Greetings from China!

Greetings from Beijing! I actually arrived some time back, but owing to China's blocking of most things google---blogspot in this case---I haven't been able to update the blog as frequently as I'd have liked. Nonetheless, I've been writing and saving my posts as email drafts, which I'll post from here out! (I found a Virtual Protection Network, courtesy of Harvard). So, here goes, with the posts back-dated...

 

May 31st, 2013

 

After arriving late at night---and having something of an episode trying to haggle with a rapacious cabbie---I've started to check out the city. Walking as much of a city is always my favorite way of acquainting myself with a place; you get to know where things are in relation to one another, and to see little nooks and details that you'd miss in any other means. So my first few stops were the necessary Tiananmen Square, Forbidden City, National Museum of China, Beijing City Planning Exhibition (which is an ode to the past and future glory of the city's management and organization, and includes a scaled model of most of the downtown and adjacent areas---lego for grownups).

 

My first impression was that the city is far less chaotic than I'd expected. I'd heard a lot about the traffic, the hawkers, the drivers, the everything. And having lived in New Delhi and spent time in Bombay, India, I figured Beijing might be comparable. I was impressed with the segregated bicycle lanes on nearly all of the medium and larger streets, and of course the extensiveness of the subway system. I had looked through an old tour book of China, which my parents had used when they visited in around 2006. The subway map in that book, again from just 2006, had about three or four subway lines drawn. Today's system---less than 7 years later---has over 15 crisscrossing the city. That's quite baffling, considering some field research I did in December on the development of the Mumbai Metro Line--a single line---that took over 8 years to plan and execute (it remains unopened to date). More on the development of the subway system in a forthcoming post. But of course, there's always the whole centralized command political system in Beijing.

 

Speaking of which, I should have poked around a little more before coming because I've learned that my original blog space---blogspot---is blocked in China and I'm unable to access it let alone update it. So I'm writing as many as I can as email drafts before I post them upon getting access to a VPN, or virtual private network. Something similar goes for pictures: I'm taking photos from my iphone (which I haven't activated and have only kept on airplane mode because of multiple advisories from friends in the security field) but I'm not sure if I'll be able to upload them along with each relevant blog post until later. 

 

But of the city, I've still mostly just explored the downtown, but I remain impressed with how relatively organized it is, for a "developing" country. A happy surprise is that most of the areas I've seen have been mixed use: with retail, institutions, work, shops, leisure, all accessible by safe footpaths, subways, buses, bicycles, and of course car.

 

That said, Chinese cities are following a similar development model: tiers of urbanism with adjacent satellite cities. So the bus system similarly is piced according to how far outside of the central city you go. A different bus on the same network will get you to what would be a suburb, and another bus still will take you hours outside of the downtown area while keeping you technically in "the city."

 

Anyhow, I've got some very interesting meetings coming up, which I'm sure will come with lots of interesting more information. But I'll wrap this post up now.