Beijing and beyond
Authors’ note
At the heart of every inspired architect lies the dream to create entire cities of seemingly floating buildings. As impossible as this may seem, this is being realized in China today. This is most likely the reason why scores of international designers and planners have entered China to participate in the building boom. China, in particular its major cities, is undergoing a transformation of unseen magnitude. Fundamental changes of the urban and ultimately of the social environment are manifest virtually on a daily basis. Admittedly, this is why the authors of this article, respectively an architect and a writer from the Netherlands, are – albeit at the fringe –involved in this project. Even though from a Dutch perspective of regulation and consensus-building this landscape seems alien and its ingredients precarious, we , like so many, are drawn by the new, the uncertain the dynamic conditions China offers and are eager to understand the forces that will give shape to the Chinese landscape for generations to come.
The focus of this book is the 798th Factory site in Beijing. This article will aim to illustrate history from a reversed perspective and zoom in on the one square kilometer of this site, starting at the scale of China as a nation, it will introduce its staggering urbanization and modernization process. The Factory 798 will represent a significant illustration of these development and their effects on the cityscape. Finally different scenarios for the future of the Factory will describe both what is likely to occur and what the authors will argue for as desirable.
These scenarios will give an account of the hazards and opportunities China faces at this crossroads in time, when the economic surge that has lifted the country out of isolation is starting to reveal its limits and inadequacies, and only the market forces are defining the urban realm and society as a whole. In two parallel stories the direct correlation between the process of urbanization and the process of modernization in China is brought forth; The scale of nation-wide planning and the human perspective.
China forever forward
Economy
Two decades of open door policy has triggered economic progress and consequent urban development of unprecedented speed and proportion. China’s rapid economic growth over the past twenty years has lifted millions out of indigence, and introduced many to wealth – not relative wealth, but wealth in the western sense of pure purchasing power. Emerged from near isolation, it is today the seventh largest trading nation and the sixth largest economy in the world. News of 10, 11, 12% annual economic growth has penetrated every corner of the world and has contributed to an image of an advanced economy. In addition the growing awareness of the emergence of a large and strong middle-class desirous of belongings that expose their newly-earned social status, draws ever more international entrepreneurs to the new consumer market of China. Indeed, if the country’s major cities are able to maintain their projected 9-11% annual growth and per capita income, by 2010 there could be a population earning at least US $ 6000 per year exceeding that of the United States.
These figures, however, certainly don’t tell the whole story of China’s economic condition. The idea that lives in the west that all it takes is a clever entrepreneur, and a market of 1.3 billion consumers is for the taking is unfortunately misplaced. In actual fact, the division between the development of the coastal cities and the hinterland, between the registered citizens and the rural population, is severe and still widening. This split between the advanced, globalized part of the Chinese economy and the vast labour force of self-employed farmers is very difficult to reconcile in a modern society. It amounts to only half a modern country, half an economy; mass-migration and the enormous movement of human resources is inevitable.
The direct relationship between economic forces and urbanization is best illustrated by the most densely populated areas of the lower Yangzi River delta, the Pearl River delta, and the Beijing-Tianjin-Bohai region. As the three great "urban spheres" they comprise 5 percent of China's total land area, 20 percent of the total national population and will account for 65 to 70 percent of China's total GDP in twenty years.
But the push and pull factors that exist between the growing affluence in the metropolises and the underdevelopment in the countryside constitutes a strong pillar of the current economic development in that it is the basis of China’s productive vigor. The shift to high gear, as it were, has been possible partly due to China's near bottomless supply of very industrious manpower. In this cross-fire of underdevelopment and accelerated progress, of communist command and dispersed market development, town planning seems to have evolved to become city building. China, its environment, its economy and its people will all be directly confronted with and effected by the results of this new form of urbanization.
The years to come will reveal where the new cities are burgeoning, what kind of urban tissue they will be composed of and to what extent China has been able to guide the development process. For the coming decade it is projected that nearly 600 million farmers2 will enter China’s cities to engage in (informal) economic activities. This migration will help push China forward towards a fully developed economy and a modernized society; at the same time, however, this will put an unforeseeable strain on the urban fabric. The so-called "well-off society" [as recognised in the recent 16th Party Congress] involves a civilization that has fundamentally urbanized. The challenge will be to provide work and adequate homes without sprawling the existing metropolises and to build hundreds of new cities as compact and vibrant centres for the future.
This makes for a very fragile equilibrium of hope and hazard that the policymakers and planners of China will have to operate on. At the projected population growth and urbanization rates the world simply has no choice but to believe in China’s success.
Urbanization
Ceaseless building ventures have taken hold of China. Shanghai reveals a new metropolitan core, Beijing is wrapped in scaffolding to present a new capital at the 2008 Olympic Games, and China’s main river deltas are zealously exerting a mixture of suburban high-rise and factories. Starting at the coastal regions, urbanity is sweeping across the country beyond the boomtowns and heading for the countryside. In its wake a new urban reality unfolds. We are presented with a landscape of contrasting densities, of architectural hybrids revealing the power of this transformation: The fascinating fused cityscape that it results in claims all our attention. This might explain why only recently the limits and drawbacks of insistent urbanization coming to the fore. Indeed, it is only recently that these issues have become part of the agenda of Chinese (and foreign) planners.
Magnitude
In the second half of the 20th century, China witnessed the steady growth of its population, from an estimated 350 million in 1940 to about 1.3 billion in the year 2000. At a minimal average annual growth rate of 1 %, China‘s population will grow to 1.7 billion. With average rate of only 1.5 %, a more realistic figure, the population will reach 2 billion. In 1997 only 350 million people (or 30 %) were registered as urban population, while about 70 % were registered as rural. By the year 2030 when China‘s population is expected to be between 1.7 and 2.0 billion, China will have reached the urbanization rates of semi-industrialized countries (approximately 30 % rural and 70 % urban), no less than 1 to 1.3 billion rural people will have reorganized their lives in an urban way.3
An appropriate strategy of urbanization that is able to accommodate the large numbers of migrants is presently not in place. In fact, age-old regulations blocking migration from the countryside still has significant effect. Incentives and opportunities were created to encourage people to stay within the rural areas and generate revenues with small, local (so-called) “township and village enterprises”. But this approach has not reduced the uncoordinated growth of the larger city regions; and today these ‘solutions’ threaten to displace the problems of a scattered low-density urbanization deep into the countryside.
Ultimately a policy that is based on blocking movement towards the cities will widen the gap between the developed regions and the rest of China. It counteracts the implementation of an integrated urban network China should strive for. To plan and construct the number of new cities necessary to serve 1.3 billion new urbanites will require nothing less then a visionary strategy on the scale of China as a nation.
Who will build China?
Internationally planners, architects and social scientists have stressed the need for such a comprehensive and integrated strategy. And in China as well a statement of this magnitude has been put forward by the former minister of Civil Affairs Doje Cering. His objective, as formulated in the April issue of Outlook Weekly in 2001, is to build 20 new cities annually in 20 years, with an emphasis on large and medium-sized cities. The article states the plan will help improve the urbanization of China's rural areas and points out that more cities should be set up in the country's central and western areas.
The question remains which kind of cities this masterplan could entail and how this plan could be implemented. The power of numbers is in the case of China and its urbanization simply overwhelming. The sheer magnitude of the planning, design and construction tasks require an entirely different set of tools. The rushed and unrestrained building strategy (if it may be called so) currently prevailing in China won’t provide a sustainable approach for this vast undertaking, nor are any of the traditional Western planning methodologies adapted to accommodate the requisite scale and speed. In other words, only an entirely new urbanization strategy can rise to this challenge.
This challenge is multifaceted. From a purely technical perspective, China has the manpower to design and construct the vast architectural volume required. At 500 times as efficient as his American counterpart , Chinese architects are surely able to design the stated 400 new cities before the year 2020; this is not in question. Construction parties pushing ahead day and night in consecutive eight hour shifts can erect the simple block structures with fast and cost-effective building techniques.
The obvious organizational challenge of such a mega-project can also – if by any country – be successfully managed by China. With the administrative structures still firmly in place, the necessary manpower and resources can be allocated with extraordinary response and precision, thus building what would in effect be a second Chinese nation.
It is unlikely however this approach would amount to cities that fit the upcoming class of modern Chinese urbanites. The last fifty years China has, like many European countries, unrolled countless numbers of concrete residential blocks. Today these neighborhoods no longer reflect the diversity of their residents. So the scenario of a new episode of government controlled urban development would raise concerns that more of the same, homogeneous urban settlements would be created.
More likely, however it is market-driven development that will give shape to the future of China’s urban realm. The sea of shiny glass office buildings, malls, hotels and modern apartment towers has had a tremendous impact on the larger cities. The centres of Shanghai and Shenzhen dazzle in the gleam of Western – and to certain extent modern – architecture. At present the harsh and disorganized arrangement of large new blocks erected amidst traditional Chinese neighborhoods suspends even the most conservative preservationists in silent amazement. Lively markets and modern department stores, parks and parking towers, small neighbourhood contentment and big city amenities are adequately crammed together. The juxtaposition of the commercial on top of residential, of small and intricate alleyways wrapped around bulky anonymous boxes seem, if only for the here and now, to present that magic mixture urban planners have all been looking for.
It is this kind of developer’s dominance that has towns and villages, malls and mega-stores mushrooming throughout the nation. Four hundred new cities are no match for the armada of local contractors, planners and policy-makers to plot by plot patch together. Even if the blueprints for a well-structured urban proposal would be produced within the coming years market-driven urbanization will most likely outrun its implementation. An obvious advantage is that regardless whether or not the 400 cities’ objective will be met, the population of one billion migrants can be provided with new homes independent of any planning objective.
But the drawbacks of this almost inevitable scenario are also manifest in China’s metropolises. Whole areas of old-centers are either slowly deconstructed or effectively demolished overnight. The onslaught of modernization steadily washes away the juxtapositions so powerful in the present Chinese city. The diversity in the down-town districts decreases, and the centers are surrounded by endless suburban expansions. The image looms of generic satellite cities covering the country, with not much more to offer than the average midsized American town. Then even the numerous international design competitions that China currently writes out won’t be able to secure a rich mixture of buildings and urban environments that today the Chinese metropolis still contains.
Planning the spontaneous
The image of China with modern cities and their modern problems might not seem to put forth any real dilemma. China is in dire need of a staggering number of new homes, built in new towns and cities, and both the government and the local entrepreneurs are eager and able to oblige. Possibly – from a European perspective, most likely – the fruit of their labor might prove too monotonous or not modern enough. At this moment in China’s development, however, I feel it is not for the West to advocate any issues of style or even sustainability. The centres might turn into common – somewhat anonymous – business districts and the residential areas might be segregated low-density suburbs, but every industrialized country in the world today is facing these problems.
The difference is that China can beat the projected demographics. Simply providing the quantity of city space is, as argued, not the real concern. Modern China is experiencing a shift in the desires and requirements of its citizens (notably in cities such as Beijing). Today China can anticipate this urban mind-set to evolve and spill over to the new cities. Without glorifying the Chinese condition, I believe China is able to reproduce the unique and dynamic qualities of its currently modernizing metropolises. One thing it can certainly do is accommodate the one billion new urbanites with housing and modern amenities. This belief is rooted in the knowledge that China has a fervent market and a solid political backbone. The unwavering enthusiasm with which developers and local politicians are constructing China’s countryside provides the stamina needed and the potential for architectural renewal. From a European point of view, the design sketches suspended on the walls of newly erected town halls and the translucent models of suburban extensions – soon to be build – lack however the appeal they seem to have on most of the Chinese audience. The new plans lack density, lack diversity and lack the testimony of time – although, it must be said, Holland too has its share of desolate office districts and nondescript residential neighborhoods that seem to edge closer without anyone consciously aware of it. My feeling is the future Chinese citizen will neither be content with prevailing monotony nor with a form of mitigated modernity.
So what can the government (with solid backbone) do? The objective of four hundred new cities as formulated by the former minister of Civil Affairs won’t be built on a clean slate. Any urban intervention will take place within the chaotic grid of 40 existing metropolises, 700 existing cities and over 12000 Chinese towns and villages. Recreating the density and matured quality of long-standing urban environments can be achieved only within these existing cities. The predominantly communist constructions that make up their body of architecture can provide the essential layer of history - as we see in The Factory 798. So the objective for the government is to collage and merge the designs for pristine suburban extensions with the present day towns and cites, building right amidst their structures. This increases density and reduces the consumption of scares arable land. The challenge on the national scale is to relocate the developers away from their natural environment of vacant suburban plots back into the existing centres.
Beijing
More modern than most
Through the ages megalomaniac concepts such as the four hundred city plan, have resulted in the most enticing collages and detailed descriptions of the utopian. Today however, reality has relentlessly surpassed the imaginary worlds of the architects and planners. The truly modern metropolis is dynamic disorganized and dense. It has stacked burrowed and cross-connected its many layers beyond comprehension and imagination. With every designed solution its landscape appears to be less fabricated and more evolved. Coming to terms with this reality of the metropolis disillusionment gives way to admiration. Undetected splendours reveal themselves and the lucid market forces that shape the built environment can be observed objectively. As such the ideal urban context seems to deny the architect the conditions to respond with any new utopian vision. What remains is the search for pockets of possible transformation within the existing urban tissue. This implies current pressure on the Factory 798 site.
Then what might the future hold in store for this site? A few scenarios are possible. The only scenario that is excluded is that site will remain forever unchanged: In the first scenario, the site will fall victim to the current relentless urge of Beijing’s redevelopment. The idea of a modern capital with lucrative skyscrapers and shopping malls is tempting and realistic. Just as happened with the site near the Imperial Summer Palace, the artist community will be destroyed, its artists dispersed.
A second scenario presents exactly the opposite. The local government will become aware of the historical importance of the architecture. Factory 798 will become a monument, a museum, a tribute to the past of communist workers and their ideals. This is the other extreme (not to be ruled out in the country of extremes). The buildings, the machinery and the red painted slogans on the ceilings remain. Accordingly, the art and the coffee bars and the nightclubs will move out.
In a third scenario, the site will be turned into a green space. As host of the 2008 summer Olympics, Beijing assured the International Olympic Committee to significantly invest in Beijing's environmental quality. One of the measures announced was to relocate about 200 industrial enterprises currently within Beijing proper to the suburbs. - Beijing is striving to become a garden city with increased green land coverage of 45 percent by 2010 and an average green space of 15 square meters per resident.
A fourth possible scenario is a development with historic characteristics. The few workers that are still there would ousted. Their factories will turned into modern lofts for expatriate members of the creative class. The Chinese themselves, just as in Xintiandi, will come to think of the old rusty factory site as a modern place, with shops for Georgio Armani-suits and Rolex-Haagendasz. The nightclubs and the restaurants will stay, boutique shops will be added. But the artists will have a hard time. As the area slowly gentrifies, rents will go up, and as anywhere else in the world, the artist that made this place lively, exiting and modern, will not be able to afford to live there (a form of San Francisco syndrome).
A fifth option would have learned its lessons from Shanghai. Just to turn an old site into a shopping arcade isn't enough to make it attractive. It needs an underground current, a certain sense of urgency, a place for reflection and critique as well. It needs both artists and commercial spaces.
The Factory is however not in our hands; it is not even our prerogative to promote any specific scenario. And if it would be up to me, I would advocate all of the above. ``We are pro demolition and subsequent market-driven redevelopment; because nothing should impede the momentum China has accumulated to better its economy, its cities and society. We are pro refurbishment; because a class of new bourgeois-bohemians, in need of large loft space, is elevating China towards a creative society producing innovative ideas and creating added value for its products. We are pro intervention; because art becomes better when under pressure. We are pro hands-off and; because art needs a ruff un-altered industrialized environment to sell, and it's selling! We are pro laissez-faire; because at the speed China is urbanizing urban buffer-zones are essential to absorb unforeseen future requirements.´´
All these scenarios would equally fit my propagated vision of a rich, diverse and dense urbanity. As the outcome of a new experimental form of urban planning, it brings together the power of a communist nation and the entrepreneurial thrust of countless individual planners and developers. Superimposed on the existing urban tissue a healthy and dynamic cityscape can immerge. To conclude, the Factory 798 and all it stands for, is the result of this urban experiment and does already contribute to the vibrant capital of a nation in flux.
Neville Mars
Architect
Project Manager DCF
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part 2
Urban utopia's
Not long after the revolution of 1949, partyleader Mao and then mayor of Beijing Peng Zhen climbed the rostrum of Tiananmen square and gazed at the horizon of the city that now was theirs to transform. Imagine, the chairman had pronounced with great enthusiasm. 'We'll see a forest of chimneys from here!' The city, in the eyes of the communists was an ugly place. A capitalist stronghold, whose inhabitants pursued decadent bourgeois lifestyles. That, they decided had to change. Cities would no longer be places of consumption. They would be turned into places for the new working class. As cathedrals for the new era, factories with their tall chimneys would be erected all over the city. As a matter of fact, they would hardly remain cities at all. The society would be organized in small autarkic units. Each factory would be its own microcosmos, a place - usually a walled compound - where the proletarians worked, lived, ate, recreated, loved, and participated in party activities . In theory there hardly was any need to leave one's own danwei (work unit). Thus the city, that ugly site of consumerism, would dissolve in a fragmented pattern of very loosely connected places of production.
Now the tide has turned once again. In grand redevelopment schemes Chinese cities are quickly becoming nodes in a globalized consumer society. In the post-Mao era the industry is moved out of the city to outer laying areas. New industries are concentrated in the so called development zones. Large plots of land inside the city are being redeveloped. The cityscape is turned upside down. Old buildings are being demolished. City-planners and urban developers are weaving a new fabric of broad boulevards aligned with modern buildings. Of development zones and suburban settlements. Of new highways, airports and busy shopping malls.
On my last trip to China, I encountered two different visions on this new urban china. The first I found in a pack of postcards that I bought on the observation desk of the Shun Hing Square in southern Shenzhen, with its 386 vertical meters the 6th tallest building in the world. It was a vision that neatly coincided with the city's newly minted official slogan: Welcome to Shenzhen, marvelous city of joy.
The representational space of the postcard was evenly divided between the skyline of the city and the modern means of transportation. The background shows a dense constellation of rectangular and soft colored buildings. Low, with a high density on the right. Higher and more outspoken in architectural design on the left. It is immediately clear: this is a city where people do not earn their living in dirty industry, but with the white collar work of the lucrative service sector.
The foreground was completely taken up by a grand clover leaf of a highway intersection. The shoulders of the freeway were turned into lush parks, painted dark green, with small trees, planted in a orderly and regular pattern. The roads were dotted with exactly so many cars, that it was obvious that this was an affluent city, whose inhabitants could afford to own their automobiles. This without causing the ills of modernity such as traffic jams and constipated highways that would deter the quality of living.
It is a powerful vision of the city that is represented here. An almost utopian tribute to new modernity that China awaits now that the country has opened up. After decades of urban decay and negligence, the city will be revolutionized, modernized and once again rise as the center of Chinese culture and commerce. This is how at the beginning of the new century Shenzhen - and possibly the whole of China - likes to represent itself: urban, energetic, striving forwards, modern, willing to succeed.
A second vision on the new urban China I found while leafing through the in flight magazines on a domestic flight within China. It included a large array of advertisements for new living communities. They carried melodious sounding names, such as Venice Water Townhouses, Beijing Gold Island Garden, Moonriver Resort Condo or Merlin Champagne Town. Some of these showed the lavishly decorated insides of the urban towers presented on the Shenzhen postcard. But most promised a totally different vision of the city. Or rather of an anti-city, that resembled American style suburbs. Themed single family houses were dispersed in a very low density through rolling green fields. Walking paths would meander along romantic canals. In one example a European style windmill functioned as the identity marker for the small community. Also these pictures had an almost utopian promise. They showed a gentle country land, lush as in a Roman elegy. They did not promise the dynamic of city life, but presented themselves as quiet havens where all is at peace. A refuge from an implied overcrowded city. It is a vision that can also be found on large billboards in cities like Shanghai and Beijing.
What struck me was that neither of these visions include references to the past half century. The new China seems to be a tabula rasa, optimists would argue, a place were utopian cities can be constructed out of nothing. Or, according to critics, a mere export zone for the sterile western concepts of the horizontal and vertical: the skyscraper and the gated suburb.
In both cases, the chimneys, that Mao and mayor Peng were hopefully anticipating, and effectively built, have been erased from these visions of the new urban China.
This brings us to an important question. What to do with the old factories? Will they all be knocked down, to make room for new developments, be it postcard style modern glass pastel colored boxes, or deluxe themed suburbs?
Learning from Shanghai
The free markets generally don't diddle over historic sites; they demolish, they drive fresh piles and churn out glossy towers; they especially do not diddle when the site in question does not possess the hallmarks of the "genuinely historic", when there is no fear that a bit of tradition may be expunged. A fairly savage horde, to be sure, that razes to the ground all that does not yield profit, or the hope of profit (the speculative kind), the sort of short-sighted endeavors that often leave a trail of JunkSpace -- as the dutch architect Rem Koolhaas terms the environs of such structures left to languish in obsolescence and disuse once the brief cycle of their opportunistic existence has passed.
In a small museum at the Shanghai Bund the capitalistic West is reproached for doing exactly this. 'Since the fifties', it reads on a small sign accompanying a series of pictures of a yet untouched pre-1990 Shanghai skyline, 'in the west many historical buildings have been torn down to make place for modern buildings. But here in Shanghai the historic architecture of the Bund is preserved.' The implied message of course is: see how the communist party has been able to prevent the creative destruction of capitalism and cares for the historic heritage.
The sign of course must have been painted before the start of the nineties, before Shanghai started rebuilding itself on a large scale. It is estimated that since the mid-nineties in almost two thirds of the city the old houses are torn down and rebuild by developers. More than a million people have been displaced by this gigantic operation. Yet save the objections of a handful of mostly foreign expats, there were hardly any complaints about the loss of historic architecture. 'The Chinese have built, destroyed, and rebuilt their cities for thousands of years', writes Ian Buruma. 'What matters is not the actual age of a building but the location. A new temple on an ancient site is considered old or at least historical, it is the association, the genius loci that counts.' Or, as a local - expat - architecture critic has told me: 'the drive to modernize is so enormous that it overwhelms the notion of historic preservation.' Developers and buyers are longing for a vision of the city that corresponds with the Shenzhen-postcard. They want to build a new society, a modern place, preferably from scratch. 'We don't care about history', a young collage graduate told me once. 'Here in China right now, we are making history.'
There are however signs that this might be changing. A recent Shanghai redevelopment project included the site where in the 1920s the communist party was founded. Not only the house in which the first clandestine meetings were held was preserved, but also a small neighbourhood, built in the Shikumen style was singled out to be saved from the demolition hammers. A handful of streets were refurbished and turned into the small shopping district of Xintiandi, featuring modern western and Japanese stores and a boutique hotel decorated in a mix of historic and modern styles.
At first sight the rediscovering of the old Shanghai 'main street', seems related to similar developments in America and Europe. There long forgotten old harbor fronts or historic down town streets are being refurbished, and turned into fashionable shopping districts. Critics often reject them as sell-outs. They are inauthentic fakes, simulacra, the argument goes, build by clever developers to comfort nostalgic minds longing for a past that once was. Modern consumeristic values are repackaged and sold as historic. They evoke feelings of old fashioned communities that no longer exist, just to boost sales of multinational chain stores. 'What concerns me is ... [that] illusion is preferred over reality to the point where the replica is accepted as genuine and the simulacrum replaces the source', writes Ada Louise Huxtable in The Unreal America . Surrogate experience and surrogate environments have become the American way of life. 'Distincitons are no longer made between the real and the false; the edge usually goes to the latter, as an improved version with defects corrected – accessible and user-friendly. … The Magic kingdom has become an urban design model.'
On a second look however, it seems these critiques of Disneyfication and false historcism cannot be applied to Shanghai. Xintiandi was turned into a popular shopping district, not because it revoked an historic idealized version of Shanghai. It became a trendy destination because in the first place it was a modern place. It succesfully repackaged and resold the historic buildings as a modern shopping district. It proved how the old can fashionable, how it can be the next new new thing. It proved that old buildings can be preserved without breaking the modern self-image of the new Chinese city. The Shanghainese do not like Xientiandi because the buildings reminded them of a happy past that was gone. They liked them because it proved they lived in a modern city, with modern shops, cafes and restaurants. It promises not a return to a happy past, but shows the way to an affluent future. It proves that historic sites could be incorporated in the Shenzhen-postcard vision of the city, by even making it more modern.
Beijing Bobo
Their is a tradition in Beijing of artists looking up each other. There is a history of creative minds building a small community to exchange ideas, of an avant garde, sharing a living and working space, to reflect and critique contemporary society. The emergence of Factory 798 can be understood in this tradition. There is however something different this time.
In the early nineties a small number of art communities existed in and around Beijing. One of the first of these settlements was the community near the old imperial Summer Palace. There, on the margin of the city, artists turned a number of old run down houses into their work space.
Black and white photo's from those days show a young bohemian crowd, not unlike photo's made at the Haight-Ashbury in the seventies. We see young people in bare or sparsely furnished living quarters. An old mattress, a half broken chair, an old table is usually all the material comfort there is. This is where we see them painting, sleeping, drinking, smoking and throwing parties. We see them even burning their art on the occasion of a special performance event. These artists lived both literally and figuratively on the fringe of society. They produced a discourse that was excluded from the official public sphere. They made art that almost nobody outside their own circle was interested in, so they might as well feed it to the flames.
This, now, is changing. In the process of the opening up of China, artists slowly gained more freedom to express themselves. Also their work gained international recognition and has been shown on exhibitions all over the world. Even within China in the last few years their art has been receipted more favorable. From the outer margins of society they slowly moved to a more central position in the national public sphere. As artists, as commentators on the fast developing urban life, as producers for an international art market.
The geographical position of the new artist community at factory 798 illustrates this process. This time the artists didn't pick a site at the fringe of the city. They are back in town. And what a position they have claimed for themselves! Right in the middle of one of the fastest developing axis in Beijing: the corridor between Beijing's embassy quarter, the international business district and the international airport. They moved - again both literally and metaphorically - towards the center of the Chinese society.
It is exactly this geographical central location that threatens the existence of Factory 798 as a center of art. While the Airport Expressway-axis is being developed further, it is foreseeable that pressure will rise to demolish the chimney's and convert the old factory sites into either the landscape of the Shenzhen postcard, or into the suburban themed villages in the ads of the in flight magazines.
And while the artist community is under threat once more, it might be ironic however to note that in other parts of the world an opposite trend can be seen. At this point in time in Amsterdam a new prestigious development is being carried out around the southern part of the Ringway, close to the Amsterdam airport express way. It is called the Zuid As, or southern axis. With its new glass towers and emerging sky scraping structures, it doesn't differ much from the Shenzhen-postcard model. At the time of writing banks and other big international companies are opening new prestigious offices.
But - and here is the big difference - policy makers in the Amsterdam city council are trying not only to attract Fortune 500-companies. They are doing their best to also develop cultural zones within this district. The city of Amsterdam even tried to move the Stedelijk Museum, the most prestigious museum of contemporary art in the Netherlands to a new location on the Zuid As. This is the idea: a museum or other cultural sight, could give a development like this a heart. An identity. Something that distinguishes it from all the other office developments around the world.
But there is even a larger factor at work here. The presence of a cultural base can be an important factor to attract the economic heavy weights. As Richard Florida has pointed out in his book The rise of the creative class economic growth becomes more and more linked with the rise of a new class of professionals: the creative class - designers, lawyers, scientist, mutual fund caretakers, artists, advertising agents, architects, engineers, managers, industrial inventors, software writers, etc. According to Florida, the working class and the people working in the service industry are primarily paid to execute to plan. It is people in the creative class that make the plans. The dealer in the service industry sells a new car, the workers build it, but it is the creative class that has designed it, and added the largest economic value.
This creative class is picky in deciding where to settle. They hold individuality, self-expression and openness in high esteem, rather than conformity and 'fitting in' . In order to attract them a city needs to offer a right mix of amenities. To build traditional places of culture such as the opera or a theater is to miss the point. This new class is attracted by a mix of bohemian values and more bourgeois comfort. Bobo's they are often called, short for bourgeois-bohemiens. These people feel attracted to underground art and counterculture. They are part of the global economy, but also follow its development critically. They like Prada and underground punk rock. They visit Starbucks and art exhibits in squats.
Will this theory hold in the emergent Chinese urban culture, that comes from such as different history? It is too early to tell. But the rise of a creative class could turn out to be an important stimulus for China. It could even mean a shift in mentality of the global production chain. Right now creatives and managers are designing new technologies and building brands in the U.S. They hire coordinators in Hong Kong and outsource production in China.
Could it be possible for Beijing to reverse this process? To become not only a target for production and consumption of ideas and technologies designed elsewhere? To become a true global metropolis and attract its own creative industry. To truly become be a center of creative design?
In order to do so, the city needs to attract the new creative class. In the middle of all these new axis and zones of development, a demand will rise for places that will give them an identity. That will function both as places of inspiration and as a refuge. That are a combination of underground breeding grounds and of advanced consumer culture. Where one can indulge in designer coffee as a symbol of modern urban lifestyle and at the same time reflect upon these developments. That at the same time embraces the new consumer culture and critiques it. In Beijing, at the site of Factory 798, such a place already exists. And it has even grown there organically.
A symbol for modern China.
Let's take a step back. Before looking ahead in the future, let's have a look at the status and the function of the Factory 798-site at present day. Which of the above possibilities are already present?
On a cold winter morning, when I visited the 798-premises, I was brutally refused admission by two security guards at the entrance of Space 798. Come back at a later time, they told me. Why, they couldn't say.
But it did not take long to find out. While I was drinking a hot coffee in one of the cafes on the site, a motorcade of long black limousines passed by the window. They were followed by a small minivan, in which a handful of western men were seated, with notepads and pens in their hands. A few women were carrying camera's. Against the backdrop of the decaying buildings and the leaking pipelines, these luxury cars seemed slightly out of place. Then I noted that all the cars were carrying a small Swiss flag. I realized that this must be the Swiss president, who during those days was on an official state visit to China.
It was of course not unusual for factory 798 to host foreign head of states. Already at the opening ceremony the East-German leader Erich Honecker was present. At that time, the factory was a symbol for the new revolutionary China. Where modern technology and state of the art architecture preluded the era of the Chinese proletariat. It often had seen foreign delegations who came to praise the workers or admire their machinery.
But unlike his predecessors the Swiss president did not come to the factory to meet the workers or learn about the technology that is still produced at the site. He came to visit the artists in their workshops and to attend the exhibitions in the galleries. He wanted to see how the country had opened up. He came to see how the artists reflected on the country's turbulent change. How the artists had claimed their space in the new society. How a new creative class was rising. How a showcase and a market for modern art was emerging.
And if the Swiss president has walked around long enough, he could have seen how at factory 798 both the old and the new China are present. The chimney's, some of them still emitting thick white smoke, evoke a vision of an industrialized communist era. The modernistic Bauhaus architecture reminds visitors of the once strong ties between communist brother countries, China and the East German Democratic Republic. Even at present day, in one of the large halls, workers are still casting communist style statues of national hero's and leaders, boldly and confidently looking ahead to a brilliant future. A giant Mao, molded out of plaster, leans against one of the back walls.
A couple of blocks away the new China presents itself. Inside the Bauhaus-shaped buildings, there are newly remodeled designer-restaurants, featuring pizza and cafe lattes. Commercial sings for imported lifestyle-beers point to a night club that prides itself to be located in the 'Soho of Beijing', 'in a former factory now converted into a giant art mall.' Inside the art-mall and galleries, old slogans once again revoke the old Chinese society. It reads: 'Chairman Mao is the red sun that shines in our hearts.' Underneath, there is an exhibition of modern art that critiques the new consumer society while at the same time being part of it.
In short, the Swiss president visited the factory because it had once again become a symbol. An emblem that both looked ahead to a new future, while at the same time reminding visitors of the past. A place that was both modern and post-modern. A place that celebrated the new consumer society, while at the same time reflecting on it. And a site that provided the city with a new cultural identity. In its short existence as an art center, Factory 798 has grown into an icon for the new modern urban China.
Martijn de Waal
Historian, Social Journalist
Neville Mars - Martijn de Waal
2004-10-15