Cloudy in Beijing Blogging about my time in China

Redevelopment

The old neighborhood located on the way to my school received some news last week. The entire place is slated to be bulldozed.

The municipal notices were mysteriously pasted on a few walls within the neighborhood last Monday. People crowded around the posters, silently reading the details of how they had no choice but to move out. Within a few days, both notices were torn down, perhaps due to unhappy residents.

The neighborhood is admittedly an  eyesore for the area. Whenever I pass by, its hard not to notice the trash that piles up on the streets, leaving the faint smell of sewage in the air. At the same time, this neighborhood is the only one I know of in Beijing where so many stray dogs run about.

So as China continues to develop, neighborhoods like these are often the target for new development. Residents living in the neighborhood, however, will be compensated for their lost homes and businesses. People can expect to be paid around $824 for each square meter of their residence; a "1 to 1 ratio" in terms of compensation versus the cost for a new residence according to local news reports.

While this all meant to be fair, I'm not sure what kind of apartment this will be able to buy or how moving will be arranged. The starting cost for most new apartments in Beijing averages around $3000 per square meter. Older apartments can go around for $1000 per square meter.

It will be interesting to see how things unfold in neighborhood as the weeks go on. Residents have six weeks to agree to move  out in order to be awarded the fair compensation. One government official was quoted as saying they are taking a "move out first, then receive benefits" approach in regards to the residents. Holdouts will not receive special treatment he added.

As of now, nothing has changed in the neighborhood. In the morning, the streets are still lined with vendors selling hot dumplings and fried bread. At night, people sit outside and enjoy sticks of cooked meat.

But I know things can change very quickly. When I was living in Xi'an, I witnessed the same thing with another rundown neighborhood where I lived. One day people were living in the old apartments there. The next day, the place  was evacuated and abandoned. And within a week, the bulldozers had come and completely leveled area.

Tianjin in photos

Only a two-hour drive away from Beijing is Tianjin, another one of China's largest cities.

I ventured there with my classmates during a day-trip last weekend. Our tour of this vast city of 12 million was short. So I didn't feel like I really had a chance to understand Tianjin. But I did come away with some nice photos. Above is a picture of the cityscape with Tianjin's television tower on the left.

Our first destination was the Binhai New Area of Tianjin, located next to a river that leads out to the sea. The area was crowded with people enjoying the warm weather. I took this picture of some bing tang hulu, a common snack sold on streets in China. The bulbs of red are sugar-coated hawthorn fruits.

We toured the city in our bus, enjoying the views of people and places we passed by. I think we were just as much of a curiosity for this small boy.

One thing I'll always remember about Tianjin are the numerous traffic signs hanging above the city's streets. They range from those reminding people to not throw trash out of their windows to this one about drunken driving. "Drunkenness is in the alcohol, ruin is in the cup," this sign reads.

Tianjin has one very unique attraction. The city is the only one in the world to have built a Ferris wheel on top of a bridge. People can ride the wheel while drivers below can look up at them. It's appropriately called the "Eye of Tianjin."

Meeting squelched

Last weekend I was set to go to a public forum. Organized by preservationists, the event was suppose to discuss the protection of the city's Bell and Drum towers (pictured above), which are slated for a controversial restoration.

I was excited to go because it would be my first time attending such an event in China. But hours before it was to be held I had found out that the forum had been abruptly canceled.

Event organizers would only say the event was canceled for "various reasons" and refused to elaborate, acting as if it wasn't a big deal. But clearly more was going on, with other news outlets speculating that the police had forced the shut down of the meeting.

This shouldn't have surprised me. Protesting isn't really allowed in this country (though it still happens), and the government will often try crack down on dissent when it can, even hauling away activists to be tortured.

But in reflecting about this, I couldn't help but make comparisons to my time as a city government reporter Kansas. Back then I'd often find myself writing about development projects that would alarm and even anger city residents. But always the public had a direct line with the city to state their concerns, usually by appearing at a city council meeting. At the same time, the city process of approving the development projects was transparent, and the people involved were most of the time available for interview.

Here in Beijing it's completely different. There is no avenue for residents to express their views. Instead, such rallying of public support is apparently seen as a threat. All the while, the exact details of the development project are shrouded in secret.  (I remember calling the key developer behind the project, only to get the secretary who was surprised that I had found the company's phone number. I left a message, which was never returned.)

The group of preservationists is still hoping to stop or reduce the impact of the restoration project. In the near future, they plan on stating their views more publicly via the media; currently the group's leader calls the plan akin to building hotels in the Forbidden City.

Still, I find it strange and somewhat disturbing to live in a place where you have no say, and you have a limited access to understand what's going around you. The decisions are being made by people behind closed doors. This is way of things in China: capitalism without democracy. I suppose it's more efficient, with the government able to easily override certain obstacles to achieve its goals. As for accountability, I don't know. At times it can feel like it's the government versus the people.