Will Beijing lose its collective memory when the hutongs go?
Updated on 04 August 2008
Today saw another Tiananmen Square protest - by displaced residents of Beijing's old hutongs, razed in a pre-Olympic clean-up.
Greetings from the Smogopolis that is Beijing.
Sadly, the two clear days we had have well and truly gone and it's back to the misty vistas of tower blocks.
But down on the streets something rather interesting is happening.
The good folk of Beijing, faced with an army of foreign invaders with cameras (lots of tourists too), and faced with a nasty, brutal regime, have decided to play a rather brave card.
Or at least a few of them. So it was that 20 or 30 women gathered in a district just off Tiananmen Square today to protest about the government demolishing their houses.
There's little doubt that their leaders have used the monster-demolition of large parts of this city for the Olympic Games as an excuse to wipe further districts off the map which are not really affected by the games.
China's leaders have used the Olympics as an excuse to wipe further districts off the map which are not really affected by the games.
This district is scheduled to have the likes of Nike and Rolex setting up shop, and in Communist China nothing talks louder than capitalism.
So the women and their homes - traditional hutong dwellings with leafy courtyards and low, pantiled rooms - must yield to the bungalows of modern China.
A writer who has recently published a book about this describes it as a Stalinist drive to erase the collective memory of Beijing. Of course, this being the Chinese regime, they quite often build fake old districts in other parts of the city as some kind of inexplicable cultural compensation. But the difference between new fake and old culture is, well, obvious.
A book recently described the demoltions as a Stalinist drive to erase the collective memory of Beijing.
But these people are seizing their chance. They had placards asking the western media to tell their story. They see us here and they know their own legions of police are under orders to lay off protesters - at least to some degree.
I personally turned up at another protester's house this afternoon. She was out there on the street lambasting the cops and the authorities in general. The coppers simply radioed for advice and did nothing.
But after the games are over and likes of us have departed... What then? Retribution seems likely.
