Beijing is Determined

I had heard about dust storms coating Beijing with a thin layer of yellow grime. People had told me that Chinese often spit on the sidewalk. As our plane landed, my British seatmate pointed out the window at the grey morning and said, “See, the pollution here makes you think you’re walking around in a black-and-white film.”

Yet the stories all turned out to be wrong. Or at least they weren’t true this past week. It was a fine time to visit China.

The sun warmed and brightened everything—by mid-afternoon, I was peeling off my sweater. The tourist spots, anticipating next year’s Olympic Games, all seemed to have just been washed and painted. In the air were the smell of fresh cut grass and the “snow” from shedding poplars.

No matter where I went, in fact, trees were nearby. Greening campaigns have resulted in row after row of closely spaced trees, planted in part to reduce the effects of increasingly frequent sandstorms in the city. Seeing them on my way in from the airport was another reminder that the Chinese make no little plans. When they want to do something, they really do it. Big tree farms, grand boulevards, imperial palaces: everything is on a much grander scale than I’m used to.

It’s been that way for some time. While clambering along a lonely stretch of the great wall, I kept thinking about how remarkable it was that successive administrations continued to fund such a kooky project. They no doubt had many chances to say “OK, that’s good enough,” or “we don’t really need to protect that province,” but apparently they never did.

As we drove out of town toward our hike, the friend I was visiting remarked that the highway we were on had been completed only a few weeks earlier. After we turned off toward the hills, he noticed a few places where shortcuts had been built since the last time he had gone that way. At several intersections, he pointed out men standing next to large earth moving equipment. “Those guys and their machines are for hire,” he explained, as casually as if they were parked there selling ice cream.

A few hours later, returning to the freeway, we joked to each other, “Was this road here this morning?”