beijing city guide: Introduction
Playing checkers outside the gates of the Hall of Prayer for Good Harvests, Tiantan Park. © Glenn Beanland Lonely Planet Images
Pack away those assumptions of Maoist revolutionaries in functional tunics, pods of workers performing t'ai chi in the Square and sedate youths singing the national anthem. Beijing is a city on a roller coaster ride into the new millennium. These days Beijing's MTV youth are mixing Latin salsa with traditional jazz with pop fizz with British punk and consuming the whole thing with chopsticks and a side order of McMuffins. In a city where the sign 'Question Authority' is not a Tiananmen Square prompt but a directive to ask someone who knows; where herniated English is splashed across designer-copy t-shirts with irreverent aplomb; and advertising jingles taken out of context lose their slick Willie patter and become enigmatic ciphers, anything can and does happen.
The old hutongs (alleyways) and buildings are being demolished, new buildings are going up; small things are giving way to big things and big things are giving way to even bigger things. This fast-paced, two-minute-noodles lifestyle doesn't please everyone: the old comrades are complaining about uppity youths and loss of values. But Fang Lijun, a gifted member of the post-89 Beijing artist community, speaks for the hipoisie when he brashly replies, 'Don't even consider the old methods on us, we'll riddle your dogma with holes, then discard it in a rubbish heap.'
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