During China’s second-biggest national holiday, Beijing’s notorious smoggy skies were crystal-clear – possibly thanks to cloud seeding. About 85 million people took to the road across the country, and with many of them visiting the capital, there was a fantastic buzz. Throngs descended on the Forbidden City, the red-lanterned stalls of the night market and Wangfujing Street, which leads to the Sanlitun shopping district. Here, the array of international brands – from Haagen-Dazs to Apple – and designer stores in gleaming multistorey malls reflect the diverse consumer choice available to Beijingers.
“Five years ago there weren’t any fast fashion stores,” says Nels Frye, editor-in-chief of China’s Lifestyle magazine, who has lived and worked here for almost a decade. “The arrival of these has really changed the way people look and think about fashion.”
The speedy development of a sophisticated consumer culture in China was recently explored by Andrew Roberts on bloomberg.com: “As more Louis Vuitton bags, Gucci wallets and Omega watches flood cities like Beijing, consumers are eschewing readily available logoed products in favour of more distinctive alternatives,” he writes. “The shift to less conspicuous goods may dent growth at Vuitton and Gucci, which until recently sold more than half the luxury handbags in the world’s second-largest economy.”
To have reached the point of logo fatigue in a Communist country in such a short space of time is remarkable, and a testament to how quickly China continues to develop. In Tiger Head, Snake Tails, Jonathan Fenby writes: “For all the regime preservation measures and the lack of a visible alternative to the Communist Party, large questions hang over its nature and role now that it has ditched ideology in favour of managing economic expansion. It has had to allow society to move in directions unthinkable under Mao.”
After the rapid economic growth over the past decades, which was heavily reliant on manufactured exports, Beijing is looking to the future. As the world economy has slowed, so too has China’s export industry. Lessening demand from the rest of the world has taken its toll, and the World Bank has forecast GDP growth to drop from 9.3 per cent to 7.7 per cent this year (contrast this with US growth estimated at 1.9 per cent, and the UK’s GDP, which shrank 0.4 per cent in the second quarter).
To offset this, the government is pursuing growth through other means. “China has stated its goal to make the transition from being a producer to being a creator,” Frye says. “This could partly be down to the increasing cost in labour or to follow the cultural development of society.”
So what will this mean for the capital? “Beijing wants to become more service-industry focused,” says Matthias Al-Amiry, general manager of the Raffles Beijing hotel, located minutes from Tiananmen Square (see businesstraveller.com/tried-and-tested for a review). “Before 2008, there were a lot of factories around the centre, which were shut down or relocated. After that, more and more international companies and brands started coming in. There’s a lot of construction going on – I think we’ll see many more office buildings going up on the fourth and fifth ring roads – call centres and financial and telecommunication companies.”
Major hotel chains also continue to target Beijing, despite an over-saturated market. “Beijing is experiencing over-supply and under-demand for hotel rooms, not because of the Olympics, but this added to it,” says Al-Amiry. “There was a boom in hotels because the economy exploded over the past 20 years, so everybody wanted to be part of that. We have another 1,500 luxury rooms coming to town in the next 18 months.”
In September, the 313-room Four Seasons Beijing opened in the central business district (CBD), while a 325-room Conrad is set to open imminently. Rosewood Hotels and Resorts will debut in China with a 279-room property next summer and a 340-room W hotel will open in early 2014, both in the CBD.
Meanwhile, an alternative business culture is developing within the ancient alleyways at the heart of Beijing, the hutongs. Strolling through this Old City district, you see the grey-brick residences with shared bathrooms that have survived demolition (88 per cent have been destroyed, with residents rehoused in high-rise towers). The Beijingers that continue to live in the hutongs are mainly elderly and retired, but there has been a rise in expats drawn to the area in recent years.
“Foreigners fetishise this side of Beijing,” Frye says. “I suppose it’s mainly independent types that are interested in living in the hutongs. It’s an odd transition to make, this movement into the third world within grandiose, super-rich Beijing. Very soon I think this will become one of the highest-rent places in the world – being so central, land values are so high, perhaps the equivalent of London’s Mayfair.”
A hutong resident himself, Frye is originally from Massachusetts. As well as his Lifestyle role, he runs “Hip Hutongs” tours, writes a fashion blog, and co-owns a tailoring company. He epitomises the expat start-up culture that has led to vintage stores, trendy bars, boutique hotels and high-end galleries springing up in the area – for a taste, check out the Wuhao Curated Shop (wuhaoonline.com), which is an oasis of calm after turning off Nan Luo Guxiang, the district’s main tourist drag. The invasion of independent businesses in what was the poorest area of the city centre, still inhabited by “east-enders” but equally attractive to local hipsters donning retro clothing, is reminiscent of London’s Shoreditch scene.Beijing’s evolving fashion sense is perhaps an indication of the internationalisation of China’s capital. “People are more knowledgeable about the world outside China,” Frye says. “Five years ago it was more common to meet people who had never been out of China – now it’s taken for granted that people want to travel. It’s a vastly more cosmopolitan population.”
That said, while my eloquent tour guide, Michael, could easily chat about his favourite characters from The Big Bang Theory, being an English-speaking traveller out and about, you are often struck by a language barrier, suggesting the Western influence is not quite as pervasive among the wider population.
“I think if you came back in five years’ time, you’d find a lot more people speaking English, and probably behaving in a more service-orientated way, which comes less naturally to the area than in places like Cambodia or South East Asian countries,” Al-Amiry says. “What I realise from my Chinese colleagues is that more and more of their children’s schools are offering English as a second language, which was not the case previously, and that’s key to opening the country up to the rest of the world.”
When you ask people how things have changed, they will often begin their comparison with “Five years ago…”, reflecting the impact that hosting the 2008 Olympics had on Beijing’s evolution. No doubt the infrastructure that was put in place before the Games, and the influx of foreign visitors during them, has left its mark. And yet the city retains its authentic, often enigmatic feel. “For a nation that can look back to such a long history, the People’s Republic of China is, in many ways, still in an adolescent phase as an actor on the world scene,” Fenby writes in Tiger Head, Snake Tails. “What it wants, above all, is to be able to use the rest of the world for its domestic development, and to be able to go about its own way without the moralising of others.”
The apparent ideological contradictions that exist within China’s capital don’t have to hinder its growth – they just make it all the more fascinating.
