GOLDEN WEEKS - Overbooked: The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism - page 215

This is the story of how the tourism industry has changed China and how China is
changing the industry.
• • •
My first short visit to China was in December 1978. The streets of Beijing were dimly lit,
the air dry and dusty. My cheeks felt like cold sandpaper when I walked outside. Even-
ing rush hour was announced by crowds of bicyclists streaming home, their tires swishing
through the shadows, their bells pinging in a staccato rhythm. There were few hotels for
the rare foreign visitors; I stayed at the Friendship Hotel, a Chinese-modern establishment
built in 1954 with grand proportions. I was a journalist heading to Cambodia on assign-
ment, which in those days required a layover in Beijing. I had time to explore the city.
Hidden behind that sleepy façade was a city in political turmoil. A French colleague,
the journalist Francis Deron, took me to the heart of the public debate, cutting through
the city's distinctive hutongs, or alleys, in a circuitous route that ended at a bus station.
Plastered across a high wall were protest posters written in bold black characters asking for
individual rights and freedoms, and democracy. This was “Democracy Wall,” where small
groups of Chinese men were engrossed in conversation and glancing over their shoulders.
Later, at an informal market, I bought a scroll painting of sparrows on bamboo from an
artist who asked Francis what I was doing in China. We had to shake off a small crowd
following us. On the way back to the hotel it dawned on me that we had seen very few
traces of the old palaces or temples. In India, the cities are a mishmash of Hindu temples
and Muslim mosques, walled forts and marble palaces, alongside modern villas and new
office blocks; the ancient and the new butting up against each other.
I had seen only a glimpse of the calculated destruction of the city's heritage—what
Chinese artists and preservationists have called “death by a thousand cuts.”
Ideology drove the first wave of destruction. It is hard to exaggerate the exhilaration that
the Chinese Communists said they felt at their victory in 1949. They had defeated their
Chinese rivals led by Chiang Kai-shek and shaken off the United States. Under the lead-
ership of Mao, the Chinese People's Republic was a single-minded experiment to fashion
a new socialist society of equality in a country that had been ruled largely by imperial dyn-
asties. The initial idealism sparked needed reforms in the health system and the redistri-
bution of land in favor of poor farmers.
When Mao Zedong entered Beijing to enthusiastic crowds, the city was encompassed
by 25 miles of thick crenellated stone walls with sixteen multistory gates, many guarded by
stone lions. Outside the walls were moats and farms. Inside the walls was a city planned
to reflect the harmony of heaven. Set at the edge of the great northern plains, Beijing,
or the North Capital, was a well-planned city of “palaces, peony beds, lotus-filled lakes,
dragon walls, carved lions embodying the antithetical yet complimentary principles of yin