Beijing's Revolution

Lu Hao is putting the finishing touches on his latest work, a huge portrait of a pigtailed young girl. Dressed in slacks, a pink polo shirt and loafers, Lu chats casually with a string of visitors who drift in and out of his studio. Some are fellow artists and dealers from the community several thousand strong occupying the courtyards and alleys here in Songzhuang, in Beijing's eastern suburbs. The conversation ranges from gossip about colleagues through the sources of artistic inspiration to the merits of colleges in Australia, where Lu's son is studying. Later, Lu and I hop into his brand-new, lime green Jaguar and drive over to the site of the sprawling house he is having built overlooking a small lake. Proudly showing off the view from the second floor, Lu extols the virtues of living in Songzhuang. "All my friends and colleagues have moved here, so we can get in contact easily. And it's cheap here too. This whole house is only costing me $800,000 to build. Imagine what I would get for that in New York. Nothing!"

This Olympic summer, Beijing is buzzing. All over the city, iconic buildings designed by some of the world's best-known architects are changing the skyline--here a stadium like a bird's nest, there a media-company headquarters built in such crazy elevations that you wonder how it will stand up. But for me, it is the casual prosperity so evident in Songzhuang that proves that this is a city going through a revolution. For I can remember precisely the situation faced by artists when I visited Beijing for the first time, in 1994. Then the art scene was still underground, and most artists were poor, often living in squalid conditions. Meeting with foreign reporters could be a problem, I was told, because the authorities had just come down particularly hard on artists, who were still (as if Mao Zedong had yet been alive) seen as a source of "spiritual pollution." Many artists weren't even in Beijing, having fled the city after the bloody suppression of the Tiananmen Square demonstrations in 1989.

Nowadays, many of those exiles have returned home and joined one of the most exciting contemporary-art scenes in the world. But the explosion in Beijing's arts world is only one aspect of a broader cultural, social and even commercial flowering of the capital, until recently a symbol of authoritarian conformity to many outside China. Much has been written about the transformation of Beijing's hardware ahead of this summer's Olympic Games--both the whirlwind of development that has swept away huge swaths of the old city and the waves of cars that are choking its roads and poisoned its air. But to those of us who live here, it is the metamorphosis of the city's "software," as it hurtles toward becoming one of the globe's great cities, that is really striking. "It is a horrible place to live, but I wouldn't be anywhere else on the planet" is how Kaiser Kuo, a Chinese-American rock star turned digital guru, describes Beijing today. "You get addicted to the excitement, speed and change. There's nowhere else like it."

Beijing today is a vibrant, increasingly confident metropolis of nearly 20 million, the proud leader of a national social and cultural transformation that is developing hand in hand with China's amazing economic boom. In culture, the blossoming encompasses performance art, painting, sculpting, rock 'n' roll, experimental music, film, poetry and literature. Commercially, where once it conceded all to Shanghai, China's longtime economic powerhouse, Beijing is now at the forefront of a wave of entrepreneurship in telecoms, media, software and the Web. Socially too, Beijing is on fire, with new clubs, bars and restaurants opening every day. The city, which can still mark the year its first privately owned restaurant opened (1980), now boasts some 20,000 dining establishments, whose fare ranges from increasingly refined cooking from all corners of China to haute cuisine from world-renowned chefs like New York City's Daniel Boulud, who has been in the capital to supervise the soft opening of his first restaurant outside the U.S. Recently, Boulud and I toured one of the city's bustling wet markets, then dined on our purchases at the new eatery, in a building off Tiananmen Square that housed the American embassy until the communist revolution in 1949. "Beijing has been slow in catching up, but now it is going through a renaissance," says Boulud.

If there is any one group that is the driving force behind the metamorphosis of Beijing, it is outsiders like Kuo. Be they born somewhere else in China or half a world away, a flood of migrants has peacefully occupied the capital in recent years, drawn to Beijing to seek fame and fortune or simply out of a burning desire to watch history unfold. The city I first visited--where the lights were out by 9 p.m. and creativity was a dirty word--is gone.

There is, of course, one area where little has changed: politics. Despite allowing Beijingers (and indeed all Chinese) vastly more freedom in their personal lives, the Communist Party still suppresses any public discussion of the legitimacy of its rule or talk of alternatives to the current authoritarian system of government. And there's no doubt that the same party cadres that allowed Beijing's cultural flowering to happen still have the ability to smother the creative explosion if it gets out of hand.

That reality has been vividly illustrated in recent months as the authorities made final preparations for the Games. Instead of ushering in the new openness the Olympics were supposed to foster, the government has clamped down on almost every aspect of life in the name of security. Thousands of foreigners living in China have been unable to renew their visas; many would-be tourists have been equally unlucky, leaving hotels that had expected to be bursting at the seams with occupancy rates under 50%. Organizers have been told unofficially that all outdoor gatherings in the months before the Games are banned. Clubs that had operated with impunity are suddenly having trouble with their licenses. Human-rights activists, public-interest lawyers and other dissenting voices have been jailed or harassed. Police even detained and interrogated members of the Hash House Harriers, a beery running club, suspicious that the flour they used to mark their runs might be part of a terrorist attack.