One in a Billion: Beijing, the Wall, and What the Square Doesn’t Say

The Great Wall, visited on the second day with a group that had been assembling around the same hostel over the previous week, is one of those places that defeats the expectation problem by being different from the expectation in ways you couldn’t have anticipated. You expect grandeur and you get grandeur, but you also get the specific texture of the stone under your hands and the specific gradient of the watchtower steps and the specific quality of looking along a structure that continues beyond the horizon in both directions and understanding, finally, that six thousand kilometres is not a metaphor but an actual distance that someone actually built. The wall was constructed over roughly two thousand years, with the most significant sections dating from the Ming dynasty between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries, and it was built by a combination of soldiers, peasants, and convicts working under conditions that killed a significant number of them, some of whom are buried, according to tradition and some archaeology, in the wall itself. The Ming emperors who ordered its construction had specific strategic reasons, the defence of the northern border against Mongol incursion, and the wall was partially effective for that purpose for a period and then became, as most static defences eventually become, more a statement of intent than a practical barrier.

There is a toboggan at the Mutianyu section that takes you back down to the car park. I used it and I am not ashamed of this.

Tiananmen Square is the largest public plaza in the world, which you understand intellectually before you arrive and then understand differently once you are standing in the middle of it. It covers forty-four hectares. The portrait of Mao Zedong that hangs above the Gate of Heavenly Peace at its northern end is six metres high. The square was constructed in its current form in 1958 and 1959, during the Great Leap Forward, the period of forced industrialisation and agricultural collectivisation that produced one of the deadliest famines in human history. The official estimates place the famine deaths at between fifteen and twenty million. Independent historians have put the figure considerably higher. The square that was built during this period is an exercise in political aesthetics, the creation of a space so large that the individual within it becomes, almost by definition, small.

In June 1989 the square was where the Chinese government’s response to seven weeks of student-led pro-democracy protests came to its conclusion. The precise number of people killed during the military crackdown of the third and fourth of June has never been established, because the Chinese government has never permitted independent investigation and has actively suppressed documentation of what happened. Estimates range from hundreds to several thousand. The image of a single man standing in front of a column of tanks on Chang’an Avenue, just to the north of the square, is among the most reproduced photographs of the twentieth century and cannot be displayed or searched for inside China today.

Walking through the square with Chris, an Australian from our group who had the disposition of someone who would be good to have nearby in an emergency, I mentioned that it was smaller than I expected, which is the kind of thing you say before you have properly looked at where you are. The Forbidden City, which the square abuts at its northern end, is itself a complex of nearly ten thousand rooms, constructed between 1406 and 1420 by a workforce of roughly a million people, which is a number that sits alongside the other numbers in Beijing’s history as part of a pattern of operating at a scale that the rest of the world rarely matches.

You do not get Facebook in China. You do not get Twitter or YouTube or Google, which is blocked by the Great Firewall, the country’s internet censorship infrastructure, officially known as the Golden Shield Project. The censorship operates on a scale and with a sophistication that reflects thirty years of investment, filtering not just platforms but specific search terms, specific images, specific dates. The fifth of June, searched in the right way, returns nothing useful. Everyone knows this, and everyone in Beijing who wants around it knows how to get around it, which is through virtual private networks that route internet traffic through servers outside the country. The government knows this too and periodically tightens the restrictions on VPN access, and users find new routes, and the process continues in the way that these things do when the desire for information is stronger than the technology designed to prevent it.

The Chinese people I met in Beijing were curious, warm, and almost entirely unconcerned with communicating any of this to me. They were getting on with things. The city was getting on with things. Cranes on every horizon, new districts rising in what had been farmland five years earlier, a subway network expanding at a rate that makes London’s look like a school project. The 2008 Olympics produced a version of Beijing that the government wanted the world to see, and the version was not dishonest exactly, but it was selective in the way that all self-presentations are selective. What came after the Olympics was the city continuing to become whatever it is becoming, at its own pace and on its own terms, which is not a pace or a set of terms that anyone outside China can dictate.

Ashley came to the airport to see me off. He told me to look after myself and to eat something before I got on the plane, which was good advice and which I followed.