HISTORY: City of Heavenly Tranquility: Beijing in the History of ChinaBy Jasper Becker, Penguin, 371pp, £22.00
WHAT IS A CITY? Is it a collection of buildings? Or a conglomeration of people? A tangle of stories? The sum of its lived history? Or a symbolic site existing largely in the imagination of those who inhabit it?
Jasper Becker's book on Beijing does not ask any of these questions. Instead, he leads us into a city constructed from stories of people who live there. As a journalist, Becker has an agenda: to deplore the frenzied destruction and rebuilding of what used to be Peking. As is widely known, the razing of old Beijing and its rebuilding has brooked only token resistance from those who live there. Indeed, many Westerners find the lack of leverage against such government initiatives not only alien but repugnant. For most non-Chinese audiences the bulldozing of the quaint, centuries-old laneways or hutongssurrounding the Forbidden City is more than mere vandalism - it is regarded as an assault on individual human rights.
Even as Becker describes them, these same hutongsare now virtual slums, without running water or toilets. As one-storey structures, they are also hopelessly outdated in a city of over 14 million people. This is not, however, a case entertained in this book. Rather, Becker argues that the razing of old Beijing is a form of revenge taken by the Communist Party on the people of Beijing for the spontaneous uprising culminating in the events of Tiananmen Square in June 1989. It is true that the city built by the Emperor Yong Le had survived relatively unchanged for almost five hundred years. But if there were any one event responsible for the modern destruction of Beijing it would surely be the Cultural Revolution, unleashed by Mao Zedong in 1966 and ending only with this death in 1976. In its wake, not only Beijing but most traditional cities and villages lost many of their architectural and other cultural treasures - as well as their intellectual elite.
Memories of that revolution haunt this book, for it is arguably the one event that has (ironically) facilitated the breathtaking speed of China's modernization. For developers, history is a brake. Destroy history and things can be done quickly. Take away the leverage of local protest and back development with strongly centralized government, and virtually any plan can be implemented - and quickly. At an astonishing pace (Chinese labour works on 24-hour shifts) old Beijing is disappearing. New Beijing is now rising in architectural shapes that simply astonish. Whether it is the Bird's Nest or the Water Cube, the enormous egg-shaped Concert Hall or the two leaning towers for Central China TV, Beijing is now becoming a show-case for architectural shock and awe.
As that phrase might imply, what is at stake here is a violent confrontation of cultural values. As a Westerner, Becker believes in history, even quoting Orega y Gasset: "Man has no nature; what he has is history." Here Becker defines "history" through such famous architectural sites as the Great Wall or the Forbidden City. In Becker's hands, their stories are driven by a very Western agenda, which is, essentially, that of the conflict between preserving and dismissing the past. Although in many ways disjointed, the book is held together by the trope of a desperate siege against the forces of destruction, rendering it predictable, if poignant, reading.
As such, each chapter replays much of the same drama, with very little self-interrogation or even reflection. A notable exception is the chapter on the Garden of Perfect Brightness ( Yuanming Yuan). Burnt down by Lord Elgin 150 years ago, for the Chinese their ruins are taken as shorthand for the subsequent century of shame and humiliation at the hands of foreign devils. Ironically, its gardens and palaces were actually designed by the Qianlong emperor in close collaboration with a group of brilliant European Jesuits - the same whose praise of their adopted culture made chinoiseriea European craze during the eighteenth century. In other words, as Becker points out, this particular history might be told quite differently, as one in which the Garden of Perfect Brightness could be construed as an inspiring symbol of cultural exchange between China and Europe.
What is not taken into account is that our history is not their history. When Mao describes human nature as "a blank sheet of paper," what he implies is that neither people - nor cities - are products of a past, but are rather one stage in a larger cycle of destruction and reconstruction. As a rule, the Chinese do not tend to consider "the past" in its entirety as valuable and thus to be preserved. What the Chinese preserve from the past are key "examples" (such as the Great Wall) which will be held up as models for greatness. But to think of a city as an evolving organism, as we do in the West, would seem quite alien in this culture. This much has become clear to me while living on and off in Beijing during the last four years. Watching the bulldozers advance before the huge construction cranes, the line that keeps coming to mind is from W B Yeats's one Chinese poem, Lapis Lazuli, which speaks of how "All things fall and are built again. . . "
In confronting "Old civilizations put to the sword. . ." Yeats's wisdom is implicitly Chinese. It says: cities are not buildings nor the stories they tell. Cities are rather the invisible energies that reside in its people, as they flow through it.
Those evicted from the hutongsreconstitute their three-generational families in apartment blocks beyond the Fourth Ring Road. Old people still practice their qi-gongin the parks at dawn. Kites dance above the grim open space of Tiananmen Square. What defines Beijing is not its history but its overflowing energy. And what we see as tragedy is not all loss. In Yeats' words, Beijing now takes its place with those other cities and civilizations which "fall and are built again. . ."
And (he adds, as if for the visionaries of the New China) "those that build them again are gay."
Jerusha McCormack is visiting professor at Beijing Foreign Studies University and was involved in the foundation of the first Irish Studies Centre in China. She was consulting editor for the RTÉ Thomas Davis Lecture series on China and the Irish which was aired earlier this year.