My one-liner assessment of Beijing since being back has been, "Beijing is becoming a giant concrete mall." In so many more words, the buildings are stumpy, the streets are wide. The wide (and looong) streets don't help the incessant traffic, nor do they aid the pedestrian. The pedestrian now thrives between mall A and mall Z, but not in the hutongs you'll find in the newest Karate Kid. No, in fact, Chinese developers were known to have said "I'll bulldoze the Forbidden City if I could make money. It's prime real estate." My architect friends lamented about this over the weekend. Unfortunately, it wasn't the first time that someone has lamented to me about poor urban planning in Beijing. I believe it was a taxi driver back in 2007 who first told me about Liang Sicheng, a famous Chinese architect (and incidentally, Maya Lin's uncle) who wanted to preserve Old Beijing:
From wikipedia: ....With such a deep respect for tradition and the nation's cultural heritage, Liang came up with his biggest ambition: preserving Old Beijing in its entirety. Under the Communist government, he was named Vice-Director of the Beijing City Planning Commission. In his early recommendations for transforming Beijing into the new national capital, he insisted that the city should be a political and cultural center, not an industrial zone. He later put forward a proposal that a new administrative center for government buildings with a north-south axis be established west of the Forbidden City, far away from the Inner City. He also advocated that the city walls and gates be preserved. He even published an article entitled "Beijing: a Masterpiece of Urban Planning", hoping to win the support of the general public. Very regretfully, these dreams of Liang were not realized, ending only in frustration. Despite his best efforts, most of Beijing's ancient gates and city walls have been torn down, depriving the world of a spectacular example of cultural history.
Liang's name lives on in China today, but his legacy is more ellipsis than period. It seems to be a common trait of the famous and influential in China --- Zhang He, Lin Zexu, Baogong, Deng Xiaoping, Mao --- they were giants, and they embodied all that was wrong. Zheng and his treasure fleets, Lin Zexu and his lost Opium war, Baogong the uncorruptable, Deng Xiaoping and his Tiananmen, and Mao, well, and there was Mao. It's all the flawed men when you simply need a Washington, an Edison, a Jobs.
But no, if history books reflect the truth, Liang Sicheng will be remembered as the man who tried to save us from ourselves, and failed. So it plays on, 5000 and one year later, we are still hellbent on destroying and making, making and destroying. We will not pause. We will not reflect. We will rise and we will fall, and we will rinse and repeat (and our soccer team will still suck). We are not the French, and we are certainly not American. We will keep on building --- Great Walls to Great Fire Walls. We will keep on re-writing. We will keep going, and that is all fine and good, and that is all great and well.
Because you see, to me, Beijing is nothing more than a love story. Perhaps we all find that beyond the exteriors of a city, what moves us about a place are the people. So be well guys, be well.