Two weeks to go....

...until the 21st anniversary of the grimmest - and most important - event in China's modern history, the entry of the PLA into Beijing to bring a violent end to the Tiananmen Square demonstrations.

The Lego 'Tank Man' above was one of the first of a daily series of images of Tiananmen '89 that Stuart over at Found In China has been running this year as a three-week memorial countdown to June 4th. It might seem rather frivolous and irreverent to render that iconic confrontation with a children's toy, but as I noted around this time last year, I don't think we should be too stuffy about this sort of thing - humour serves its purposes, offers us new perspectives on the most terrible events, and provides a kind of cathartic safety-valve for emotions that threaten to become too painful, overwhelming. I'm sure Stuart will include in his series many more pictures of the terror and carnage that erupted in this city on the night of June 3rd 1989 and continued over the following days (in the comments to one of these posts he provided a link to this particularly grisly collection of photographs on the Democratic China Blog II [one of those resources that had long been inaccessible to me here, until I got myself a proper VPN at the end of last year]); we need one or two 'lighter' moments to recover our spirits after horrors like those.

I have long been pondering the idea of creating a provocative modern artwork drawing on the iconography of the 'Tank Man', a sort of guerilla performance piece - perhaps doing something with toy tanks down on Tiananmen Square; or staging a mass lookalike march, with dozens of folks donning white shirts and dark slacks and unruly black wigs, and carrying shopping bags. I would have dearly loved to see someone try to emulate the 'Tank Man' during last year's pompous militaristic parade down Chang'an Avenue for the country's 60th anniversary celebrations, stepping into the road to disrupt that hideous procession of armoured vehicles - but any attempt to carry out such a stunt would, I'm sure, have got the perpetrators swiftly despatched to the gulag, if not to a firing squad. I've also thought about instigating a portrait series of leading 'dissident' figures of today posing as the 'Tank Man' - I think Ai WeiWei would be up for it, but I'm not sure how many others would dare such a provocation, or have the status to protect them from dire retribution.

The idea I like best, and keep returning to - perhaps something that could be done in Photoshop, without having to risk a live 'event' on Chang'an Avenue or the Square - is that of a 'Tank Man' facing down a line of radio-controlled toy tanks. It suggests (I hope - without dishonouring the extraordinary bravery of the original 'Tank Man') the comparative impotence of the regime, and the potency of individual acts of defiance. But then I thought an even more apt message might be to depict not just a reversal of the scale of the 'Tank Man' incident (the intimidating hugeness of the tank rendered small and harmless) but of the numbers too:

a column of 'Tank Men' stretching away into the distance, facing a single tank.

Back in '89 it seemed impossible that one man could halt an entire column of tanks driving down the road, but this unassuming hero proved otherwise. Today it seems impossible that the outdated and discredited Communist Party can cling to power in this country using the threat of force against its own people, yet - alas - they continue to prove otherwise. Back then, one man had the courage to stand up to this brutal regime; today, a nation of more than one billion people is too apathetic or too fearful to do so. It really wouldn't take very much to start changing things here, to start the long overdue dismantling of the one-party state. The balance of power is on the Chinese people's side now, if they did but recognise it.

Being a tourist

Since I had a free day today, I decided to take advantage of the glorious weather and indulge in one of those touristy excursions that you somehow never get around to in your home city - a trip to the top of the CCTV Tower (the old one, that is; unfortunately, the new CCTV building - Ole Scheeren's distinctive skewed arch, which you can see in the distance way over on the other side of town in the shot below - seems to be lumbered with the same name; so I imagine that this one is going to have to be re-christened the CCTV Antenna, or somesuch). The viewing platform is 238 metres above ground (that's about 780 feet, I think). I do hope someone's been taking regular pictures of the changing city from up there over the past 5 or 10 years: a time-lapse film of that transformation would be stunning (one of my not so crazy 'art' ideas!).

More views of the urban sprawl......

Ah, Beijing traffic! And that's the relatively un-busy West 4th Ringroad at a non-peak time of day! (My mistake! I'm so unfamiliar with the west side of town, I think my mind tends to exaggerate how far away it is. This is, in fact, the 3rd Ringroad - which does get pretty busy..... though not at 2pm.)

The chai Olympics

I've been meaning to do this for a while, but, alas, I no longer have a functional version of Photoshop on either of my computers (hence the dearth of photographs on my blogs of late).

This character - chai - means 'demolish', and it is daubed on the walls of buildings shortly before the bulldozers arrive. Sometimes, you wonder if this isn't about the only warning the soon-to-be-displaced residents get. Sometimes, indeed, the demolition seems to follow so swiftly that I speculate there may be dozens of opportunistic wrecking crews roaming the city, authorised to raze any chai'd building they find and claim a bounty for their good work. (I'm kidding about that, of course. I don't think even the Chinese would try taking market economics to that extreme. Would they???)

The wholesale destruction of great swathes of Beijing - often in a rather chaotic and unplanned way - has been one of the sorriest consequences of awarding the Olympics to China. Many of the most charming and characterful old neighbourhoods have been ruthlessly flattened to facilitate the city's misconceived plans for modernisation. The dreaded chai symbol has swept through the hutongs like a plague.

We've heard a number of unflattering slogans for these Games now, of course: the Genocide Olympics (thank you, Mia - you take the prize for hysterical overstatement), the "1936 All Over Again" Olympics (makes a similar point, but more broadly and more humorously), the "No Fun" Olympics, the Fenqing Olympics (fenqing are the objectionable, hysterical young nationalists who are the Chinese government's unfortunate 'blowback' from years of unremitting propaganda), and (another favourite of mine) the Mafan Olympics (mafan= 'hassle').

But I decided some time ago that people really ought to remember these Games as

the Chai Olympics

because the brutal eradication of so many close-knit communities, the obliteration of so much architecture and history, the foolhardy ripping out of so much of the city's heart & soul, that's what will be, I'm afraid, the one really lasting legacy of the 2008 Olympics.

(Many thanks to my friend The Artist for realising this design.)

Holding it all in..... for the Olympics

There have been some slight signs of 'progress' in the campaign to eradicate some of the less appealing behavioural traits of Beijingers prior to the projected influx of foreign tourism in August: blatant queue-jumping at the ticket window in the subway is much reduced, queueing for buses is becoming much more orderly, and just occasionally you even find people allowing passengers to disembark from subway carriages before piling through the doors themselves.

But public spitting? I can't say I've detected any significant reduction in this; but it is supposed to be a key focus of the campaign - the powers-that-be having recognised that it is one of the things that most grosses out us sensitive foreigners. I think there really is an expectation here that there will be no spitting at all during the Olympics, that Beijingers will somehow overcome the habit of a lifetime and restrain themselves for a full two or three weeks.

It seems a crazy, unrealistic dream, but...... this is a country where social engineering of this kind really is possible. Perhaps we really will see a gob-free August.

But can you imagine what it will be like as soon as the Games are over and the tourists leave? An enormous collective, synchronous SPIT, a cathartic release of weeks of retained phlegm!

This strange, terrible image got me to wondering what this might actually sound like - 10 million people doing a huge simultaneous hawk-and-spit.

I think you could probably generate a reasonable facsimile of it by recording a representative sample of, say, a hundred or so Beijingers spitting in their different ways, and then multi-tracking each one scores of times to produce the requisite depth and texture and volume.

If only I had some decent sound equipment! I mean, some people make good money off ideas like this. If you hear of anyone else doing something like this, remember - you heard it here first.

Yes, THE BIG SPIT - the first in an occasional series of My Crazy 'Art' Ideas.