Beijing

I spent five days in Beijing, giving talks to various companies and research labs in the capital city.  While I was there, I took the opportunity to do a little sightseeing, that is, while the smog was thin enough to see anything.  Never have I ever been in a city with this much air pollution; it makes LA look like Seattle.  What I found most interesting was how “soviet” Beijing feels; while Shanghai feels like an ultra-modern mishmash of western and eastern cultures heated to a simmer by the burning fires of commerce and change, Beijing feels much older, much more traditional, and much less…..active.  There are abandoned lots and derelict buildings in the city close enough to subway lines to (in my mind) be worth many hundreds of thousands of dollars, and yet there’s no development snatching them up.  The feeling I got was that the city does not operate with the same capitalistic rationale as Shanghai, and in my conversations with locals both there and in Shanghai, I found that many people preferred that.

When the pollution cleared up, the stark, northern beauty of Beijing revealed itself, and I felt I could understand the insanely ancient cultural heritage of the area more fully; the Great Wall and Tian’anmen are both representative of something older than almost anything I have ever touched, and that sense of history permeates the whole city.