A Walk on the Wild Wall

In fifteenth century China during the Ming Dynasty, ordinary citizens were barred from viewing the procession of the emperor through the streets of Beijing from the Forbidden City to the Temple of Heaven, where he made animal sacrifices to the gods that were critical to the success of the following harvest. It was ordered they barricade their windows and remain home in silence lest they catch a glimpse of that most holy of rites, thereby upsetting the balance between heaven and earth.

It should probably then come as no surprise that the ordinary people of China are barred from attending or viewing the massive spectacle of the 60th anniversary parade that the Communist Party is throwing for itself today, for this ruling class is as exclusive in its way as the emperors of old. The entire downtown area is cordoned off by thousands of armed military, and tens of thousands of volunteers wearing red armbands, and those who live in the area aren’t allowed to leave their homes. Annoying.

The Chinese government says they’re responding to the threat of terrorism from Falun Gong and others, and there have indeed been two FG knife attacks in the capital over the last few days. The ordinary man on the street here expresses concern for “China’s 9/11” and doesn’t seem especially put out by the security measures. It’s all very Waiting for the Barbarians, and one wonders if FG didn’t exist whether they would have to create it, but this is probably unfair. Falun Gong is a bizarre and genuinely dangerous sect, run I am told by a friend in the State Dept by a blind man who lives in Queens of all places and claims God speaks to him through his television set. From all of us who live in Queens, my apologies to the Chinese people.

At least we have the benefit of watching the parade on TV, and it’s hard to miss the tight contingents of fighter jets swinging low through the city. On the tube you see phalanx after phalanx of high-tech military vehicles, tanks and radar trucks, anti-aircraft and nuclear missiles, bombers and helicopters, every piece of heavy equipment you can imagine trundling past Tiananmen Square and its iconic portrait of Mao, placidly smiling at the pomp. All this is followed by a series of floats celebrating the stunning recent advances in Chinese technology, medicine, agriculture, industry, space research, science and so forth – and let’s face it, China and the ruling party deserve to be proud of their accomplishments; it’s possible the rapid-fire advance of Chinese civilization over the past couple of decades – legacy of the great, visionary pragmatist Deng Xiaoping – will go down in history as the one important event of our time.

In the evening there is an interminable song and dance extravaganza on the imperial square with all of the dozens of ethnic groups that comprise China singing what are described as “folk songs” in their native tongues lauding things like “another five percent increase in the crop yield”, punctuated by massive firework displays. I get a few cheap laughs from this retro-social realist cheese, but it’s no more cheesy than your average televised Fourth of July celebration, just tuned to a different key and on a more spectacular scale. Witnessing even a bit of it from the periphery is still cool, and a highlight of my journey.

By far the most impressive thing is the weather. When I arrive in Beijing and make my way past the electronic fever detectors positioned to block the spread of swine flu (pretty intimidating), my first thought is “Oh My God. People Breathe This Stuff?!?!?” A thick layer of sickly dark yellow smog blots out anything more than a block or two away from you, and it seems laughable to read the pronouncements from the government that unspecified “eco-friendly chemical agents” will be released in the air above the capital that night to disperse all clouds and prevent rain during the festivities. Ha ha yeah whatever. An old fashioned rain dance. Good luck with that.

But sure enough the next morning the smog is GONE, as if it never existed, and there’s nary a cloud in the sky for the next four days.

Holy crap! The Chinese Communist Party controls the weather!

I’ve taken a break from the backpacking hostels to stay in a five-star hotel, the Shangri-la on the west side of town. It’s guests are a mix of well-fed, high-level apparatchiks from the provinces decked out in red sashes and drinking high-end cocktails, and professional tennis players competing in the China Open at the new Olympic Tennis Center. During my stay I see & share elevators with Novak Djokovic, Dinara Safina, James Blake, Caroline Wozniaki, “Dr Ivo” Karlovic, Elena Dementieva, Sveta Kuznetsova, Jelena Jankovic and a host of unranked qualifiers hoping to make it into the tournament. I love tennis, so this is awesome, and I end up seeing Serena Williams, Safina & Robby Ginepri play when the first round commences.

The next day of this 8-day celebration is for the ordinary people. We’re allowed into Tiananmen to view all the mega-floats up close, which is quite cool. The imperial pomp of the central square and the gargantu-scale Forbidden City is formidable and something I’m stunned and grateful to see, but the crowds for the holiday are massive and the scale of Beijing at this point starts leaving me cold, with its limitless skyscraper canyons and autocratic signs posted at regular intervals advising citizens to “work hard, be thrifty, avoid bad habits, respect the military and love civilians”. All commendable sentiments, but it seems downright odd. I’m hungry for a Whopper-size dose of democratic chaos, despite all the disabling nonsense it engenders, a little “grab a six-pack with a fake ID and hang out all night by the levee” kind of a feeling, and while the Chinese people are awesome – some of the nicest and smartest I’ve met in the world – I’m having a hard time penetrating the veneer of this great city and tasting much of anything.

That’s when I pay attention to the bicycles. I bike through the streets of New York every day, and it always helps me make sense of life at home. Why not the streets of Beijing? And so I scrabble through the side streets looking for a bike shop, find one not too far south of Tiananmen and leave a large deposit for a crappy rental one-speeder with faulty brakes, never to return (the deposit was worth more than the bike).

Like magic, big monolithic Beijing melts away and the city becomes lovable. First off Beijing is a great bike city, with dedicated lanes on every major street, even some of the highways – it’s far safer than New York. Second, you’re navigating around fellow bikers, mopeders, motorized wheelbarrowers, electronic wheelchairs, delivery bikes larded down with massive packages of goods or sky-high piles of recyclables, and a host of weird contraptions that locals have jury-rigged together; the one I remember most clearly is a lawnmower engine & handle attached to two truck wheels.

The best part of biking in Beijing is veering off into a hudong, the narrow, interconnected alleyways of Old Beijing – and discovering the honeycomb of old-school life that snakes through the city like an enormous termite infestation and give Beijing real character. You can twist through them for hours without getting bored, past open-air vegetable markets and little outdoor bars, single-floor dwellings that look about to flop over, all of them hosting a Chinese flag, one-table kitchens serving hot pot and barbecue, barber shops, cookware storefronts, concrete 1-yuan bathrooms, clothing shops with tatty western mannequins, laundry hanging everywhere and a thousand squalid wonders waiting to be uncovered. You can go down them for days without running out of cool things to see. So life still grows wild on the vine behind the solid wall of megaliths that front the major freeways. May the hudongs live forever.

On day three in Beijing I make the obligatory trek north to see the Great Wall, a spectacle if there ever was one. I go to one of the less visited sections that’s renovated for tourists, but again it’s all a bit manicured and Disneyland for my taste until I hike 2km, cross two consecutive “do not pass” dividers and discover an apparently endless stretch of “wild wall” that hasn’t been touched since the Ming Dynasty. The paving stones have cracked over centuries of winters, trees and grasses have sprung up all around, the guard towers are crumbling and sometimes look as if they’ve been blown up in an aerial bombardment.

I keep going kilometer after kilometer along the wild wall, can’t stop myself despite knowing I have to go back as far as I came. By far the best hike ever, just incredible. I’m posting pictures to Facebook soon so everyone can see for themselves. At some points it’s a bit dangerous as the only thing left clear of trees are the gate stones along the edge, and some are a bit loose & it’s a good 40-50 meters down if you fall. But hey I’m having a good time and you only live once. Then I think about it more and realize what a public laughingstock I would be back home:

“Hey what happened to Sean? I heard he died.”

“Yeah. He fell off the Great Wall of China.”

“Ba ha ha! How ridiculous.”

So I move off the edge and trundle over the trees in the center.

Another great example of wild Beijing: 798 Art District. This place is what Williamsburg wished it was back when it bothered to pretend being a serious avant garde art zone. It’s centered around a massive, Terry Gilliamesque factory from the 1950s bristling with comically huge insulated piping and tubes, steam-spitting spigots and smoke stacks tattooed with slogans from the Cultural Revolution (kept there on purpose by the artists who run the place). It’s now been refurbished and is used as a set of display spaces. The rest of the zone really looks nothing like Beijing, with spiffy little one-storey art supply shops, outdoor cafes and galleries hosting world-class exhibitions of big-name contemporary Chinese artists. It was a good chance to see what China is doing these days – a lot of figurative stuff, mostly painting, geared for the international art market. But there were plenty of sculptures outside, including a gigantic bird cage that passersby were invited to sit down in and become part of the art while they slurped a cherry ice. At night there are art book carts along the side streets and outdoor movies like you see on New York summer nights. The people wandering the streets here look cool but are not “beautiful people” per se; the vibe is more Fort Greene than Fashion Week.

There was a subversive note to some of the work, especially the outdoor graffiti, always masked in the vocabulary of the ruling party that it sought to subvert. One poster said “Life is Beautiful, Love More So, Freedom is Worth Losing Both”, followed by a quote from Mao preaching patience in the service of the cause. Another had a mischievous, smiling cartoon match and a bunch of iconic portraits of Che Guevara, quoting Che: “It only takes a spark to light the blaze!” Hard to take this too seriously as everyone looked pretty fat and content, it reminded me more of the empty acting-out of anti-Bush polemics that you’d see in artsy neighborhoods back home; the vibe I got was more of people whose temperament balks like mine at all the random autocratic nonsense, and wants to tweak someone’s nose. But the strategy of using ruling party sloganry against itself is interesting and dangerous in action; they could all be shut down at any moment, and they still skirt the edge. Another great example is a social realist poster of angry proletarians taking up arms above a giant Wal-Mart logo, and there were lots of ironic renditions of the big red buttons everyone was wearing for the anniversary.

Last night in Beijing I head out with a couple of open qualifiers who didn’t qualify to a big lake in the northwest of town by the Summer Palace, for some Peking duck and a few beers to drown their sorrows in. We circle the lake, stop at a few taverns and again see what a great, prosperous city this is. Boat rentals and lakefront bars with alternating guitar balladeers and karaoke machines, families and young couples out for a tree-lined evening stroll, little kids trying to skateboard and falling on their asses, old folks singing the old songs with the old instruments. Everyone looks happy; there’s a sense of opportunity that most never thought they would see, I think, and everyone I met without exception seems more than willing to put up their government’s sometimes overbearing presence to keep the good times rolling.

We did find an underground bar playing rock songs with lots of people from my generation, the Tiananmen Square massacre generation. They played some tunes in English (and there are English signs everywhere, and not just in Beijing, and 80% of the shirts here have English on them) and at least one ironically delivered rendition of a hymn of the Cultural Revolution that everyone smirked at and bobbed their heads to. The massacre seems largely forgotten in Beijing, at least on the surface. And I would expect zero near-term change in the low level of political freedom in China. Will the Chinese Communist Party ever have to choose between the open experimental pragmatism of Deng that has led to all this good fortune, and the blunt, dogmatic hubris of Mao, which mostly pisses people off? No matter how many health and safety secretaries you summarily execute for poisoning the baby formula, the lack of accountability will cause damage at some point. But twenty years later it seems like those kids really did die for nothing.