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Hutongs — repositories of a city's history

Pallavi Aiyar

The narrow alleyways that represent an organic connection between Beijing's present and past are fast disappearing.

STANDING ATOP the Jingshan Park Hill, just north of the Forbidden City, provides the most commanding view of Beijing, the nerve centre of one of the world's greatest civilisations for the majority of the last 900 years. This is a city saturated in history, haunted by the ghosts of warlords and khans; merchants and scholars; revolutionaries and poets.

Looking around from atop the hill, however, it is difficult to conjure up visions of these ghosts. What you see radiating out in all directions from the nucleus of the Forbidden City are construction sites, monstrously large earth-moving machines, and predatory cranes rearing up their mechanical heads high into the sky.

Demolition spree

As Beijing gears up to host the 2008 Olympic Games, it is anxious to project itself as a modern world-class capital. A weak legal system and collusion between real estate developers and local officials has, however, resulted in the wanton demolition of large swathes of the historical city. Up to half of the physical neighbourhoods that once comprised the capital's centre has been destroyed and so has much of the city's social fabric.

The primary object of Beijing's demolition spree has been the hutongs, the narrow tree-lined alleyways that used to make up the entire 62 sq km area surrounding the Forbidden City. Hutongs have been the arteries of Beijing since Mongol times or the 13th century. They represent an organic connection between the present and multi-layered past of China's capital city.

Hutongs are flanked on either side by traditional Beijing-style courtyard homes called siheyuan or four-sided gardens. Over the centuries, complex family dramas played out inside the high, grey-tiled walls of these siheyuan, as generations of the same family and the servants who catered to them lived under a single roof much in the same style as India's joint families. The siheyuan were the quintessence of glamour, wealth, and privilege in imperial China and thus among the most obvious targets for the communists who deplored them as symbols of feudal decadence. From 1949, following the communist accession, all hutong homes were expropriated by the state and handed over to work units, which then allocated accommodation to workers.

Over the next few decades formerly grand homes gradually grew dilapidated with a single siheyuan coming to house a dozen or so families, five or more to a room. But although the hutongs no longer exuded the elegance of imperial times, they continued to be the fulcrum of "lao Beijing" or "old Beijing" society. The Beijingers or "lao Beijingren" who lived here were the inheritors and safe-keepers of all that made the city unique: the growling local accent, the warming street snacks, the sense of being connected to the hutongs by roots that ran deep.

Too narrow for supermarkets, the needs of hutong residents were provided by small corner shops called xiaomai bu and by itinerant service providers, who brought in supplies of coal for the freezing winters, sharpened knives on request, and even cleaned out dirty ventilators.

According to the Beijing Cultural Heritage Protection Centre (BCHP), an NGO, today there are less than 1,000 of these hutongs left, down from an estimated 4,000 in the 1940s.

The "New Beijing, Olympic Beijing" that red banners all across the capital city promise to build has emerged on the ashes of the hutongs. In their stead are a rash of mega-malls, luxury high-rise residences, and glitzy office spaces.

According to He Shuzhong, the founder of BCHP, the fast-paced destruction of one of the world's most historic cities has been allowed to take place primarily because of the fact that the notion of "conservation" in China has traditionally been an extremely narrow one. He says the Chinese Government tends to regard heritage as consisting of a few high profile, well maintained, and grand buildings such as the Forbidden City or Temple of Heaven. The hutongs in their ordinariness and dilapidated present are often simply dismissed as slums without any historic value. "They [the authorities] don't take into consideration the social history that the hutongs represent or their value as authentic and living examples of traditional Beijing architecture," he says.

This explanation is confirmed in an interview with the Deputy Communications Director of the Beijing Organising Committee for the Olympic Games, Sun Weide. Mr. Sun smiles when he boasts that there is so much construction going on in Beijing currently that the municipal authorities have to update the maps of the city every three months. Important historical sites will be protected but, he continues, hutongs with "no historical value" will be demolished. But, as Mr. He points out, what, in fact, constitutes "historical value" is far from obvious.

Lack of awareness

Compounding the general lack of awareness regarding heritage conservation is also a legal system that gives only weak protection to private property. In China, all land is publicly owned and individuals lease their homes from the state for a set number of years. If the state thus decides that the land where a particular property stands will better serve the "public interest" in some other way, the owners are simply given a few weeks notice to move out before the wrecking balls start swinging.

Although compensation is paid for expropriated homes, many residents complain that the amount is inadequate or on occasion never received at all. However, even when people do receive compensation money it is at most enough to allow them an apartment on the outskirts of the city.

Mr. He explains that in the aftermath of Beijing's winning bid to host the Olympic Games, real estate developers from Hong Kong and around the country arrived in Beijing en masse, convinced that an imminent property boom would make fortunes. All of them wanted to develop on prime downtown property, which was precisely the same 62 sq km area of hutong-filled old Beijing. Estimates of families forced to relocate as a result of the redevelopment of Beijing in the last decade vary between 350,000 and 500,000.

With real estate developers notorious for greasing the hands of local construction and urban planning officials, hutong residents are usually powerless to prevent their evictions. Over the years there have been protests but organised demonstrations are outlawed in China.

In 2003, there was a spree of suicides and suicide attempts to protest the demolitions. In September of that year a Beijing resident Wang Baoguang set himself on fire while forcibly being evicted from his home.

Less than a month later a hutong dweller, 43-year-old Ye Guoqiang, jumped off a bridge in the Forbidden City to protest the demolition of his family's home and restaurant to make way for a shopping arcade. He survived the fall only to be arrested and jailed.

Since the height of the protests in 2003, Mr. He says the situation has taken a turn for the better. Aware that mass discontentment at what is often illegal expropriation of land is detrimental to the legitimacy of the government, the central authorities have begun to clamp down on evictions and demolitions. Last year, the Government sacked Beijing Vice-Mayor Liu Zhihua, the official in charge of Olympic Games related construction, following a scandal in which he allegedly took millions of yuan in bribes from developers. He was later also expelled from the Communist Party.

The new property law unveiled by Parliament is further aimed at bolstering the rights of private property owners. In his opening address to Parliament, Premier Wen Jiabao identified "problems arising in land expropriation and housing demolition" as a "serious problem affecting people's interests but not yet properly addressed."

Moreover, consistent grassroots and international attention drawn to the plight of the hutongs is finally having some effect. The BCHP, for example, sends volunteers bicycling around the remaining hutongs to monitor the implementation of the city's conservation laws and collect information from the ground up.

An increasing number of similar civil society organisations are in addition educating hutong residents about their legal rights and on latest developments like the newly passed property law.

Successful experiments in certain hutong neighbourhoods have also emerged, aimed at encouraging the organic commercial development of the areas by giving residents a stake in renovating and upgrading the surroundings without uprooting them or causing other fundamental ruptures.

Thus rather than demolishing hutong homes and replacing them with shopping malls, the idea is to retain and improve upon existing structures while opening up new uses for some of them. So, in recent months a host of boutiques, bookshops, restaurants, and coffee bars have sprung up in these areas, providing jobs and livelihoods for the residents while maintaining the basic social and architectural fabric of the communities.

For Beijing, holding on to the few remaining hutongs that have somehow survived the change of imperial dynasties, the rise of communism, and even the drive to create an "Olympic city," is vital. To do otherwise would be shortsighted, cultural suicide.

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