Beijing Time

by Michael Dutton, Dong Dong Wu, Hsiu-Ju Stacy Lo

“Where is the market?” inquires the tourist one dark, chilly morning. “Follow the ghosts,” responds the taxi driver, indicating a shadowy parade of overloaded tricycles. “It’s not called the ghost market for nothing!” And indeed, Beijing is nothing if not haunted. Among the soaring skyscrapers, choking exhaust fumes, nonstop traffic jams, and towering monuments, one discovers old Beijing—newly styled, perhaps, but no less present and powerful than in its ancient incarnation. Beijing Time conducts us into this mysterious world, at once familiar and yet alien to the outsider. The ancient Chinese understood the world as enchanted, its shapes revealing the mythological order of the universe. In the structure and detail of Tian’anmen Square, the authors reveal the city as a whole. In Beijing no pyramids stand as proud remnants of the past; instead, the entire city symbolizes a vibrant civilization. From Tian’anmen Square, we proceed to the neighborhoods for a glimpse of local color—from the granny and the young police officer to the rag picker and the flower vendor. Wandering from the avant-garde art market to the clock towers, from the Monumental Axis to Mao’s Mausoleum, the book allows us to peer into the lives of Beijingers, the rules and rituals that govern their reality, and the mythologies that furnish their dreams. Deeply immersed in the culture, everyday and otherworldly, this anthropological tour, from ancient cosmology to Communist kitsch, allows us to see as never before how the people of Beijing—and China—work and live.

Genres: China

288 pages, Hardcover

First published May 31, 2008

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

Reviews

[Stuart Hill · Rating 2 out of 5]

A strange book indeed. This attempted to provide a cultural and anthropological study of the Chinese capital but was not very successful. The six chapters of the book examine different aspects of the city, covering the history of Tiananmen Square, how the city has developed from the Mao era to the present, life in a neighbourhood of traditional housing. recycling, piracy and bohemians, the extent to which the city can be considered to be 'authentic', flea markets and the artistic community.

Some of the content is fascinating such as the account of how the Tiananmen Gate was replaced by a replica and the description of the enormous scale model of the entire city which has been installed in the Planning Exhibition Hall. Elsewhere the text seemed overly pretentious or too anecdotal. In many cases individual districts or citizens are descibed without any contextual information to explain how typical they are.

The tone of the book was peculiar and inconsistent, at times aiming for a scholarly style, at others sounding like a tourist blurb or overly enthusiastic guidebook. I was also surprised by how many errors there were. For example a reference is made to the Soviet film 'October' featuring a ticking clock which counted down to the storming of the Summer Palace. However, this was a silent movie so any such clock would be inaudible, and it was the Winter Palace which was the focus of the Russian Revolution.

The authors often described a situation without really explaining the reason for it. Modern construction is said to be a consequence of a new aspirational culture which ignores the influence of the Communist Party's control of the entire process in a country which lacks a legal framework defining property ownership, which allows officials to profit from the destruction of historic buildings and the subsequent construction of high rise developments. The city is touted as being bohemian without mentioning that if any artistic expression is considered a threat to the Party then this leads to either arrest (Ai Wei Wei) or a ban (Cui Jian).

The discussion of how authentic the city is was interesting but could have been taken much further, the crux of the matter is surely that the traditional culture of the nation was almost destroyed during the cultural revolution resulting in a society which can only attempt to imagine the past. The true symbol of the city is arguably the Forbidden City which from the outside appears to be as it must have always been, yet the contents which once filled its halls having long been removed to Taiwan, it is in essence an empty shell.

The text is accompanied by photographs but these are undistinguished and don't add much to the book. To sum up, very much a curate's egg with some excellent material interspersed with weaker sections.

[Dagezi · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is really a tale of two books. The first three chapters are absolutely first rate: grounded, often revelatory discussions of time reform, the reworking of Beijing's urban fabric, the significance of Tiananmen Gate to various Chinese national projects and a fine-grained little chapter on community policing in Jiaodaokou. If the rest of the book had been this good, this would an easy five stars. But it's not. In fact the balance of the book basically sucks. Longwinded, vacuous pronouncements replace analysis and Dutton et.al.'s tendency to overplay the distinction between gift and commodity economies which was forgiveable when it was the one false not in an otherwise excellent beginning becomes obnoxious. The chapter on the eternal return is especially odious but the book ends with a whimper. Pity that.

On a positive note, there are lots of aha moments for folks who are reasonably but not intimately familiar with beijing. E.g. did you know that Tiananmen gate was demolished and rebuilt in perfect likeness in 1969-1970. I didn't...

[Sanjay Banerjee · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book provides a picture of Beijing’s tumultuous transformation over the years from a anthropological and historical perspective till the eve of the 2008 Beijing Olympics. The book narrates both about the official and the non-official city, on both urban form and urban experience in today’s Beijing.