I first visited Beijing 14 years ago, when I was a fresh-faced, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed 18 year old, writes Iain Overton. I had been travelling, as a student, on the Trans-Siberian Railway and had managed to blag my way from Krakow to China's capital city for £126.
After seven days of being wedged in a fetid cabin with a grizzly Stalingrad veteran and his Lolita-esque grand-daughter (complete with lollipop), I was desperate for a change.
And what a change it was. China was a blur of colour. Mao's legacy, it seemed, was a distant memory. There was promise in the air. And I was overcome by the smell of Green Tea, the glint of gilded dragons, the taste of fried bean-curd. Now those memories seem like a sepia-tinged photograph.
Beijing today is unrecognisable from that of my teenage experience.
Gone are the tea-shops, replaced by mile upon mile of faceless office buildings. Gone are the hordes of bicycles, once so prominent on the streets, displaced by Four-Wheel Drives and imported cars. Gone, too, are the ancient curving streets, demolished by six-lane highways and glistening malls.
Such is the way of the world. Those of us who experienced the unbridled joy of back-packing when 'Lonely Planet' seemed to be something taken literally (so few other travellers did we meet), were privileged to walk in a world before the Internet, before Starbucks, before EasyJet: when places felt like they were supposed to. Different.
Now it seems you can travel a dozen hours on a plane and disembark in a place that is not that remarkably dissimilar from the place you had just left. Only it is often beset with worse pollution problems.
Don't get me wrong - I am all for world-wide development and the ending of poverty. I truly am. It's just that economic progress always seems to be marked by an absence of finesse. Advancement seems to preclude pulchritudeness. A nation's abandonment of its History always seems to end up with the nation coughing on the stench of its own smog.
I suppose I am just becoming a curmudgeon, but with the news filled daily with the apocalyptic vision of global warming, and the death-knoll of climate change, one can't help but feel worried about China and its push to the modern.
I am glad it is moving away from the nightmare that was Mao, but does its future have to be an immeasurable, concrete-laced, line of cars?
(Iain Overton and Poppy Sebag-Montefiore's films on Modern China at to run on More4 over the next few weeks).
We have many problems, but we are making persistent effors to solve them. It's our pleasure that our friends can point out our problems and misstakes. Thank you! Chinese people will realize the great renuvetion of Chinese nation. At that day, you will love this country.
A Chinese.
Posted by: Raoul | Monday, 28 August 2006 at 02:34 PM