While the minimum wages of average middle-class Chinese is no more than 50 Yuan per day, a cup of coffee you see anywhere in Beijing on the street starts at 20. Wait a minute, this is not right? Why is that? It is a life style of modern China. Yes, I bought that cup of coffee just to see if I could enjoy being modern visitor of China and continued to walk around the city.
The East part of Beijing — which is pretty easier to get to these days via super cheap subway — has changed dramatically due to the birth of the new Central Business District (CBD), which has been modeled after any metropolis in the West you can think of the name. The CBD has not only tall buildings, but also the infrastructure that support the expansion and the ‘culture’ that has been fabricated to satisfy the becoming modern business district of Beijing – yes, I think the 20 Yuan coffee is part of the game. In fact, I like the taste of the coffee although I know that it was not properly brewed (a shot of espresso poured into hot water rather than, what I would expect, a fresh brew coffee from ground). I have tried to avoid saying cliché thing anyone can read anywhere such as ‘Beijing is a city of unexpected growth’ because, essentially, everything in China today is expectable. The studies on China have been overwhelming but no one has actually suggested the way to cope with the growth with carefulness and sustainability mind.
It is the speed ‘per se’ that is too fast to comprehend. Outsiders wonder how could the mega-business and government of China get the money to actually erect all the awe-inspiring structures in the capital city — if not the cost of opportunity acquired from other parts of the country, say, people in the rural areas might need to accept to fact that Beijing is more important than any cities because it is the fabricated facade of the nation; therefore, they, in the regional parts, have to wait. Same deal with the Olympics, it seems to everyone that the spectacularity of the event has a specific connotation on the way in which the Chinese see themselves in global stage: no matter how hard they have to slab their own faces to make them look red and healthy (it is the belief that the more read the face is, the more healthy the person is), they will have to do it to convince people that China is in the good shape.
I continued to stroll down the CDB of Beijing and tried to catch a bus to the inner part of the CBD due to the inefficient subway system that only serves preliminary the periphery of this new financial district. Unfortunately, the bus system, the true friend of Chinese commoners, does not have much room for people and I was not strong enough to fight for a space in the overly crowded bus; therefore, I had to walk, still, with my 20 Yuan cup of Americano (I am pretty bitter about this, you can tell). The more I see Beijing, the more I realize that China is definitely hybrid territory. One could find the extreme contrasts between the rich and the poor by just looking at the curves: People who makes 50 Yuan a day and expensive shops for whom?
I just came back from Beijing where I regularly visit on business purpose at least once a year. This time I have observed many radical changes: the culture, the way people see themselves, the built environment, and the cultural geography – let alone the humongous existence of the 3 mega architectural symbolisms, the CCTV building, the ‘Bird Nest’ National Olympic Stadium, and the Grand National Theater, all designed by prominent architects overseas. I asked around when I was in Beijing about how people think about what they have today in Beijing, despite the fact most answers are anonymous and random; there are certain consensus: people like it because they are fancy, representing an opportunity for China to orchestrate the symphony of wealth in the global scene.
