As housing prices and rents soar, hutongs get ripped down and “crazy bad” air becomes the new normal, will Beijing maintain its heart as a cultural capital, or is the city losing itself and our affections?

Filled with stories of pig excrement, SARS babies, and enough Chinese cursing to satiate even the Beijing Profanity Alliance, this show was a pleasure to put on and we were really glad to see everyone who came out. Joining Kaiser Kuo on stage were two Sinica stalwarts: Chinese media export Jeremy Goldkorn and David Moser, jazz pianist and head of the CET Beijing program. We were also thrilled to be joined by Zha Jianying, author of China Pop and Tide Players, and a now-expat Beijinger from New York who admits to being torn between her two homes.

Listen to the podcast here.

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Post tags: Beijing, Beijing architecture, Hutong, hutongs, redevelopment
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Lufeng, a city of 1.7 million, saw violent clashes with authorities earlier in the week, when villagers in the suburb of Wukan ransacked a government office and police station after riot police chased and beat up protesters.

No violence was reported in Saturday’s protests, with security forces noticeably absent.

“We don’t have weapons and armour, nor can we match them for strength, but we have the numbers to protect our village and the lives in it,” said Lin Zuliang, a farmer representative from Wukan who addressed a cheering crowd via loud speaker.

As China rapidly modernises, wrenching changes have stoked tens of thousands of so called “mass incidents” countrywide each year. Authorities often crackdown swiftly on such dissent, including censoring reports, fearful of trouble proliferating.

Villagers claim officials colluded with a score of developers to steal hundreds of hectares for development including a luxury holiday resort with salmon-pink luxury villas and a neon-lit nightclub sprouting out of former farmland.

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Post tags: forced evictions, Guangdong, land disputes, land rights, redevelopment
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A man holding a bucket was seen walking out of the office of Shenzhen Luosha Engineering Development Co, a real estate firm that will build a new project at the complex. The man poured something from the bucket into apartment windows, a witness surnamed Li told the website. Li later found the street was crawling with scorpions, the report said.

Police and residents spent the whole night capturing nearly 50 kilograms of scorpions.

All the apartments are scheduled to be demolished but home owners haven’t signed compensation deals yet, the report said.

Residents told the newspaper they suspect the developer freed the scorpions to drive them out as some buildings have already been torn down due to a tight schedule.

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Post tags: demolition, property disputes, real estate, redevelopment, Shenzhen
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The plans for Wuhan, a provincial capital about 425 miles west of Shanghai, might seem extravagant. But they are not unusual. Dozens of other Chinese cities are racing to complete infrastructure projects just as expensive and ambitious, or more so, as they play their roles in this nation’s celebrated economic miracle.

In the last few years, cities’ efforts have helped government infrastructure and real estate spending surpass foreign trade as the biggest contributor to China’s growth. Subways and skyscrapers, in other words, are replacing exports of furniture and iPhones as the symbols of this nation’s prowess.

But there are growing signs that China’s long-running economic boom could be undermined by these building binges, which are financed through heavy borrowing by local governments and clever accounting that masks the true size of the debt.

The danger, experts say, is that China’s municipal governments could already be sitting on huge mountains of hidden debt — a lurking liability that threatens to stunt the nation’s economic growth for years or even decades to come. Just last week China’s national auditor, who reports to the cabinet, warned of the perils of local government borrowing. And on Tuesday the Beijing office of Moody’s Investors Service issued a report saying the national auditor might have understated Chinese banks’ actual risks from loans to local governments.

The Washington Post interviews Satyajit Das, a derivatives consultant and author of “Traders, Guns & Money,” about local government debt in China:

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Post tags: debt, economic slowdown, infrastructure, local power, redevelopment
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Over the past few decades, Chinese cities have seen their historic centers erased by a generic vision of modernization: broad boulevards and highways, office towers and luxury flats. In Datong, that vision had its day in the 1990s and 2000s. Now, this old-fashioned coal-mining city is on the cutting edge of a new urban development strategy: recreating an imagined, glorious Chinese past. I’d seen this in parts of Beijing, especially around the Qianmen area—an old central neighborhood of shops and restaurants that had flourished through the early twentieth century and was rebuilt in faux-historic style in the run-up to the 2008 Olympics—or at the Xintiandi shopping mall in Shanghai. But Datong is something else. It’s not only a few shopping districts that are being recreated, but vast swaths of an old city that just decades earlier had been obliterated in a fit of auto-cultural genocide: rampant, unregulated development in the name of modernization.

The efforts are centered on rebuilding the once-magnificent city walls. Most stretches had come down in the Mao era and the rest were destroyed to make way for new buildings in the 1990s. Now, they are being rebuilt, mostly from scratch. Already, half of the center of Datong is encircled by the the new walls, which are a full scale replica of the originals: thirty-nine feet high and sixty feet wide at the base. Every few hundred yards are watchtowers and every few watchtowers,a hole punched in the wall for traffic to pass through. There’s little evidence that traditional methods or materials are being used, despite claims to the contrary. Construction cranes line the wall like siege engines, depositing pallets of freshly baked red brick that fill in steel-reinforced concrete pillars. Grey stones cover the skeleton to give it an old look.

It’s hard to pinpoint exactly when this trend began but it seems to be driven by tourism. Over the past decade, well-preserved old cities like Pingyao (240 miles south of Datong) have become major tourist destinations thanks to their city walls and old streets. But there’s also a deeper sense in China of the country having lost too much in the past century of destruction. The revival of Confucian thought, for example, is a way of finding out how Chinese did things in the past—before the country’s experiments with fascism, communism and authoritarian capitalism. City walls and the like are a more concrete manifestation of this desire to turn back the clock.

Datong’s efforts began in 2009 and officials say they will invest more than one billion yuan, or about one hundred and fifty million dollars, over four years. Like most projects, the money is borrowed from local banks, which are partly controlled by local political leaders. The money is to be repaid by selling land—which the city controls—to real estate developers.

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Post tags: Datong, redevelopment, tourism
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The ever-changing urban landscape has become a common scene in many Chinese cities. According to the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development, China is constructing over 2 billion new square meters (21.5 billion square feet) every year, gobbling up some 40% of the world’s total cement and steel for buildings whose average lifespan is estimated at only 25 to 30 years, despite the fact that Chinese law requires them to last for 50 to 100. “These figures should definitely raise a red flag,” says Zheng Shiling, a professor of architecture at Tongji University in Shanghai. “Clearly, many of those buildings didn’t have to be replaced because of their bad quality, but rather owing to a prevalent mindset among decision makers that new things are always better than the old.” (See pictures of the making of modern China.)

Tearing down buildings before their time has a long history in China. During the mayhem of the Cultural Revolution, countless historic buildings, including the oldest temple of Confucius, were destroyed as Red Guards declared their relentless disdain for the past. “Whenever a new emperor was enthroned, he would try to wipe out all remnants of previous dynasties,” Zhuang Weimin, director of the Architectural Design and Research Institute at Tsinghua University, recently told the state-run People’s Daily. “This kind of belief still very much influences our government officials today.”

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2030548,00.html#ixzz15EZ4AcaJ

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Post tags: architecture, cities, redevelopment
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Nanluogu Xiang is located in one of the richest neighborhoods in the city — once in terms of its sprawling old hutongs (or alleyways), its culture, and now in terms of the revenue generated from tourism driven bars and shops selling handicrafts and souvenirs made by fashion or arts students. The old neighborhood has cultural stopovers such as the former home and now museum of Mao Dun, the writer whose name is lent to one of the most luminous literary awards in the country. Modern writers, like Chun Sue, also live in the neighborhood.

According to Auntie Fu, rent prices in Nanluogu Xiang rose by 40% last year. She said: “When the south side of the street gets its planned subway stop, there will be even more people about.” She points to the pressure on commercial renters: both Xiaoxin’s Café and Zha Zha Café (two popular stops on the street) have their second shops on Wudaoying Hutong nearby. When asked, Auntie Fu admitted that everyone is aware of the possibility that they might be forced out of Nanluogu Xiang.

The street is in danger of selling just tack, which does not help retain its boutique status. It may end up like Sloping Tobacco Street in nearby Houhai, a completely commercialized area that has no authenticity but instead shops selling the same things over and over again.

Auntie Fu talked about the ethnic Xinjiang people who appeared, taking advantage of the busy street selling jewelery, with or without stalls: “Police cars will come one by one to stop them, giving customers bad feelings and pressure.” Once the police are involved setting up regulations and codes for a gentrified area, the formerly freely developing cluster of bars and the street on which they run become highly regimented. It’s a sign of how things become – developing commercially, but strictly regulated at the same time.

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Post tags: Beijing, hutongs, redevelopment, tourism
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Shanghai Scrap: To what extent are Shanghai’s property developers able to take advantage of the conflicting rights at play in these sub-divided homes so as to gain control of the property? Is it easier, at some level, for the local government to help a developer demolish and redevelop rather than restore rights and preserve?

Sommers: In thinking about this question, we have to think about scale. The historic residences that are still in existence in Shanghai – and the number seems to be dwindling by the week – are held or claimed by a diffuse group of individuals, some of whom have competing interests (the holders to legal title may want to sell the house to be renovated by a Hong Kong or foreign buyer; the holders of usage rights may want to use their claim to extract compensation or ownership title to an apartment of their own).

If an individual owner or would-be buyer would like to transfer rights in a single house, the transaction is too insignificant in scale to the problems the local authorities have to confront to warrant their taking an active approach that would run the risk of creating ‘disharmonious’ controversy by ousted holders of usage rights. And, given how expensive real estate has become in Shanghai, a would-be buyer likely doesn’t see the economics as warranting a contribution of extra funds to entice usage rights holders to leave.

At the same time, if a single developer comes along to redevelop the site, a much larger project can be constructed on the ground and that upside potential can create enough value to justify the developer in helping pay a high price to these same holdouts, and it is much easier or more efficient for the relevant government agencies to deal with a single claimant (the would-be developer) than to deal with a myriad of one-off purchasers.

Given these dynamics, it’s probably not surprising that the local property officials don’t perceive much premium in taking an active role to facilitate the clearing up of remaining hold-outs of properties where redevelopment of the site is not planned.

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Post tags: historic preservation, property rights, redevelopment, Shanghai
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These days, those who reside in the neighborhood known as Gulou are anxiously counting the days until construction crews begin turning its 32 charmingly decrepit acres into a polished tourist attraction called Beijing Time Cultural City.

Anchored by the ancient Drum and Bell Towers, the $73 million redevelopment will include courtyard homes for the rich, a “timekeeping” museum and an underground mall, presumably well stocked with Rolexes and Cartiers — or perhaps their more affordable counterfeit cousins.

Since the project was announced in January, historians have been sounding the alarm. So, too, have the expatriates who cherish the area’s old Beijing authenticity. “When they’re done, the place is going to look like Universal Studios,” said Robin Foo, a Brunei-born Chinese architect who has spent the last six years turning a local Yuan dynasty temple into a swank cafe and catering hall.

But the outrage is harder to find among the thousands of poor families who live in the ramshackle collection of gray brick houses topped with wavy roof tiles. “Tear the whole place down,” said Zhou Meihua, 72, who shares a 20-square-foot pair of rooms with three generations of family members. “If we get enough compensation, we’ll happily move out.”

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Post tags: Beijing, Beijing architecture, destruction of old cities, redevelopment
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The 303-year-old Yuanmingyuan, or the Old Summer Palace, will have a new theme park and a culture square on its periphery, according to urban plan-ning authorities.

“The adjacent neighborhoods around the Yuanmingyuan Park are in total disorder,” reads a February 3 statement on the website of the district government.

“A floating population and illegitimate buildings plague this cultural area, creating hygiene and safety risks,” the statement continued, suggesting development as a solution.

Haidian Urban Planning Bureau officials were not available to comment Tuesday but a development plan was said to have been drafted Monday pending approval by the higher authorities, according to a report in the Beijing Daily.

The plan involves an Old Summer Palace theme park and a gateway square outside the walls of the Old Summer Palace, the paper reported.

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Post tags: cultural heritage, history, Old Summer Palace, redevelopment
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