Beijing Building Lois Conner - Rossi & Rossi

Communist Party hacks would talk tirelessly of the country’s
rebuilding in the wake of devastation wrought by foreign
invasion, political cupidity and civil strife. The reality was more
complex: during High Maoism acts of creation were in constant
congress with egregious deeds of state-sanctioned vandalism
and destruction. Today, more than ever before, China’s
urbanity is the work of the construction state; it is a domain of
steel girders and concrete foundations, lofty frameworks and
profound excavations. (Plates 8, 9, 11, 13 & 19) This is the
world through which Lois Conner’s Beijing Building guides us.
It is in the capital city of Beijing that plans are mooted for
the wide-sweeping national transformations which feature
in cities as far flung as Shanghai and Wuhan, Chengdu and
Guangzhou, not to mention in hundreds of smaller urban
centres around the country. It is in Beijing that the ‘vein of
the nation’ (guomai), the pulse of the polity, is regulated, and
from which it radiates. For centuries Beijing has been home to
titanic aspirations, and it is in the images of this city that the
lingering splendour of the dynastic past and its radical present
are also most readily in evidence.
Much imperial conceit remains in the Chinese capital, for it
still rules over a territory secured by Qing emperors in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. While the built legacy
of the past has been dwindling for over half a century, in the
years surrounding the 2008 Olympics a refashioning of a
Beijing, both preserved and transformed, was promised as
part of the largest international spectacle and global event
of its kind. The city that exists in the wake of 2008 is one
that bears more clearly than its predecessors the imprint of
cultural impulses and contradictions, as well as the clashing
planning histories, political forces and socio-economic
imperatives that date back over a hundred years, in turn lateimperial,
nascent capitalist and socialist. The century-old
aspiration of China’s politicians, thinkers and cultural activists
vying to realize a Chinese ‘renaissance’ (fuxing) is no longer
spoken of as a promise to the future, rather it is a programme
being turned into concrete reality today. Beijing Building is
then, also, a visual account of a city in the thrall and paroxysm
of change, self-deception and self-discovery.
Lois Conner’s Beijing is encircled by six ‘rings’: multi-laned ring
roads (huanlu). In an oral history account of Beijing, telling the
story of China during its Olympic decade, the writer Sang Ye
and I present an interview with a Beijing taxi driver. He is one
of those old-style local drivers, not one of the Hebei provincials
who fill the ranks of the newcomers and often don’t know their
way around the ever-expanding city. Like taxi drivers the world
over he is often frank, frequently amusing and devastatingly
insightful about the life, society and politics of his city. He offers
a pithy topographical context for Conner’s Beijing Building:
Beijing is so huge it’s hard to work out where north is. The
First Ring Road, well it’s not really a road, is where the old
Imperial City wall was. The Second Ring is Chairman Mao’s
Ring Road [which follows the phantom footprint of the old
city walls]: inside are still a few things left over from Mao’s
day. The Third Ring Road is Deng Xiaoping’s, the Fourth is
Jiang Zemin’s and the Fifth and Sixth belong to Hu Jintao.
Everything up to the mountains are the fucking rings of Hu!
They’re even crapping on about constructing a Seventh Ring
Road. They’ll be ringing right in to Hebei province soon….
Things are constantly changing. When we were kids, we
thought how great it was that things were different every day
under socialism. But now that things really are in constant
flux with the Hu Ring around the Jiang Ring and new buildings
inside and outside each ring, everyone wanders around as
lost as stray dogs.
It is this world of expanding rings that Lois Conner first entered
nearly three decades ago. Since then she has, through her
work, tracked the outward reverberation of the Rings of
Beijing. Old Peking, the city of dynastic creation that was
slowly modernized during the Republican years, was originally
built on a grid, one whose geometry was determined by the
points of the compass. Since the 1980s, however, it is in the
boastful, upward thrust of high-rise construction that Beijing
has been built. In the patterns of these vertical frames, too,
Conner investigates what lies beneath the integument of the
contemporary city, searching for a lost metropolis whose past
sensibility lies as a gossamer over the exoskeletons of today’s
leviathan signature structures.
Engineered around the imperial throne and the south-facing
emperor, the city’s four cardinal directions of north, south,
east and west were not only points on the compass, but the
means by which people oriented themselves, their houses,
their lives and their movements. To ‘not be able to find north’—
zhaobuzhao bei—is a colloquial Beijing expression that is both
practical and metaphorical. The rings have confounded the
grid, and true north no longer exists.
The taxi driver is scathing in his observations of the new world
that has sprung up around him over the past decade. While
visitors may marvel, older residents are readily appalled by the
wilful dismemberment of the body of Beijing:
This Beijing of ours was (designed according to the form of
the god) Nezha—three-headed, six-armed Nezha with his feet
on wind-fire wheels, golden halberds in his hand, and a sword
and cudgel for defeating demons tucked in his belt. He was
known by everyone—be they in heaven or on earth. From
this you can see we’ve got traitors in our midst: they don’t
like Beijing, they think it’s too backward, not friendly enough
towards the foreign devils. We can’t have that these days, can
we? But all the good things have fallen into the hands of the
devils. Which is why the bastards with all their plans have
turned Beijing into a bird.
‘Bird’ (niao) is a term that also expresses contempt, disgust
and bastardry in the local patois of Beijing. The taxi driver
describes the new contours of the city and its recently famous
iconic buildings, many of which feature in Lois Conner’s work:
The bird’s legs are stabbed into the East Third Ring Road—
the off-kilter ‘big underpants building’ that serves as China
Central TV’s headquarters. (Plates 18, 20 & 34) Its head is
over on the West Ring Road, beak agape—the damn thing
they call the Millennium Monument. Of course, a big bird like
that needs a nest, doesn’t it? Well, the nest has been plonked
down on the North Fourth Ring Road. (Plates 4, 12) On the
radio they even boast that it’s the biggest nest in the world.
Fuck me, but what the hell is so impressive about throwing
scrap metal into a pile?
Of course, a bird needs more than a nest. It needs to eat. So
they built it the Water Cube, a Perspex birdfeeder. Big birds
lay big eggs, and this bastard’s laid its egg right on Chang’an
Avenue—‘China’s Great Whorehouse’. (the Grand National
Theatre, Plate 16)
This garrulous account is a powerful complement to Beijing
Building. For Conner’s Beijing is only seemingly lyrical; it
conveys too a vision of captured change. Certainly, within the
tireless industry of urban transfiguration it provides precious
moments of contemplation, quietude and respite. But Conner
evokes a world in which ideas of Chinese identity and its claims
to greatness are, literally, made concrete. Her account of the
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