The Beijing Cultural Heritage Protection Centre - fighting to save the capital's surviving hutongs and other historic pieces of architecture from the predations of greedy property developers and the corrupt Party cronies who rubberstamp their insane schemes - has launched a new initiative to raise funds and awareness, Do You Hutong?
The inaugural event is to be tomorrow evening, Saturday 17th July, out at the Three Shadows Photography Art Centre, a swish gallery in the Caochangdi art colony just outside the north-east 5th Ringroad. I gather it will involve a variety of art exhibits, a buffet, and a live music performance from popular laowai band Girls Are Waiting To Meet You (GAWTMY).
It's a cause well worth supporting. And it should be a fun evening - even though it is a bit of a pain-in-the-bum to get there. Maybe I'll see you there....
3 comments:
How effective are these sorts of grass-roots movements over there? I always had the impression that they were tolerated, mostly... right up until they got ignored to death. Hope this one hangs around!
(June 17 = July 17th?)
You may know this already, but YouTube's got several GAWTMY videos -- mostly live, one "professional"/cinematic (sort of a comic-grossout featurette, called "Zombie Girl"). Looks like a fun group to follow!
Ah yes, date typo duly rectified, JES (god, I've come unstuck in time again: I really did think it was still June).
No, ultimately this kind of thing is doomed to failure. Very occasionally, perhaps, it may serve to delay the redevelopment of an area for a while.... and every hour saved is worth something. Also, it may help to encourage other forms of 'preservation': mapping, photographing, collecting oral histories.
In 10 or 20 years, all the hutongs will be gone, I'm sure. Probably well over half of the ones that were here when I first came to live in Beijing 8 years ago have been swept away already.
A lot of the larger buildings - old temples and palaces and so on - will be gone too; or hopelessly compromised by their loss of context, marooned inside mall developments; or transformed into hideously tawdry commercial enterprises - why just be a museum when you can be a boutique or a restaurant instead? The defining characteristics of modern China are an overriding get-rich-quick mentality and a crass sense of taste.
There's a plan afoot to build a huge subterranean souvenir shopping complex in the area around the Bell and Drum Towers in central Beijing. Given the almost non-existent health & safety standards and quality control mechanisms present in the Chinese construction industry, it wouldn't at all surprise me to see their foundations inadvertently undermined, and have them start to collapse or subside into the ground in a few years' time.
It should also be kept in mind that this kind of activism can be very dangerous for the Chinese organisers. They are pitting themselves against big monied interests - many of them inside the Communist Party itself - and if they start achieving too much success, ruffling too many feathers, they could suffer for it.
I'd say there's about a 50% chance tonight's event will get closed down by the police.
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