新兴都市――北京

By Michael Wise 迈可尔・瓦尔斯

安徽省人事厅国际人才交流中心 陈莉 编译

Gearing up for this summer’s Olympics, Beijing is remaking itself for the 21st century at full tilt. But there is growing awareness of the value of historical preservation.

为了迎接今年夏季的奥运会，北京正全力塑造自己21世纪的新形象，但是也有越来越多的人意识到了保护历史的价值。

The highlight of a visit to the new Beijing Planning Exhibition Hall is the extraordinarily detailed scale model of the city that projects what China’s capital will look like in the year 2020. English-speaking guides dressed in scarlet-and-black silk tunics offer assistance to foreign visitors as pulsating lights flash over the exuberant mock skyline. The government-operated urban planning museum is housed in a four-story building the size of a major U.S. department store, and the model―a testament to the city’s current explosive growth―covers some 3,200 square feet.

Just outside the museum, which is located in the heart of the capital near Tian’anmen Square, construction proceeds at breakneck speed. Beijing’s latest transformation, driven by the turbocharged expansion of the Chinese economy and the city’s intense desire to present a new face for the 2008 Olympics, is producing a resounding clash between the past and the future. Although wall text in the museum proclaims a “perfect fusion” of the two, the rampant destruction of narrow lanes lined with courtyard houses dating back six centuries alarms many Beijingers who fear their heritage is on the auction block.

Yet amid the wide-scale demolition and new construction, some of the city’s most prominent historic landmarks―the Forbidden City, the Summer Palace, and the Temple of Heaven―are undergoing their most comprehensive restorations ever. These, too, have sparked controversy, with criticism coming from the UN agency that oversees world cultural heritage, concerned the makeovers will leave these centuries-old structures looking freshly minted.

In the same way that they have invited leading foreign architects to build skyscrapers and stadiums, Chinese authorities are now seeking assistance from foreign experts in restoring the Forbidden City. The World Monuments Fund, a nonprofit group based in New York, is guiding the renovation of some of the interiors in the 999-room former imperial residence, and Italian conservationists are bringing their experience to bear on retooling the palace exterior.

This is not the first time Beijing has undergone reinvention. Successive dynasties have remade the city to their liking. Built on flat terrain in a grid pattern that gives it the feel of a checkerboard, with the emperor’s palace set in the middle, Beijing was made the imperial capital in the 15th century, during the Ming Dynasty. Until the 20th century, the city was surrounded by a massive wall with fortified tower gates. “Not one of our European capitals has been conceived and laid out with such unity and audacity,” a French naval officer observed after visiting imperial Beijing at the conclusion of the Boxer Rebellion in 1900.

Daring architectural constructions are rising all over what is now a megalopolis of 15 million people, most notably the bubble-like National Theater complex, by French architect Paul Andreu; an expansion of the Beijing airport, by Norman Foster; the new Chinese state television headquarters, designed by Rem Koolhaas and Ole Scheeren in the form of a gargantuan contorted arch; and a huge Olympic stadium, by Herzog and de Meuron.

The television headquarters will be the second-largest building in the world, after the Pentagon, and the architects have attributed at least part of the building’s dramatic form to the need to make it visible in the heavily polluted air hanging over Beijing. “It’s an environmental condition you have to be aware of when you design here,” Scheeren says. “It’s not only bad for your health, it also makes all architecture look bad. I call it Beijing blur.”

Coming into clear focus despite the blur is the destruction of the traditional neighborhoods, known as hutong. In these areas, a pitched battle over the city’s past and future is being waged daily, as Beijing rushes to modernize and adopt Western-style ways and standards of living.

A few minutes’ walk south of Tian’anmen Square, I find the bustling Dazhalan neighborhood in an upheaval. A central road is being widened and large swaths of old houses and shops are being bulldozed to make way for new apartment buildings, including rebuilt contemporary versions of the traditional courtyard houses called siheyuan. Billboards advertising the new development show Pizza Hut and Starbucks among the new tenants.

A master plan adopted by the city in 2002 sets aside 25 historic-preservation districts, and the group wants to ensure that these areas survive development pressures. There are only 1,500 alleyways left in Beijing, half the number that existed in the 1950s. And fewer than 600 of those remaining are in designated historic districts, whose protected status is far from clear. Still, whereas just a few years ago hutong preservation was seen primarily as a foreign media obsession, Chinese authorities are increasingly aware of their value. “The appearance and style of old Beijing is an important cultural resource and competitive advantage for the sustainable development of the modern city,” Liu Qi, general secretary of the Communist Party of Beijing, said recently. And an editorial in the official paper China Daily commented, “With better-preserved hutong, Beijing could attract more visitors and win greater applause.”

I see how a hutong can be preserved and upgraded when I visit another area, north of Tian’anmen Square and the Forbidden City, near the 18th-century Bell Tower, where pedicabs ferry tourists on forays around the neighborhood. I am on foot, guided by Hu Xinyu, managing director of the Beijing Cultural Heritage Protection Center.

We climb the tower to get a panoramic view of the labyrinthine passageways. Back at street level, Hu points out a pair of stone stubs astride the entryway to one of the many courtyard houses, explaining that these are remnants of carved lion heads vandalized in the Cultural Revolution. As a peddler cycles slowly past us, his wicker baskets full of persimmons and tangerines, we peer into courtyards at heaps of coal bricks still used for heat. Cabbage and scallions hang out to dry in the brisk winter air. Hu suggests stopping in at the local mah-jongg parlor, where amid the click-clack of gaming tiles, a friendly player takes us aside to show off an assortment of pet crickets kept in tiny jars.

We pass by several blackboards affixed to facades, each covered with colorful, meticulous chalk calligraphy that explains the origins of the Olympic movement to area residents. Nearby, Nanlouguxiang Street is one of the few hutong passageways to become almost fully gentrified―it’s now lined with bars and restaurants aimed primarily at Western travelers. In the narrow lanes spilling off to the sides, there are many grand courtyard houses undergoing comprehensive restoration, and two have already become hotels.

Wealthy foreigners like media mogul Rupert Murdoch and the president of Airbus China are snapping up courtyard buildings of this type; high-end renovations are stoking fears that surviving hutong will become enclaves for the very rich or be degraded into tourist-only zones devoid of the close-knit communal life that made them so distinctive. “People long for what is being swept away physically,” Julius Song, a retired professor of sociology, says. “But even more there is longing for the intimate feeling of people who lived there for generations. They shared so much.”

In China’s booming economy, the market for expensive living quarters is white-hot. While old courtyard houses are being razed, new high-rise developments are going up all over town. Some of the most architecturally distinctive have names like SOHO and MOMA, contrived to evoke Manhattan glamour in the minds of potential buyers. I visited the showroom for an eight-tower complex drawn up by American architect Steven Holl, billed as an environmentally path-breaking design featuring geothermal heating and cooling. “People are getting rich overnight, and they want to live in a very good apartment,” Jiang Peng, deputy manager of the project, says as we walk through a model apartment designed to attract what the Chinese call golden-collar workers.

During this fevered spate of private-sector development, Chinese state authorities are overseeing construction for the 2008 Olympics and the restoration of key landmarks like the Forbidden City, the Summer Palace, and the Temple of Heaven. The Olympic deadline is heavily influencing both the preservation of old buildings and the construction of new ones. The city government has ordained that all new structures must be finished by the end of 2007, well before the Games begin.

北京市规划展览馆极其详细地展示了中国首都2020年时城市外貌的比例模型，这成为参观该馆的亮点。穿着红黑相间丝绸上衣的英文导游为外国游客提供帮助，跳动的灯光闪烁在模拟的城市轮廓上。这个政府运营的城区规划博物馆设立在一个规模相当于美国大百货商店的四层建筑物内，模型标明占地3200平方英尺――成为了这个城市当前爆炸性发展的确证。

这座位于首都心脏天安门广场附近的展馆外，城市的建设正在飞速地进行着。由于中国经济的蓬勃发展以及北京城急于为2008年奥运会展现新面貌的强烈愿望，北京近来发生的变化正在使过去和未来发生强烈的碰撞。尽管博物馆内墙上的介绍宣称二者之间达到了完美的融合，但是仍有不少北京市民担心他们的文化遗产终有一天会出现在拍卖会上，因为有着600多年历史的连接着四合院的狭窄巷道正遭受着大规模的破坏。

然而，在大范围的拆迁和兴建中，这个城市最负盛名的历史遗迹，如紫禁城、故宫、天坛等正经历着有史以来最大规模的修复。这也同样引起了激烈的争议，联合国监管世界文化遗产的机构批评说翻新会使这些历史悠久的建筑物看起来像是新建造的一样。

正如邀请世界顶级建筑师来建设摩天大楼和大型体育馆一样，中国官方也正在寻求外国专家的帮助来修复紫禁城。总部设在纽约的非营利性组织――世界历史遗址基金在指挥这座拥有999间房屋的皇家庭院内部的修缮，而来自意大利的遗产保护专家则将他们的经验运用于皇宫外部的翻修中。

这并非北京第一次经历重建。朝代不断更迭，历代王朝根据各自的喜好而不断重建这座城市。15世纪时作为明朝京都的北京城因地势平缓、布局方正而看起来像棋盘，皇宫则居于正中。 一直到20世纪，北京城都是被厚实的城墙所包围，城门高大、结实。一个法国海军军官在参观北京皇城后就1900年义和团运动发表看法时说：“我们欧洲没有一个国家的首都有这样统一和大胆的构思和布局。”