One Has to Be Impressed

Just a few days in Beijing after an absence of nearly 6 years leaves one overwhelmed with how much has changed and how much newer, cleaner and more organized the place looks even in the eyes of one very skeptical of “development.” The large number of new structures has often been reported on in the Western press. One can only say that if anything it’s been understated. A large part of the new construction seems to be 20-30 storey condominiums for the new bureaucrat, business and technocrat types flocking to the city from everywhere around the country. (The population now tops an incredible 17 million.) Most of the new high rise housing seems as nice as anything one would find in other world capitals in developed countries. One cab driver told me that only certain sections of the city are slated for these kinds of building projects and other parts will retain a more traditional residential character of smaller buildings. For sure the major bulldozing of residential areas and the protests that followed has probably already been accomplished, not unlike the leveling of the low income housing to make way for UIC in Chicago that I remember from decades ago. Indeed, gentrification may well be an international process.

Before coming back to China, I was very concerned about air pollution. I was again unexpectedly surprised to discover that the haze around Beijing is not really much worse now than what one would see in Tokyo, Osaka, Seoul, Taipei or for that matter, Los Angeles or New York City. Of course, visual impressions don’t say anything about how many invisible parts per million of God knows what is floating around in the air. Nevertheless, even if it is still very bad—and it almost surely is—one no longer sees the old busses putting pounds of soot into the air with each step on the accelerator on every street 24 hours per day. Indeed, every bus in Beijing is virtually new and has no visible exhaust and a significant proportion of the busses are in fact electric trolleys. I saw not even one old car giving its last gasps of black exhaust all the time I was in Beijing. Furthermore, there are very few motorcycles and none with visible exhaust, for the most part replaced by electric bicycles powered by batteries that recharge and can be pedaled in a pinch. A experimental odd-even license plate number scheme has been enacted by way of experiment to reduce the number of cars on the street. On alternate days only the odd or even plate cars are permitted on the streets. (Interestingly, one local told me that the fat cats have probably bribed their way to two sets of license plates for their cars!) Streets are swept daily in the traditional way and are much cleaner than most US small towns, not to mention major cities.

Anyway, though not worse than the US, there are still too many cars. This was very clear coming back into the city on Sunday night by taxi. At that time huge numbers of private cars, almost all full of presumably more well-heeled families, were returning from a day outside the city before returning to work on Monday. Sunday night in front of the Beijing main railway station and all the way on Qianmen Street past Tiananmen was auto-madness. Taxis are everywhere and plenty of people seem to have the money to use them. Also interesting to note is that the number of Japanese cars is greatly reduced and there is now a large variety of makes and models, Hyundai being perhaps the most common. A local Chinese model, I was told, goes for about 30,000 yuan, or about $4000 US.

The trip to Tianjin by bullet train was also an eye-opener. It took just an hour and reached speeds of about 180 km/hr. The bullet trains have been in use only since this April and compare well to those in Japan. Tickets were reasonably priced and it seemed to be not only the nouveau riche that were riding. The railway between Beijing and Tianjin is lined with a green belt of poplars and willows about 100 yards wide on either side, the same situation as the 4-lane highway out of Beijing north to Hebei. I was also pleasantly surprised to find that the roughly 100 km of land between Beijing and Tianjin is still overwhelmingly farmland as it was 20 years ago. Crop plots were small and alternated (corn, soybeans, vegetables), perhaps as a way to control insects. There is a large amount of new housing in the country side as well, but mostly multi-storey structures instead of the traditional one-storey countryside houses.

Tianjin is definitely behind Beijing by some years but is cleaner and also experiencing a good bit of new construction and will host some team sports for the Olympics.

The trip from Beijing to Xinxiang—reduced from 7-9 hours overnight to just over 4 by bullet train now--solved some of the mystery of where the dirty air hangs out. While the city is noticeably improved, coal fired power plants are everywhere in the countryside along with other smokestacks belching out large quantities of don’t-ask-what. (Of course, it may be that the air pollution is just more visible over the unobstructed distances in the countryside.) Once again, however, the air quality improvements were noticeable in Xinxiang over 6 years ago and one can see further down the street and up into the sky in this city of 570,000 than was possible before. In short, air quality improvements I’ve been able to see so far go beyond Beijing and the Olympics.

Certainly it would be foolish and naïve to think that pollution is being conquered in China, but it seems possible to say that the country is turning a corner toward at least making a genuine commitment to doing concrete things about it while not at all stopping or slowing its export oriented neoliberal economy--the ultimate cause of the glut of pollution in the first place. What we see in the US media about China in particular looks simply like further evidence for the Chomsky-Herman media thesis that bad things about US enemies, while not necessarily untrue, are reported many times more frequently and in far more detail than any neutral or positive things while the US and its client states get off relatively scot-free.

For those of you able to get it, the Reader Weekly in Duluth has apparently just (finally) published my response to a China bashing article that came out a few weeks before I left. Unfortunately, it seems to be unavailable on the internet.

September 9, 2007