Global Downtowns

2. From Peking to Beijing: Production of Centrality in the Global Age

2 From Peking to Beijing: Production of Centrality in the Global Age Xuefei Ren On A ugust 7, 2 008, o ne d ay b efore t he o pening c eremony o f t he B eijing Olympics, Qianmen Avenue reopened to the public and tourists after several months of extensive renovation. Qianmen (meaning “front gate” in Chinese) is adjacent to T iananmen S quare, t he geographic a nd s ymbolic center of Beijing, and it was once the major marketplace in the late Qing period. Th e area declined after the demise of the Qing dynasty in 1911 and was replaced by newer marketplaces that emerged in other parts of the city. By the early 2000s, it had become a dilapidated inner-city neighborhood crowded with lower-income households, migrants, street vendors, and shoppers looking for cheap bargains. Right before the Beijing Olympics, the city government included Qianmen on its extensive list of “bad corners” that needed to be renewed to make “New Beijing.” The relocation of businesses and households in the Qianmen area was costly because of the high residential density and land value, so the city government solicited financial help from private developers to take part in the renewal project. SOHO China, a trendy real estate firm that has built dozens of high-profile projects in the central business district (CBD) in the eastern part of Beijing, was chosen as the main partner. After 46 million RMB were poured into the neighborhood for demolishing old houses, relocating residents, and upgrading infrastructures, the once dilapidated Qianmen area was turned into a Disneyfied historical downtown, equipped w ith n ewly pa ved p edestrians-only s treets, b rand sh ops, s treet From Peking to Beijing 49 lamps, and cable cars resembling the cityscapes of republican Beijing (1910s– 1930s). The makeover of Qianmen is just one example, among many others, showcasing how new centers are made a nd remade w ith state power and private capital in rapidly globalizing Beijing. The changing spatial organization of Beijing in the past and present is illuminating for reconceptualizing the meaning of downtown, and urban centrality more generally, in a global and comparative perspective. In this chapter, b y t racing t he cha nges i n t he l ocation, f unction, a nd m eaning of central places in Beijing from the imperial period to the present, I argue that we need to pay close attention to the shifting and contingent relationships between places—instead of taking a categorical approach by viewing centers, subcenters, and off-centers as geographically fixed entities engaging in a zero-sum game for residents and investments, we need to ado pt a processual approach by e xamining t he local a nd t ranslocal processes i n specific historical contexts that make and unmake different types of urban centralities. Downtown, as exemplified by the Loop in Chicago, is a quintessential American concept (see Rotenberg, t his volume), t ypically referring to a n area of a city with high concentrations of business activity. Historically, Beijing never had a do wntown in the fashion of Chicago’s Loop, primarily because the city was the administrative center of the Chinese empire, and for a long period of time the political sphere dominated the socioeconomic spheres of the city life. In the first part of this chapter, I present a historical analysis examining the broader political and socioeconomic forces at work that have made and unmade the centers in Beijing from the imperial period to the present. In the imperial and socialist periods, as China was relatively isolated from the world economy, the economic center of Beijing was largely defined and shaped in national and regional contexts, suppressed and overshadowed a s a n i nferior commercial space by t he political centers of t he empire and the communist government, respectively. I argue that the term downtown as center for economic activities is inadequate to capture urban centralities in many non-Western contexts in history, as the case of Beijing demonstrates—marketplaces f or c ommerce a nd b usiness were ma rginalized and urban centrality resided in the political domain. Contemporary Beijing, however, has enthusiastically adopted the Western a nd specifically t he A merican notion of “ downtown redevelopment,” and in the short period since the 1990s, multiple new downtowns—financial, historical, a nd c ultural centers—have emerged i n t he city, a nd t hey have [18.223.32.230] Project...