DetrasDeLaCamera: Building the new China

I've just come back from four weeks travelling around China, observing, meeting people and taking pictures, so I thought I'd write a few posts to share some of those thoughts and pictures. I travelled with my sister, a fluent Chinese speaker who has lived in the country for some time and tends to strike up personal conversations with strangers on trains, old ladies selling snacks, taxi drivers, pleasure boat oarmen, manicurists and just about anyone else she comes into contact with, so I had a chance to get an insight into ordinary people's lives that I could never have had travelling alone, but I've still come back with more questions than answers. My sister says she still feels the Chinese way of thinking and doing things is so different from ours that even if she stayed there forever she still wouldn't really understand; so I'm not claiming to have become an expert.

The thing that struck me most quickly about China was the speed and urgency with which it seems to be building skyscrapers, installing new technology, and knocking down old buildings, as if they were trying to raze the surface of history and build from a blank slate. It seems bizarre that a country with so much history should be so disrespectful of the physical remnants of it; according to my sister, the Chinese just aren't as attached to old bricks and mortar as we are, and everyone but the very old has no desire no live in an old house anyway, preferring a shiny new flat in a skyscraper. Corruption and unscrupulous developers have also played a big role; a tiny museum called the Hutong Conservation Centre in central Bejing shocked me with displays showing the capital's historic hutongs (narrow nineteenth-century streets with low traditional houses, often decorate with beautiful elaborate woodcarvings) are being destroyed far faster now than they ever were when the Cultural Revolution was encouraging young people to smash anything old as bourgeois. The main culprit is developers who buy formerly state-owned housing, bribing plenty of officials along the way, evict the residents, with hired thugs if necessary, raze the houses and build flats for the middle classes. Quite what happens to the people who once lived there is harder to fathom - the modern streets are dead of street life, while the old alleys that remain buzz with street sellers, snack stalls, and groups of people of all ages playing cards or board games, or just hanging out. China boasts some of the best modern architecture I've ever seen, especially in Shanghai - but I'd like to know whose houses they were built on, and where those people are living now.

Office block in the wealthiest part of Beijing.