The Capital Complex: Beijing's New Creative Clusters

The scale of urban development in Beijing during the past decade is nothing short of astonishing. Construction workers have relentlessly cleared space for high-rise apartments while historic factories are demolished or turned into centres for creative industries. The view flying into Beijing resembles a pancake-like development sprawl dotted with five-star tourist hotels, modernist business centres, hyper-modern television towers, eye-catching sports complexes, overpasses, underpasses, ring roads, technology parks, theme parks and convention centres. Meanwhile, city streets are congested by cars, residents suffer increasing instances of respiratory illness and traditional ways of living vanish amid the dust of bulldozers. This is progress Chinese style, reflecting the idea of modernity as “a coming into being,” as process, rupture and even disruption. It is also an unprecedented phase in China's history as the nation harbours aspirations of becoming a world power, a harmonious civilisation and an advanced society.

This chapter begins with a brief discussion of how the idea of creative industries has provided the impetus for a new phase of cultural infrastructure construction in Beijing. A walled city of four separate enclosures during Yuan, Ming and Qing dynasties, by the 1950s Beijing had transformed into a sprawling city of industrial districts. The economic reform period, which began in 1979, saw a transition from Maoist revolutionary class struggle to a pragmatic model of economic reconstruction and modernisation under Deng Xiaoping. An ensuing boom in development led to a surge in urban migration, putting further pressure on infrastructure. During the mid-1980s, several of China's large cities, notably Shanghai, Shenzhen, Guangzhou, Tianjin and Beijing began to compete with one another, attempting to lure i nternational investment. Beijing assumed a capital complex; not only was it the centre of political power, it saw itself as the cultural centre of the new China.