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A tale of two cities

Harish Chandola

A comparison of Delhi and Beijing.

AUTUMN IS called the golden weather of Beijing. But on the mid-October evening we landed here, a pall of dark grey smog had succeeded in robbing the sun of its gold. Behind a grey curtain it looked so silvery pale that for a while we were led into believing that we might be viewing an early rising moon. I had come from the notoriously polluted Delhi. But from Beijing it looked a lot better.

Pollution apart, Beijing for three decades has been like a bride decked for a wedding. Along its five vast quadrangular ring roads one fails to find shantytowns. New skyscrapers wearing pastel colours keep coming up along them, to house bright rich shopping malls, plush corporate headquarters and even government offices, like those of the new Chinese Foreign Ministry. It is a metropolis that keeps getting glamorous by the day.

Intimidated by its dynamic charming face, I wondered how it breathed. All the glass-titanium faced futuristic buildings that keep rising up are after all cement-concrete structures, which aggressively gobble up its open spaces, its lungs. I think of Delhi, which still has more open spaces and parks. In a perverse way one feels thankful for our slower growth, our poor planning and less imaginative buildings that have as yet not devoured our living space around, like Beijing. One is almost grateful for our feudal attitude of having our poor live all around us, in shantytown clusters or jhuggis, so that we are never far from their cheap services. And for our corruption too, which cares little for beauty.

Population wise the two capitals are not different. In 2003, Delhi's was slightly higher at 12,791,458 than the 12,033,000 of Beijing's. Now both may be 14 million. Of course China's total of 1,302,090,000 was higher than India's 1,033,000,000.

Both capitals, Beijing and Delhi, are frenetic in chasing wealth, Delhi is more uncontrolled and desperate in doing that. Life in it looks utterly undisciplined and chaotic compared with Beijing's, where human behaviour is better and crime far less. Both are rich cities, drawing the wealth and labour of the countries. Both choked with traffic. Cars in Beijing are newer, cleaner and brighter, hardly any older than five years, all adhering to traffic rules and avoiding aggression.

In spite of Beijing's and in fact much of the country's spectacular growth, the Chinese leadership is worried over the mounting disparity and social inequality in it. That is why the Chinese Communist Party after a four-day meeting last Thursday unveiled a landmark policy to build a harmonious society in 15 years, by reducing the wealth gap, increasing employment, improving government's public service, promoting people's moral standards, securing public order, protecting the environment and fighting corruption.

The Chinese leaders do not gloat over their country's trade surplus, which would hit a new high of $158 billion in 2006 or over its economy that will grow by 10.5 per cent this year. They worry that this growth will further widen the wealth gap between its urban and rural residents and the per capita income ratio between them would get worse, from the 3.22 to 1 of last year. In history the two have gone through similar experiences and with that wealth one could hazard saying that they may remain good friends and not take totally different paths in the future.

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