City Feeling.
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Photo: Garry Green |
It’s a popular saying in Shanghai that “Shanghai is a city of blue, and Beijing a city of grey.”
It’s all too easy for some to criticize China’s capital, and a favorite pastime of jealous residents of China’s Other City. But, smog aside, Beijing is a fascinating international city, the cultural and political hub at the center of China’s emergence onto the world stage. Because of the proximity of the hedge-trimming central government, the city has grown laterally, both physically and culturally, into a strangely beautiful bonsai tree of hidden treasures and unexpected encounters.
Beijingers are notoriously friendly, though sometimes smilingly circumspect. They know that Beijing is a city of managed chaos, a city of possibilities, where things always end up getting done, but never quite how one imagined. They know how to swim perpendicular to the riptide of change.
These changes never stop in the capital, where expats can sagely recall the “old” Beijing after a few months in the city. Networks grow tangledly at a breakneck pace, restaurants open and close, new laws passed, old laws ignored, historic hutongs razed and architectural marvels thrown up. Whole sagas of triumph and disappointment are played out in a week. You’ll leave the city a different place than it was when you found it, as it will likely leave you a different person.