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Wednesday 9 July 2008

City Life

Clear blue skies and shiny shopping malls, but Mao’s corpulent corpse still presides

I went to visit Mao Tse-tung the other day. The embalmed body of the Father of communist China lies in a mausoleum in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. There he rests in his trademark grey suit — the same grey as Beijing’s toxic 21st-century skies.

I expected to find a long queue of people waiting to see the still corpulent but very pasty-faced Mao, who lies mostly hidden under a red flag, but there were only a few. Mao is no longer Tiananmen Square’s star attraction. Instead, a giant digital clock counting down the days to the Beijing Olympics Games now draws more attention. Hundreds of squealing, excited Chinese, including many teenagers wearing tracksuits with the word ‘sport’ stitched on the back, had gathered around the clock to get their photo taken. Perhaps I should not have been surprised that Mao’s red star has faded. Some 40 per cent of the Chinese population was born after he died in 1976 and the majority of them have always been more capitalist than communist at heart. Under Mao they were forced to deny it, but now, unleashed, they would pick shopping malls over mausoleums any day — especially the 17.5 million that live in Beijing.

I shuffled past Mao wondering what he would have thought of modern Beijing, this wealthy city that now surrounds him with shiny office towers, hotels and apartment blocks. In his era it was a low-rise sprawl of hutong houses with curved eaves, stretching as far as the eye could see. The people, bitterly poor, moved about on bicycles; the Mao suit was the must-have fashion, but only for lack of choice.

Beijing began to evolve when Deng Xiaoping ushered in economic reforms after Mao’s death. The city’s real transformation, however, occurred after 2001 when it won the bid to host this year’s Olympic Games. China’s communist leaders went on a £20 billion spending spree to give the capital a makeover and ensure that what the world sees for the 16 days of the Games this August is a dazzling city that reflects a newly ascendant empire. Yet Beijing’s expensive facelift has alienated locals such as Sha Guozhu, 78, who worries that futuristic buildings like the controversial China Central Television headquarters are destroying the city’s heritage. Sha’s generation is struggling to keep up with the blistering pace of change. Since 2001, the city’s GDP has grown by 144 per cent.

More articles from: Anne Hyland | this section

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