notes from a brief return to Beijing
Note: This post was first published at a Wordpress.com blog that I am in the process of decommissioning. As it is China-related, I thought it best to post it here. It was first published on 22/1/2025, and looks back on a month spent in Beijing from December 2024 to January 2025. I've done a little light editing of things peripheral to that China trip.
I’ve just spent a month in China, mostly in a village in the mountains on the northwestern-most edge of Beijing Municipality, but also a week in downtown Beijing. By “northwestern-most edge”, I mean Yanqing District, Beijing’s highest, driest, and coldest district. What follows are a few notes of things I noticed over this month:
Changes
I suppose the most obvious thing to write about is the pace of change in China. After all, everybody does, constantly. We all know China is rapidly changing – it’s about as cliche as writing about the juxtaposition of hypermodernity and ancient tradition. But what I noticed first was that although there has definitely been change in the five years since my last visit, the pace of change has slowed, and much of the change is building on trends that were emerging when I left China ten years ago.
For example, ten years ago I was excited about fleets of electric taxis being trialled in Beijing’s outer suburbs. On this most recent trip I did not see a single petrol-powered taxi, and so many of the buses were electric that I was surprised to hear the rumble of an internal combustion engine coming from one of them.
Ten years ago traditional rust-coloured brick houses dominated in my wife’s home village, and all over rural Yanqing. Apartment blocks were starting to emerge in some villages closer to the county town, and a few wealthier rural families had replaced their old village houses with more modern buildings. It now seems that modern buildings dominate and only a few of the traditional houses remain.
I suppose it is worth pointing out that Yanqing is on the other side of the Jundu Mountains from Beijing City, and outside the Great Wall, so has its own history, culture, and dialect distinct from Beijing’s. In Beijing city proper, commoner’s houses were built in grey brick, while red was for imperial buildings. These colours are irrelevant in Yanqing.
Ten years ago alternatives to cash were appearing. Now, Alipay and WeChat seem to dominate. Apparently you can even scan your WeChat on the bus or subway to pay for your ticket. I was pleasantly surprised, because I didn’t have any of these fancy apps or a functioning Chinese bank card, when cash was accepted. But cash was accepted.
But still, the pace of change was slower. In December 2019 I was astounded by how much had changed in the not-quite five years we’d been away. This time around it was all a lot less jarring.
What had changed?
There was a noticeable demographic shift in our village. Not just the absence of school-aged children and their parents, all off in the towns and cities seeking educational and economic opportunity. Enough people have pontificated on that. The noticeable change was in accents and dialects – specifically, the presence of ski field workers from Northeastern China. I’m not sure what had them staying out in our village when there are villages and townships closer to the ski fields, but there they were.
There’s a shiny new shopping mall in the county town. It seems to have sucked some of the energy from the old mall, which was, itself, built on the site of the old central market. The old mall is still going strong, just in a slightly older, tired-er way. I feel I can relate.
The Walmart in the old mall used to be my go-to for such foreign devilry as cheese and coffee. Not so much any more. It’s now looking a lot more like a middle China supermarket, like a Jingkelong or Wumei. This is not a bad thing, probably a sensible business decision given the demographics of Yanqing. I had a quick look at the dairy section – of course, Anchor dominated the small butter shelf. Otherwise there was no cheese I would want to eat, only the plastic variety. I did manage to find bags of roasted coffee beans, which I would’ve been interested if I were there to stay and could source a coffee grinder. There were also coffee bags and pre-packed coffee filter/bag thingees. I opted for the latter – it was more than good enough as coffee, but perhaps not the most sustainable choice. But the only more sustainable option would’ve required finding a coffee grinder.
Sanlitun – not a place I like to visit, as I remember it when all kinds of dodginess was going on. Still, back then I was younger and more open to adventure. I had to go there twice – once because my wife had told me to meet her there. I was happily ensconced in a bookshop when she sent me a WeChat message informing me that we were actually meeting at Liangmahe. Off I walked, nervous thanks to my memories of what Sanlitun used to be. And then I arrived at Liangmahe realising that at no point did I feel like there was any danger or risk or dodginess worse than the need to cross busy roads.
We returned to Sanlitun the next night – admittedly only the Taiguli complex at the southern end, and at very much family friendly hours, but still, we returned to Sanlitun. Same again.
Admittedly, two nights at very much middle-aged, family friendly hours hardly gives enough data from which to draw any conclusions, but what I saw was quite different from what I remember.
And Beijing was so much quieter than what I expected. I’ve already mentioned the electric buses and taxis, and I’m sure these are a large part of the drop in noise levels. There were also many private electric and hybrid vehicles, from scooters to SUVs. I was quite impressed to see electric Hongqi/红旗/Red Flag sedans.
Perhaps related was the air quality. There were smoggy days, for sure, particularly during the week we spent in downtown Beijing. But every single day we were out in Yanqing, that is for all but a week of our time in China, from our village we could see the Jundu Mountains along the far southern rim of the basin and the mountains that rise out in the eastern end of the district. In the past we have often been unable to see right across the basin like that.
And yes, that was only one month, and a particularly dry month at that, even by the standards of Beijing’s driest district, but that level of clarity for such a sustained period of time is not something I remember seeing before.
Chit chat
I doubt much in the way of useful conclusions can be drawn from this, but I did notice quite a bit of chatter amongst the extended in-laws about diabetes.
There was also quite a bit of chatter, with media reports to back it up, about the warm, dry winter. Out in Yanqing it didn’t get much colder than about -13 or -14 celsius, and the temperatures were often popping above zero for an hour or two in the afternoon. Down in Beijing it never seemed to get much cooler than -5 or -6, and there were media reports of parks being unable to open their skating rinks because the ice on the lakes just wasn’t freezing thick enough. It did start to snow one night out in the village, but then the norwester blew up and carried the snow over the mountains. We got to sit and watch social media posts about snow falling in Beijing. It didn’t snow again while we were there. The difference between artificial snow-covered ski fields and dry, dusty mountainside was starker than I have ever seen.
There was chatter I found hard to reconcile with what I was seeing. There was talk about tough economic times, the trouble finding work, getting paid, getting by. In our village there were certainly empty storefronts and for lease signs. But the county town seemed to be bustling – provincial town bustling, very quiet compared to Beijing, but still this district with a population similar to Greater Wellington seemed to be able to support at least three branches of major brands, such as Anta or Li Ning, in the county town within walking distance of each other. So far as I could tell, Beijing was as busy as it ever has been.
Security
I was surprised to have to show my passport to enter Qianmen Dajie. I could not see why this would be necessary. But there were fixed fences and gates with guards and scanners at which one had to present identification in order to enter Qianmen Dajie. This seemed to apply only to the street itself, from the southern end of the pedestrianised stretch at Zhushikou up to the semi-circle northern end opposite Qianmen itself. The intersections of the various hutongs running off Qianmen Dajie had the same gates for people wanting to enter Qianmen Dajie, but there was no control over people leaving. Nor was there any control over people entering the hutongs from outside the Qianmen area.
I was also surprised to see large security setups at the gates to the Temple of Heaven, and Beihai and Jingshan Parks. Fences, guards, metal detectors, x-rays for bags, all just to get to the ticket office.
On the old G110 highway, the checkpoint for traffic entering Beijing had been moved up to the provincial border some years ago (it used to be a couple of kilometres back from the border, making it easy to avoid if you knew the village lanes….). Now, however, they required ID from all adult drivers and passengers, and the foreigner to go into the office so they could note down passport details. I had never before been stopped there.
Twice I saw Police conducting random ID checks in the subway. Actually random, or random because there was a person of interest in the area, I don’t know. They were not interested in me, anyway, just waved me on by.
I went in to Jingshan Park and the Temple of Heaven, and the security check was about as thorough as those on the subway – run your bag through the x-ray, walk through the scanner and let them wave the wand over you as you stroll on by to grab your bag, and all was good.
Otherwise, Beijing was its usual self. Plenty of Police around, but people just getting on with life untroubled.
Bookshops
Whoever bemoans the death of the bookshop needs to visit Beijing. I didn’t find the bookshop I was looking for (had I walked another 20 metres north and stepped outside the security gate at Qianmen… ), but I did find two others, 纸上声音 (sound on paper? I didn’t see an English name) in Dashilar, and the Sanlitun branch of Sanlian. Both were amazing. I was ecstatic in Dashilar, but when I walked into Sanlian I was in heaven.
And I noticed that there are a lot more books in translation than one would expect to see in a New Zealand bookstore. Read into that what you will.
Constancy
I remember a phase of lamenting the loss of the Beijing I once knew. Beijing had undergone so much change in the time I had been living there that the city was no longer the one I had gotten to know when I moved there. I was wrong. I found the bones, heart, and soul of Beijing still there, still very much alive, still as it was back in 2001 when I first moved there. It has undergone some changes, some fairly drastic, some for the better, some for the “really, why bother with that?”, some just for the passage of time.
But Beijing remains.