It is still summer in Beijing, with the temperature in the high 20s when it should be fresh and cool. The city is suffocating day after day under a blanket of smog when the autumn air should be crisp and clear.
In Beihai Park, located north-west of the Forbidden City, they have taken all the fibre-glass boats out of the lake in anticipation of the coming skating season. Otherwise, the scene this weekend in the huge park, once the playground of Chinese emperors, was like that in mid-July. Hundreds of people strolled around the paths in shirt-sleeves, with cameras round their neck, and children in T-shirts rode the dodgems or queued for cans of ice-cold Coca-Cola and Kentucky fried chicken.
The wedding couples suffered most from the heat, perspiring in extravagant white gowns and dress suits as they manoeuvred their way through the crowds for traditional photographs in front of the White Dagoba, a 36-metre pop-art "peppermint-bottle" built on top of a hill in 1651. Squat elderly women in trousers and gray blouses competed for space on lakeside benches with slim young couples in designer gear fussing over their single child (the little emperor of modern China). Young lovers embraced in open displays of affection which would have been banned a few years ago.
Fashions and life-styles have changed a lot in modern Beijing. But there were signs, too, of western-style poverty in the shape of a couple of down-and-outs delving into litter bins for soft-drink cans which fetch a few coins for recycling. The park's ticket collectors seem to allow a few poor people in every day without paying the 10 yuan (80p) admission charge, a sum which they could never afford. Indeed, the entrance fee effectively keeps out those among the hundreds of thousands of transient people who come to Beijing each week seeking work and who would dearly love to use the park to sleep. The Chinese capital these days is a showcase for the country's economic growth, with modern shopping malls and smart hotels and a growing middle class, but it is also a magnet for the losers in China's rush to modernisation.
These are the victims of a gradual breakdown in the old communist system of subsidised housing and full employment. A short distance from Beihai Park a homeless man was sleeping on Saturday evening on the footpath, his coat hanging on a metal fence and his bag of belongings beside him. A few streets away a transient worker had made a semi-permanent home under an overpass, using a tarpaulin and an old armchair. During the day such people look for work or beg. The lucky ones find employment on building sites, but the elderly and infirm live from hand to mouth.
In the last few months the number of mendicants, especially in areas frequented by foreign tourists, has markedly increased. Many beggars are impoverished villagers with crippled children; others are middle-aged workers who lost everything when their factory went bankrupt and who have no grown children to look after them.
This week, Beijing's transient labour department is to start a city-wide shake-up of the estimated 2.3 million non-registered residents in an attempt to remove them from illegal accommodation, especially in the inner suburbs. This is bad news for people like Lin Hong, a 22-year-old woman from Sichuan province who lives illegally with her husband, mother-in-law and 16-year-old sister in a small room near Ditan Park and makes a living selling home-made hotpot beside a busy overpass. They already live in fear of the police, who recently imposed a fine on them for having no business licence and confiscated their cooking equipment.
The plight of the "undocumented" is highlighted with some sympathy by the official media but they are also blamed by the press for 50 per cent of the city's crime. Besides living with uncertainty, they are excluded from much that the city has to offer. A day out in Beihai Park is an expense they can ill afford. Beijing at the end of the 20th century is a tale of two cities, that of the poor, who know that if they don't make money from begging, collecting cans, selling home-made hotpot or hauling bricks they will go hungry, and that of the increasingly comfortable middle class, whose members, like their urban counterparts anywhere in the world, take for granted going to the park at weekends with their camcorders and paying for their children to ride on the dodgems.