Beijing Reborn

Bad as it is, the provincial copies of this model are worse, and even cruder. Every mayor of a second- or third-tier city now seems to want to set a building record. The Jiangxi capital of Nanchang, for example, has constructed the world's largest Ferris wheel. Zhengzhou (population: 6.6 million) is competing with Chongqing (population: 31 million) for the title of the "Chicago of China," and its apparatchiks boast that they have more construction cranes per capita than any other city in the country. In Zhejiang province, city officials in Shaoxing reacted to the central government's order to limit new CBDs by simply rebranding theirs as a mixed-use "commercial center" with residential facilities. The makeover is grand, with a vast empty plaza (a Shaoxing version of Tiananmen Square), a pyramid-shaped building that is home to (what else?) the city's planning center, and a theater that looks like a knockoff of the Sydney Opera House. There are now about 100 small cities in China that, like Shaoxing, have built grand new opera houses, estimates Professor Zhou. Even Shaoxing officials regret having paved over ancient canals and humpbacked bridges that once gave the place a lyrical "water-city ambience"; officials are now trying to preserve what's left of the old town.

The type of city that emerges could be critical to President Hu Jintao's legacy. In contrast to the hypercapitalist policies of his predecessor, Jiang Zemin, Hu wants to close the alarming rich-poor gap and repair the tattered social safety net that has kept many Chinese mired in poverty. And he aims to do all this at a time when rural migrants are flocking to cities for jobs in services and on construction sites. To accommodate an influx of up to 300 million peasants in the next 15 years, China will not only have to "build almost the same amount of urban infrastructure as already exists," says Karl Traeger of Woodhead, the Australian firm that designed the original Shaoxing CBD. It will also need to plan more carefully. Showcase buildings and endless ranks of pricey luxury flats will do little to house the incoming army of workers, to advance Hu's "harmonious society," or to restrain the runaway construction sector that poses perhaps the single greatest threat to stable growth.

It's an open question how China will handle all this. The nation is now expected to surpass Germany as the world's third largest economy this year, a fitting opening act for the Olympic spectacle Beijing plans. But will the capital emerge as a metropolis of beauty and soul (like Paris) or a brawny show of power (à la Speer's vision for Berlin)? The latter seems far more likely unless China's top leaders—nine men trained as engineers—get serious about promoting "human" values, as they've promised.

With Jonathan Ansfield in Beijing and Duncan Hewitt in Shaoxing

© 2007