Arriving in China (Part 1)
I arrived in Beijing in early September 2011 and spent a month in China.
I stayed in the People’s Palace Hotel in Beijing for the first five days before flying to Xian. The People’s Palace is a four-star hotel with nine hundred rooms, and I was the only westerner there. I think the name discourages non-Asian travelers. It is a soaring gilt ad marble palace, with, as usual, the lobby much more grandiose than the bedrooms. I learned that in high quality Chinese-oriented hotels the lobbies are for meeting and greeting and impressing.
Car ownership in the cities is soaring, with annual growth in double digits.. In the rich coastal cities conspicuous consumption is rampant: people do not so much get fancy cars and gadgets to ‘keep up with the Joneses’ as Americans did in the fifties, as to leave the Joneses behind in the dust.
And yet … In the taxi to the hotel I was startled by something I had never thought to see in Beijing: crystal blue sky. In 2005 I spent over two weeks there. ‘Sunny’ then meant a bright white sky, with the outlines of big buildings dimly discernable at 300 feet.
Beijing in 2005 was way worse – there was no sun to be seen at all.
The central government is deeply worried about the dangers of pollution. By 2005 the desert had crept to within 80 km of Beijing which, itself, was swallowing up arable land as it incorporated more villages into the city proper. Today, the sky is clear blue on many (but not all) sunny days, with the leaves of the trees pricked out in detail. I was so flummoxed I started photographing blue sky.
It is such an improbable sight, to see a city which has done so much in six years to reverse pollution. But the gasoline is still leaded, and there are over 100 million cars on China’s roads. Some of the other cities I visited, such as Kunming in the southwest, are so polluted I got nauseated and dizzy in the city centre and ended up avoiding it.
Trees were planted before the Beijing Olympics to beautify an otherwise homely city, and to combat pollution. But the government has also initiated an official ‘Preserve the Environment! Tree Planting Day’, at which people are exhorted to plant trees for ancestors, for birthdays, and so on.
Indeed few patches of land remain to plant any more trees. They are tall and flourishing, and tidy beds of flowers are everywhere (in central Beijing, at any rate). They transform the city, which is mostly full of boxy low- to mid-rise buildings.