a barrier of tight museum rope. On the other side of the barrier was: Beijing. The entire central city, road by road, building by building—only smaller, built on a 1:750 scale, and a few years into the future.

We had arrived just before the half hour, in time for the educational presentation. Louvers in the glass ceiling, two stories overhead, swung shut; colored spotlights came on; and a voice began delivering narration in Mandarin. The spotlights moved around. Tiny blue bulbs lit up to trace the waterways, green ones outlined the parks, and various sets of amber ones marked off the layout of the Ming city or highlighted areas of new construction.

It was after the show that the cityscape had its fullest effect. The louvers opened and the daylight returned, shining on the buildings as they stretched away, the farthest ones blurring together in the shadows of the upstairs observation balcony. The illusion of distance was so vivid my head began to feel like a silent, low-flying airplane. The visibility was too good for the real Beijing.

And there were no cranes to be seen. In the Great Model, 2008 had come; every planned building had been finished. Koolhaas’s CCTV tower made its loop in the sky on the east side, lit up from within, surrounded by the rest of the buildings of a fully realized Central Business District. New apartment towers overlooked the low gray patches where the surviving clusters of hutongs held on.

Some of the hutongs were closer to our apartment than I’d thought. I followed the winding blue path of the Liangma River—in real life, lurid green with algae through the summer months—where it left the northeast side of the model, and found our apartment building, disappointingly just over the edge, in the photographic part. At least no new buildings seemed slated to be redeveloped over it.

To the north, an arm of the model reached clear past the Fourth Ring. There, by a broad man-made river, was the National Stadium, its lattice complete and immaculate. There was the athletes’ village and, across a row of trees, the aquatic center, free of its scaffolding and with shades of blue and white playing across its surface. The Olympic Green sat open to view.

Nevertheless, I wanted another crack at seeing the live version—the precompleted version. The Beijing Organizing Committee for the Olympic Games (BOCOG) wouldn’t talk to me about a tour or any interviews; I was on a tourist visa, with a slip stapled in my passport for good measure that read, “The holder of this visa is not allowed to engage in news report activities in China.” Besides, they said, they had just given reporters the only press briefing they would be getting for months.

But where there’s one authority in Beijing, there’s likely another authority below or beside it. The operations of the one-party state, in practice, were in the hands of various parallel or layered bureaucracies, agencies, and enterprises. So JiaJing tried to book us an appointment to visit the Olympic Stadium Construction Company, an arm of the Beijing Construction Company. That seemed even less promising, especially after an official at the Beijing Construction Company told her that the Olympic Stadium Construction Company didn’t really exist. Still, the stadium company had an address—somewhere up off the Fourth Ring, seemingly near the site itself.

A week after our first try, we were back outside the blue fence. This time, we were on foot—we’d arrived in separate cabs, and neither driver had been able to find the right street. It was, JiaJing concluded, inside the construction compound itself. With a mix of purposefulness and genial confusion, an ideal attitude for assuring minor authorities that their authority needn’t be exercised, she talked us past the guards at the outer gate while getting them to give us directions.

And then we were inside the wall, walking down an open, officepark-style street toward a second fence and gate, and behind those, the National Stadium. Construction crews were climbing on it and working on the ground below. Through the gaps in the lattice, we could see the stepped interior framework of the seating bowl. A bonging noise of metal on metal echoed from the site.

It was a warm day, with poplar-tree fluff floating in circles on the breeze. Three workers sat by the road, playing cards. They used broken pieces of cement slabs, stacked two high, for seats, and a single slab for their card table.

The Olympic Stadium Construction Company was nowhere to be seen. A few inquiries led us down a driveway; around a group of low, trailerlike buildings; through an invisible gap between a trailer and a wall; and through a round gateway into a parking lot. There was a new, perfectly ordinary office building: the construction company headquarters.

Inside, through the glass doors, a pleasant young receptionist told JiaJing that there were no tours to be had. A row of shiny dark-red hard hats, apparently waiting for visitors, lined the counter in front of her. But they were not for walk-ins. We retreated to the inner gate and tried one last approach: If we kept going forward, could we get across to the aquatics center? The guards pointed in the opposite direction, back out of the compound. Then take a left and go all the way around the perimeter to the opposite side.

We turned back to the exit and—figuring the perimeter would get us there in either direction—took a right instead, trudging south along the fence, then east along the Fourth Ring. We passed a golf driving range and a decrepit hotel. On the edge of the ring road, the sidewalk dwindled to a narrow margin of paving blocks, just outside the guardrail.

Losing the sidewalk was no great sacrifice. Beijing sidewalks were not trustworthy, the way American sidewalks were. They were perpetually being laid and relaid, so there were dusty, ankle-twisting gaps and stacks of paving blocks along them. The blocks themselves often turned slick when it rained, China being unburdened by tort law and personal-injury suits. People used the space on the sidewalks for bicycle-repair workshops and free parking; Beijing drivers, especially the drivers of Communist Party officials’ black Audi A8s, thought nothing of driving up over a curb. Everyone spat on the sidewalk, slopped out tea leaves and dirty wash water onto it. Power lines drooped perilously low, and in the alley by our apartment, someone had strung a clothesline at precisely eyeball height. When I told Christina once that I’d come within three inches of walking into it at dusk, all she said was, “Well, why were you on the sidewalk?”

So when the sidewalk dwindled away, we kept going. In the United States, strolling beside a major expressway, we might have been stopped by the police on general principles. But the automobile’s conquest of China was still incomplete, and nobody looked twice at pedestrians by the highway. There weren’t many other walkers, but there were enough; some of them were coming the other way, on the same narrow track, and we had to side-foot it down the embankment so they could pass.

As we rounded the final corner of the fence, the sidewalk was gone entirely and we were walking in ruts on grass. But then, across a grassless patch of field, a new stretch of sidewalk began—a broad, level sidewalk, worthy of downtown, neatly laid and unmarred by commercial activity or saliva. We followed it, and the eternal blue fence, north, till we got to the gate outside the swimming center. Now the polygonal forms were dimly visible behind the scaffolding box, here and there. Two guards were at their post: an older man with a stern expression and a weather-darkened face, and a skinny youth, his uniform visibly too big for him. The old one had a hard hat, the young one a cap. JiaJing tried again: Could we go in and have a look? The older one turned voluble: Without hard hats there was no way we could go in, but he could tell us about it. The underground construction was all done already; the aboveground work was nearly finished. We could always come back with hard hats. The building wasn’t going anywhere, and neither was he. Perhaps JiaJing could give him her phone number? We moved on.

Another gate—this time outside the future communications center for the Olympics—another guard. This one was more brusque: We could not come in, he told JiaJing, and it was a bad idea to stand there talking to him. There were cameras, he said. He nodded significantly in my direction, at the obvious intruder.

Our self-guided tour was over; 2008 was almost in view, but still fenced off, out of reach. We walked on, sticking with the sidewalk, keeping the wall to our right. JiaJing filled in the details of what the guards had said to her. As we kept going, a second construction fence appeared on our left. There were workers around us, in hard hats, looking up in curiosity. The sidewalk had mucky puddles on it.

And suddenly, there was no sidewalk ahead. It ended abruptly in a pit, with earth-moving machines working down inside. Beside us, two more men in hard hats were shoveling some sort of dry concrete or gravel onto the vibrating drum of a sifting machine. The sidewalk was a contingent sidewalk—the plan of a sidewalk, being made real. We had crossed over into the future.