More and more it seems what makes/made Beijing cool and interesting for many foreigners is on the way out or gone.
I live way out in the west end. A few years ago they started putting up banners proclaiming it a new CBD. Next thing you know all the cool and interesting traditional things and way of life started disappearing like carrots in a Buggs Bunny cartoon. Just two days ago I was outside a fruit market sitting on my bike looking at a small mom & pop kiosk business that sold popcorn, candy, boiled corn and the like. It`s been there for years. Went there yesterday and it was gone only to have a new Lexus SUV parked on the slab it used to sit on. Now when I look out my 21st floor window I can see no less than 30 tower cranes within a few hundred meters raising the next herd of dozens of new concrete cube homes and office towers. The noise of all the construction is non stop from around 6am til sometimes into the wee hours of the night. Pretty soon Beijing will realize it`s wish to become a cookie cutter version of a western capitalist city but lose it`s Chinese characteristic heart, soul, and sense of community in the making. Lament lament lament. Oh Beijing 2004 where art thou?
The community has been gone for a long time.
My family used to live at where the LG twin towers are back in the 1990s. A couple of well-known beijingers also lived there including Liang Zuo, writer of Bianjibu De Gushi 编辑部的故事 (1991) and Wo Ai Wo Jia 我爱我家 (1993), two most popular Chinese sitcoms ever. Liang Zuo was our neighbor and I remember my parents took me to his home for tea at night.
Liang Zuo's brother in law is Ying Da, a well-known actor and dirctor. He was born in Beijing as well. He and my father were classmates in middle school in the 1970s. Liang Zuo's nephew, Liang Xiaotian, was my middle school and high school classmate. We used to play basketball together, but I never told him that my family was his uncle's neighbor and my dad and his another uncle were classmates in middle school.
Beijing has always been a large place, but it was a much more of a close-knit community than it is now.
If you have been in China for more than 20 years, you'd know about Wo Ai Wo Jia, Bianjibu De Gushi and Liang Zuo, probably the most talented Chinese sitcom writer that has ever lived. He died a couple of years ago. I was too young to know who he is.
Why community matters?
I think it's just more fun, comparing to me, me, me and making money.
Take my own story as an exmple: in the early 90s, a random 5 year old could go to the country's most famous screenwriter's home for tea and snack, just because we were neighbors.
Kids grown up in Beijing now no longer have such privileges. Millionaires live in their districts. Common folks live in our districts. Community feels non-existent. City feels like a big computer program where everyone living in it is a line of code, being functional or not. There are also bugs and self-correcting programs. Bugs are to be wiped out from the city by self-correcting programs, until our city has been made a Utopia.
Sometimes Beijing doesn't feel real for me. It's like living in the Matrix. Not sure if anyone else shares this feeling.