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 CCTV chopper above Jianguomen Beijing's Ming and Qing dynasty emperors did not allow anyone to build structures higher than those of the Forbidden City, and their suspicion of tall buildings was passed on to Beijing's communist rulers, at least until the late 1980s.
The Beijing government has also never allowed aircraft to fly over the city center. As a result, Beijing has always been free of one of the characteristic sounds of many big global cities: the thwack thwack thwack of helicopter blades.
The Olympics have changes that. For the past few weeks, Beijingers have frequently heard the sound of choppers with both police and CCTV markings. This photograph shows a CCTV helicopter in the sky above Jianguomen in eastern Beijing.
On a related subject, the iconic new CCTV building designed by Rem Koolhaas has had its clean lines ruined by the addition of a helicopter landing pad on the roof.
The gossip in Beijing is that Koolhaas was not amused, but CCTV insisted. This article is from Danwei.org
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 Big Bowl Tea The following story was translated from the June 26's issue of theBeijing News. To make the story more readable, the translator has rearranged and adapted the original material.
Big Bowl Tea and days when they were young
by Huang Yuhao
Before Wang Xiuchen returned to Beijing in 1977, she had spent eight years in a remote village as a farmer. Though she was called an "educated youth", at the age of 17, she had only finished junior middle school.
Wang was not alone. From December 1968 onward, millions of urban youth were sent "up to the mountains and down to the villages" (上山下乡), i.e. to rural villages and to frontier settlements.
Wang was not happy with her life as a farmer. She dreaded working in the fields and was not used to the life style. Finally, with a counterfeited doctor's diagnosis from a resourceful relative, Wang was able to go back home.
When she returned to Beijing, she found the city where she grew up was not very welcoming. All her childhood friends had got married and had jobs in the state-run factories while Wang didn't have anyone or any job waiting for her. She said she felt inferior to the others.
"Everyone dreamed of being a worker in a state-run factory, but the jobs were in short supply. Sometimes hundreds of people were competing for one job and it was always those who knew the right people who got the job." said Wang.
In 1977, there were over 400,000 "educated youth" who returned to Beijing. Most of them were just like Wang, jobless and hopeless. Qi Bing, who worked in the neighborhood committee (街道办事处) at the time remembered that the yard of their office was full of people asking for jobs, and one of them threatened that if there was no job for him, he would either commit suicide or become a criminal.
After two years trying different temporary jobs, Wang finally got this one: selling Big Bowl Tea for a privately owned company. At a time when people had neither much money to spend or many things to buy, tea served in a big bowl that cost only 2 cents apiece soon became popular.
But it didn't work out smoothly. The country wasn't ready for any kind of business that was not run by the state. The company had some difficulty in registering. Moreover, it was difficult to find a place to operate the business. Their first tea house was a in a shack just next to a public toilet in Qianmen Gate, south of Tian'anmen Square.
However, the first day of business was a success. They sold tea for 60 yuan. By the end of the year, the tea house made 110,000 yuan in net profit and everyone who worked there could get 50 yuan or so as monthly salary, which was more than a factory job could offer. But still people left because, in their minds, state-owned factories could provide more stability, and to be a worker was much more dignified than selling tea. Many doubted if the private tea-selling business could last.
But to the surprise of many, Big Bowl Tea not only survived, it also thrived. It's now a big and established company, managed by entrepreneur Wang Yingxiu.
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This article is from Danwei.org
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 The initial project map June 25 is first day in the test phase of the 'Beijing Wicity Project' which aims to provide citizen's wireless internet access in much of downtown Beijing. According to the news, the wireless internet service will be free until after the Olympics games.
Beijing Wicity is a CHINACOMM (中电华通) project. Initially they aim to cover around 1 million square kilometers: much of downtown Beijing including the area along the second and third ring roads, CBD, Financial Street, Zhongguancun district and Wangjing.
"CECT-CHINACOMM" is indeed appearing as an available wireless network in Danwei's headquarter office nearby Jianguomen, but your correspondent is unable to connect. Perhaps a few days are still needed to work out the kinks.
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This article is from Danwei.org
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The initial project map June 25 is first day in the test phase of the 'Beijing Wicity Project' which aims to provide citizen's wireless internet access in much of downtown Beijing. According to the news, the wireless internet service will be free until after the Olympics games.
Beijing Wicity is a CHINACOMM (中电华通) project. Initially they aim to cover around 1 million square kilometers: much of downtown Beijing including the area along the second and third ring roads, CBD, Financial Street, Zhongguancun district and Wangjing.
"CECT-CHINACOMM" is indeed appearing as an available wireless network in Danwei's headquarter office nearby Jianguomen, but your correspondent is unable to connect. Perhaps a few days are still needed to work out the kinks.
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This article is from Danwei.org
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Two images from TooManyTribbles:
 The north west corner of the Forbidden City  Sunset over Beihai Park This article is from Danwei.org
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When the new terminal of Beijing Airport first opened at the end of March, the general impression from visitors was that it was absolutely huge.
But maybe it's not big enough: author Han Song posted a photo-essay to his blog in which he compares the "T3" to a local train station: overcrowded and chaotic with not enough seating space and lines that go on forever. He's also got some interesting observations on the new terminal's anti-terrorist techniques.
The capital airport's new terminal is like county train station
by Han Song
The capital airport's new terminal (T3), constructed for the Olympics, has a futuristic style to it like something out of Heinlein's science fiction. But upon entering, it's like a county train station, and its waiting areas aren't even as convenient as those in a county train station. Lots of people were sitting on the floor or on top of their luggage. I stood in line for my boarding pass, and halfway to the front the ticket counter attendant said that the machine was broken. So I switched to another line, and waited from 2:20 to 3:20 pm before I got my boarding pass. People walked back at forth like it was market day. There was someone holding a megaphone and shouting, and there were blackboards on the scene, too.     New regulations strictly limiting carry-on items to one small bag were in effect. Security inspectors were in full force, as if facing a great enemy, and their faces were stern: "Have a computer? Out with it!" I suggested that with Beijing about to host the Olympics, they should say "please" to passengers. She smiled at me strangely. Oh, this was on 3 May, and on 4 May the Olympic torch would begin its route on the Chinese mainland.
"We are sorry to inform you...." echoed throughout the waiting area. Of course, the flight we chose on Air China was late too, and also for "weather-related reasons (but we had called the information hotline earlier and the airport's reply was "so long as there's no fog, it will depart on time"). There were arguments at pretty much every counter that had Air China staff.
So it was a good opportunity to take a look at the new Air China terminal. My overall impression was bedazzlement. There was Olympic memorabilia everywhere. The salespeople wore red track uniforms, reminiscent of the joggers protecting the torch. And there were Fuwa made up as Chairman Mao badges or Sakyamuni statues. This touched me deeply, and I raised my camera wanting to take a photo, but immediately a "jogging torch protector" rushed over and barked at me to stop.
  The plane was still delayed, and everyone was thirsty, so they lined up at the shops to buy drinks and snacks. So I wonder if perhaps Air China's ban on passengers taking their own drinks on the plane was intended to stimulate the airport's internal business (I noticed that the water dispensers in the airport had only an image of a dripping faucet; it seemed intentional that they did not say whether it was drinking water. At least my own sense was that it was for washing dirty hands). I too joined the group in line and for 5 yuan bought a soda that sold for 3 outside. Seeing how lively their internal business was, I got out my camera again so I could report back to the leaders. But unexpectedly, a "jogging torch protector" rushed over again and stopped me with a very severe expression on his face. I knew that I was in the wrong, because this was necessary for anti-terrorism. Who could judge that I wasn't a spy with the East Turkestan movement? If I photographed the details of the new terminal and sent them to my terrorist organization and then when the time came, brought a bomb back, there'd be trouble for the Beijing Olympics.
By 7:00, there was still no sign of the plane, which was scheduled to depart at 4:00. No answers were forthcoming from Information. The last announcement broadcast said that we could use our boarding passes to get a free box meal and a drink. But it was only repeated twice in Chinese, as if testing the HSK levels of the foreigners waiting for the plane. "....you'll hear 'Nunchucks' once, but 'Chrysanthemum Flower Bed' only once."
The whole time, the airport was wrapped up in a state of uncertainty, like in particle physics....by 10:00 pm, the electronic message board showed that the flight had been canceled. My friend saw this and went to inquire of one of the staff, who replied convincingly: you'll fly by 10:30. When we informed him that it had already been canceled, he said, oh, really? Then go by what it says on the screen. That day, from the afternoon until nighttime, there were at least 12 flights canceled at the new terminal, but not one of them was broadcast over the loudspeaker, and no one ever gave a reason. Those foreigners, sitting there in a daze, were even more confused. They all looked like Carrefour employees.
  So we went out through the security passage and returned to the main hall, where we saw several hundred people clustered trying to return their tickets, another crowd of several hundred trying to alter them, and yet another crowd of several hundred clustered waiting for their checked baggage to be returned. The passengers murmured: "We can understand the weather, but we can't understand Air China's service attitude!" One passenger nearly started a fight. Air China did not arrange for transportation, nor did it arrange for lodging. Our entourage included CPPCC members and leaders, who were all anxious. The airport manager suddenly became aware of this, and said, "Our leaders are CPPCC members! Aren't you going to XX? If you don't mind waiting, I'll put you on another flight!" (It turns out that the director and vice-director of the Civil Aviation Administration of China are both CPPCC members.) So he took us to another place where he quietly altered our tickets, and said, "I've fulfilled my responsibility."
  We went back through security. The water provided by the airport and the restaurant was taken away, but the bottle of soda I bought (half-drunk) went through with no problem, and I ultimately took it on the plane. I thought, if I were a terrorist, and if the bottle were filled with gasoline...
The plane, one with lots of empty seats, landed at our destination at 1:00 am. I read an article titled "Civil Aviation Declaration: A Full Guarantee to Meet the Olympic Games" in Wings of China during the flight, while I also thought about a science fiction topic: if our flight was canceled because of weather, then why was this plane in the air? Was there an observer that collapsed the Heisenberg wave function? And then as we waited for our checked baggage afterward, there was no sign of it. We inquired, and learned that none of our luggage was on the flight (when we were changing our tickets the manager said that it would definitely be with us on the flight). Because all of our documents were in our luggage, we couldn't hold the meeting the next day.
The itinerary for the 4th had to be changed to a full day of tourism. The CPPCC office kept calling the CAAC asking them to help locate "the CPPCC members' luggage." The leaders were very concerned and promised to do so immediately. Finally, the luggage returned to our hands at nearly 1 am on the 5th.
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This article is from Danwei.org
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Yesterday Danwei linked to a post on Standoff at Tiananmen, a translation of an oral history of Beijing's first private restaurant opened after the Cultural Revolution.
Below is a news article from The Daily Telegraph by Graham Earnshaw, originally published on November 6, 1980, republished here with his permission.
Capital Café in Peking
By Graham Earnshaw in Peking
In a back alley near the Chinese National Art Gallery, a privately-owned restaurant has opened, Peking’s first for at least 22 years.
A jolly, plump woman of about 50 runs the miniscule “happy guest restaurant” which boasts a total of four tables.
Getting to meet Madame Liu Guixian was easy. I went to lunch one day. But getting to talk to her about how she set herself up was a different story.
“Oh, you’re a journalist,” she said. “Well, I’m sorry. I can’t talk to you unless there is a representative of the local district government here.”
We arranged to meet again the next morning, when I called on the district government office to find an official who could spare 15 minutes to go to the restaurant with me.
“But you shouldn’t have come to us directly,” said the district official with a look of horror. Disheartened, I retreated to my office and rang the Foreign Affairs Office. “You should make a formal request in writing,” the official cautiously replied. “But just this once …”
When I arrived at the restaurant four official representatives were waiting. Madame Liu wore a nervous smile and talked about how she became an entrepreneur in Communist China.
“I was a cook at the Environment Protection Institute but applied in March to set up my own restaurant so that I could have an opportunity to teach my two unemployed sons the trade,” she said.
She received official approval last September, and the restaurant opened in the middle of last month amid a blaze of publicity from the official Press eager to show what strides China’s economic reforms were making.
For nearly 20 years, the Chinese authorities denounced the sort of business Madame Liu is doing as a “remnant of capitalism” which should be vigorously suppressed. The opening of the Happy Guest restaurant is a stark symbol of the complete economic about-face China’s leaders have performed over the past few years.
On the walls of the alley leading to the “Happy Guest” is the faint remains of one of the thousands of raucous slogans daubed all over Peking during the Cultural Revolution of the late 1960s. It reads: “The Great Cultural revolution must be carried through to the very end.” This article is from Danwei.org
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 The finest collection of China books in the world The online journal China Heritage Quarterly has a new issue out. The theme is the studio: "zhai, shuzhai, shufang—the scholar-writer’s place of creative engagement with the written word, or artistic practice.
The issue includes an article by Claire Roberts: George E. Morrison's Studio and Library. Excerpt:
No one really knows when the building that once housed Dr. George Ernest Morrison's (1862-1920) library on Wangfujing in Beijing was torn down. It was sometime in August or September, 2007—part of the frenzy of last-minute demolitions that have been occurring in the heart of Beijing to rationalise commercial and residential zones and make way for various developments in the lead-up to the Olympic Games. The demolition site was shielded from public view by a row of shops on Wangfujing Street that continued to trade. As we walked over the wreckage of bricks and rubble last year, none of the locals were aware that the area was previously home to 'Morrison of Peking', the influential Peking correspondent for The Times newspaper of London who, in 1912, became the political adviser to Yuan Shikai (1859-1916), the first president of the Chinese Republic. Nor were they aware that Morrison was Australian, or that the street was formerly known to expatriates as 'Morrison Street' in his honour. That is now a footnote in the complex history of Wangfujing and of China that has been overtaken by the changes over eighty years.
 The entrance to Morrison's Wangfujing house
 Morrison traveling in disguise, a little like Thomson and Thompson
Walk just outside the Legation quarter in Peking, and you come to a typical Chinese house, its outer lodge facing the street, a big courtyard within, a house on one side, a long low building on the other... The long building is his library, containing probably the finest collection of books on the Far East in existence today. It is managed on a plan which reveals the man. Everything is systematised and indexed.
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This article is from Danwei.org
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From The China Daily:
From May, no lighting up at most public places in capital
Beijing will ban smoking in most public places starting from May 1 - a big step toward tobacco control in a nation of 350 million smokers.
The move will also meet China's pledge of a smoke-free Olympics.
More than 150 Chinese cities already have limited restrictions in place, but the capital will be the first to ban smoking in all restaurants, offices and schools.
Beijing has had some smoking restrictions since 1996, when the municipal government prohibited lighting up in large public venues such as schools, sports arenas and movie theaters.
The new rules, which were announced on Saturday, expand the scope to include restaurants, bars, Internet cafes, hotels, offices, holiday resorts and all indoor areas of medical facilities...
...Institutions that fail to comply face immediate fines of up to 5,000 yuan ($713), while it has not yet been decided how to deal with smokers breaking the new rule.
"There are proposals to fine individuals up to 200 yuan," said Cui. "They won't be fined for now, because some legislators insist the new rule contradicts a previous law."...
...Some restaurant owners, however, doubt the rule will be implemented.
Is it difficult to believe that this rule will be enforced.
This article is from Danwei.org
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Beware the rampageous rooter, my son Xinhua reports:
Historic torii damaged in Beijing
A historic torii standing on the street in front of Guozijian in Beijing, once the imperial college in China's olden dynasties, was severely damaged by a rampageous rooter Saturday.
If you have no idea what that means, you may or may not be enlightened by clicking through the link and reading the rest of the story.
It might help to know that the popular Kingsoft electronic dictionary lists 'torii' as a Japanese word (鳥居) meaning a gate in the front of a Shinto temple, and rooter as a translation for 'earth-moving equipment'.
You can read about another famous, filthy Chinglish translation that has spread around China thanks to Kingsoft on this Danwei article: Where Chinglish comes from.
This article is from Danwei.org
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Last night was the Lantern Festival or yuanxiaojie (元宵节), the traditional end of the Chinese new year, a fortnight after the first day of the lunar calendar.
This is how Danwei celebrated: a string of ten thousand firecrackers, lit at both ends. It took almost exactly two minutes to self destruct.
By law, the fireworks should have stopped after midnight last night, but there are still plenty of bangs in the streets of Beijing today. This article is from Danwei.org
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 How to use a Beijing WC, step five. By Su Wei. This essay is by a university student name Eric Mu who spent last summer in the capital working at a book store.
The illustration is by the Beijing-based graphic designer Su Wei—click on the image to see the whole instruction manual for using a squat toilet in Beijing.
All rights reserved by both creators.
Beijing WC
So this is Beijing, where the shiny futuristic-looking skyscrapers are many while the public toilets are few and far between.
Maybe you've had one glimpse or two of real Beijing WC, somewhere down in a deep hutong: brick concrete structure, men one side, ladies the other, decorated with big or small Chinese characters indicating something political, or vulgar, sometimes both. There are also the posters on the wall giving you medical advice to treat certain kinds of diseases that you do not want others to know about; and the phone numbers of people who promise you counterfeited anything, from a college degree to residence permit. Most importantly, these Beijing WC are—as far as I know, with no exception—forbiddingly and intimidatingly smelly and disgusting.
The nearest one to the place I stayed this last summer was a typical Beijing WC. It was five minutes’ walk away from my place. Every morning, following my natural instinct, I went there. Even before my arrival, I knew it would be already occupied by some even earlier birds so I would have to wait outside for another few minutes to get my turn to release the pressure my eating of yesterday had caused me. Once I got a place, I tried my best to finish the work as soon as possible to avoid being suffocated by the strong smell.
I am afraid I cannot find the right words to describe the scientific design of the Beijing traditional WCs: When you are doing the business, you are squatting over a huge pit. Never look down, because if you do, you'll get dizzy as if you were looking down from a high cliff down to the sea, only the sea down there is not beautiful blue. From the sea level to where you are, the vertical distance can be as high as two metres.
More scary is when you come to the realization that nothing is going to protect you if you have a sudden loss of consciousness, say a stroke, at the critical moment. Even for a fit and healthy man, there is a chance of a slight careless move which may end up with a life-or-death struggle against being drowned in the ocean of human excrement below. One time when I was there, trembling in fear, agonized by toxic gas, I came up with questions that would not normally occur to me under any circumstance but this:
How many people have actually died in this way? Are there any statistics or records? Apparently, I am not the only one sheltering this kind of unfavourable feeling towards the WC. One night, I was woken up by a suspicious sound of water coming out of a window near mine, the kind of sound which you readily associate with certain body functions. The sound explained the weird smells that came up to me every time I opened the window.
I am not sure if I am just over-sensitive, or if everyone else also went through an internal struggle before this uncivilised behaviour of pissing out of windows became an accepted norm. But when I did it, even though I knew almost everyone else did the same, there was a feeling that I became less human and more animal.
To make me feel less guilty, I did try to rationalize my motives: it is not me who does not want to go to a toilet like a civilized and educated Chinese citizen, it is just the toilet was so intolerably smelly and far away.
In the place where I worked, the bookstore, there was a small and clean toilet near the door. But there was also the warning that the facility had some malfunction, so the solid kind of human waste was not welcome. I doubted if there was really a problem, but I never asked. Don’t embarrass people even though you know it is a lie.
My boss always, a little boastfully, proudly preached to us that everyone should be treated equally, and in this book store, even “peasant workers” were welcome to sit down and read a book if they like. But I think maybe sometimes, they need a clean and well-lighted toilet more than, say a book written by Yu Dan or even written by Confucius himself. I doubt if books, especially the kind of books in this store (philosophy, sociology, history, stories written by someone who hated school and dropped out and made tons of money, anecdotes of some woman who was beautiful but died 50 years ago, etc.) will bring this group of people any substantial change. More than once, peasant workers came to the book store with anxious looks on their faces. After reading the warning, they were enormously disappointed, they vanished quickly.
At this point, I felt I should thank the KFC here for not only providing people with clean food but also clean WC. Despite the fact that I had never tried their food (sorry, no hard feelings, only a little bit too expensive for my humble income), I did enjoy their impeccably clean sanitation several times. Maybe they are not so generous to give you a free lunch, but even the free toilet is a great gesture, isn’t it?
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Now it is months away from my Beijing days, I can reflect on my experience in a dispassionate way, and it is also my belief that whatever your experience is, good or bad, it can always be enriching in some way. So what did the Beijing experience teach me?
I guess it is the tolerance if not sympathy for the people living under harsher conditions.
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Once, I came by a new type of movable toilet, bright green, on the side of a street. I was told that it was high tech and environmentally friendly new generation WC and it was part of the bid for 2008 Olympic Games and probably take over the old ones very soon. So let's hope for the best,and to the Olympic Games, if it can bring China higher sanitary standard, then at least it is good for one thing. This article is from Danwei.org
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The capital was dusted with a light coat of snow today.
The Air Pollution Index was a breathable 80 (source: SEPA). This article is from Danwei.org
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The photograph above of the Great Wall was taken today, January 1, 2008.
It shows a chunk of the Wall in Hebei; just over the Wall is Beijing.
The sky is very blue.
Today's air pollution index or API for Beijing is 32, according to the State Environmental Protection Agency. The API number of 32 qualifies the air quality as "good" according to this U.S. government agency. And apparently, blues skies on December 31, 2007 meant that Beijing met its "blue sky days" target for 2007. Whoopee.
So everything is looking rosy for this year, 2008, year of the Olympic Games, Year of the Rat.
But lest the blues skies as photographed above fill you with too much optimism, let's take a look at this neon slogan displayed above Beijing's famous and infamous Silk Street market.
The photo, snapped a few days ago, shows a Silk Market neon slogan that is a borderline intellectual property infringement of the 2008 Olympic Games slogan, and also a rather sad illustration of one of the only truly universal values of our globalized world:
 This article is from Danwei.org
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