THE ROUGH GUIDE to - Parallels Plesk Panel

Beijing’s facelift
Beijing has always been image-conscious – anxious to portray a
particular face to the world. When Mao took over, he wanted the feudal
city of the emperors transformed into a “forest of chimneys”; he got his
wish, and the capital became an ugly industrial powerhouse of socialism.
In the 1980s, when the Party embraced capitalism “with Chinese
characteristics”, bland international-style office blocks were erected with
a pagoda-shaped “silly hat” on the roof as a concession to local taste.
Modern Beijing, eager to be viewed as a cool and stylish world city,
and to express China’s new global dominance, has undergone the kind
of urban transformation usually only seen after a war. In recent years,
factories were banished to the suburbs, six new subway lines opened,
a new terminal (designed by Norman Foster) was added to the airport,
and some $10 billion has been spent on greening projects including a
tree belt around the city to control the dust storms that whip in from
the Gobi Desert. Now, statement architecture – the kind of massive,
prestige project that not long ago would have been derided as bourgeois
and decadent – is all the rage, designed by the world’s hottest (and most
expensive) architects.
As well as the fantastic venues built for the 2008 Olympics (the
most famous of which, the “Bird’s Nest”, is shown below), there’s Paul
Andreu’s National Opera House (the “Egg”), and perhaps most striking
of all, the new state television station (the “Twisted Doughnut”) by
Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, which appears to defy gravity with its
intersecting Z-shaped towers.
All this has been made possible by light planning laws, deregulation
and the willingness of the government to allow developers to sweep
homes away without much compensation to residents. Regrettably, little
of old Beijing has been preserved, with hutong neighbourhoods such
as those around Qianmen levelled en masse. The city has been left with
a disjointed feel; there’s something arbitrary about the skyscrapers and
single-use zones around them. Beijing today looks modern, indisputedly,
but it has some way to go before you could call it beautiful.
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