In China’s Second Largest City

After an exhausting 36 hour trip, the students and staff from IHP’s Cities in the 21st Century arrived in Beijing, China. The city is quite a contrast from Buenos Aires, our home for the past five weeks. Immediate impressions feel like a run-through of all the cliches I’ve heard about China: men, women and children ride bikes everywhere; there are lots of people here; the sky is overcast, perhaps from the weather, perhaps from the pollution; the food is wonderful and diverse; the infrastructure and architecture striking in contrast and disparity. Hopefully over the next few weeks, my understanding of this historic city will deepen.

I am staying with a wonderful homestay in the traditional courtyard home, the Hutong. Due to China’s self-imposed enourmous pressures to develop and modernize, these small, often cramped homes have been replaced nearly everywhere by the ubiquetous high rise housing tower. In Beijing, the traditional homes within the first ring road enjoy some legal protection, but many have already been torn down. Where neighborhoods that had existed for centuries once stood, towers in the sky now house the majority of Beijing residents.

It’s tempting for me to condemn these efforts, having been trained as a North American planner to abhor centralist modernizing efforts, especially around housing. My immediate thought when seeing these towers for the first time was of Cabrini Green, the notorious housing complex in south Chicago that is decrided as the poster child for failed modernist planning. Aren’t these houses in the sky inherently anti-community?

I am a little short on time to write about my experiences so far. In the meanwhile, enjoy this New York Times articles about China’s new Leftist:

Co-editor of China’s leading intellectual journal, Dushu (Reading), and the author of a four-volume history of Chinese thought, Wang, still in his mid-40′s, has emerged as a central figure among a group of writers and academics known collectively as the New Left. New Left intellectuals advocate a “Chinese alternative” to the neoliberal market economy, one that will guarantee the welfare of the country’s 800 million peasants left behind by recent reforms. And unlike much of China’s dissident class, which grew out of the protests in Tiananmen Square in 1989 and consists largely of human rights and pro-democracy activists, Wang and the New Left view the Communist leadership as a likely force for change. Recent events – the purge of party leaders on anticorruption charges late last month and continuing efforts to curb market excesses – suggest that this view is neither utopian nor paradoxical. Though New Leftists have never directed government policy, their concerns are increasingly amplified by the central leadership.

More to come soon!

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