Beijing walls hide neighborhood’s blight

BEIJING | The city’s Olympic beautification drive has left little unspruced.

Forty million potted flowers have been positioned strategically across the city, and reams of canvas depicting gleaming office windows cloak the incomplete facades of buildings under construction near a main shopping district.

No amount of cosmetic artistry, however, can conceal the scar carved into the landscape a 10-minute walk southeast of Tiananmen Square.

Here, a neighborhood known as Xianyukou, part of the ancient commercial and residential quarter of Qianmen, lies in ruins 2 1/2 years after the beginning of an urban-redevelopment project that has come to be characterized by official secrecy and thuggery.

The district government is worried about what Olympic visitors might think at the sight of gutted traditional courtyard homes in one of 25 historic Beijing neighborhoods that were marked for state protection in 2002.

So earlier this month, it ordered the construction of concrete walls, complete with a Qing Dynasty-style tiled roof topping, in an attempt to hide the decaying buildings in which some residents, who are refusing to move until the government offers them more compensation, still live.

“This wall is an insult,” said 40-year-old Chen Guixiang, standing in his yard behind the offending structure. “We common people are made to feel like we are damaging the environment.

“They built huge stretches of it in just 10 days, but they plan to tear it down after the Olympics. It´s all for show, to save face. The local government fritters money away but still offers only meager compensation for us to leave.”

Anger has been the dominant mood in Qianmen ever since demolition crews stormed the area early in 2006 and began to create the eyesore that they are now so desperate to hide.

Chongwen district officials wanted the redevelopment completed before the Olympics and were willing to go to extremes to meet the deadline.

Local people still tell stories of how teams of thugs, hired by the district authorities, evicted thousands of residents who refused to accept compensation of about $118 per square foot, which was the level set in 2002 and thus failed to take into account soaring property prices in the capital.

They say people from the “demolition office” resorted to violence to dislodge the most stubborn, many of them elderly people who had lived in the area for generations, to make way for a major bus route that went into operation last year.

“They would come in the middle of the night and throw rocks through the windows to scare people into agreeing to move,” said another resident, who asked to be identified only by the surname, Li.

Conservationists have campaigned for Qianmen to be restored on a courtyard-by-courtyard basis to preserve centuries-old architectural gems and the rich stories associated with an area that dates back 400 years to the Ming Dynasty.

Qianmen won fame as the haunt of Peking Opera singers, acrobats and calligraphers and was dotted with guild halls where scholars from all over the country would sit for the national civil service examinations.

Story Continues →