In Beijing, 20 Million People Pretend to Live

August 5, 2017 10:51 AM

在北京，有2000万人假装在生活 - 张五毛

translated by Megan Pan:
In Beijing, 20 Million People Pretend to Live
translated by Manya Koetse “Beijing Has 20 Million People Pretending to Live Here”
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“In Beijing, 20 Million People Pretend to Live”: A Controversial Essay Touches Nerves

On July 23, writer Zhang Wumao published an essay on his public WeChat account, Mr. Zhang Says (张先生说), that spread like wildfire on Chinese social media. As of the morning of July 24, the controversial essay, titled “In Beijing, 20 Million People Pretend to Live” (在北京，有2000万人假装在生活), had already racked up over five million views and nearly twenty thousand comments on WeChat.

The WeChat article was censored later that afternoon. Weibo users report that many of their posts in the topic “In Beijing 20 Million People Pretend to Live” have also been mysteriously removed.

Though the hubbub online has died down, the essay, a meditation on varying facets of life in Beijing, has since spawned over a hundred thousand countering essays in response.

No Man’s City – A Chinese Blogger’s Powerful Essay About The “Fake Lives” of Beijing Residents

According to Mr. Zhang, the city’s rapid transformation has turned it into a place with no identity; a place that nobody can call home. The essay argues that Beijing has been overrun by migrant workers or waidiren (外地人, ‘people from outside the city’), and that these ‘outsiders’ have turned China’s capital into a place with staggering house prices and heavy traffic that lacks soul. The city no longer really belongs to native Beijingers, Zhang writes, as they cannot even recognize their old neighborhoods anymore. The essay describes how Beijing has become so big, so full, and so expensive, that life has virtually become unsustainable. The result of Beijing’s transformation, according to the post, is that its residents, both locals and immigrants, just “pretend to live there”, leading “fake lives.”

posted by the man of twists and turns (21 comments total)

A. My wife was complaining about "people from remote villages" cluttering up the city 20 years ago.

B. My mother-in-law still lives in Beijing. She and my wife very recently discussed her moving in with us in the USA, and concluded that she's better off in Beijing.

C. DAMN, that place has changed a lot in the last 20 years.
posted by Kirth Gerson at 11:16 AM on August 5, 2017 [2 favorites]

We outsiders complain about Beijing while missing our homes. In reality, we can still go back to our homes. They still exist, it is only that they fall increasingly behind day by day and we cannot adjust anymore. But for old Beijingers, they truly cannot go back to their home, their home is now undergoing a physical change at an unprecedented speed. We can still find grandpa’s house from back then, but many Beijingers can only search for their own home by the earth’s coordinates.

I guess I'm just at the right age where that's one of the saddest things I've ever read. Having trouble controlling the dust in this room.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 11:40 AM on August 5, 2017 [8 favorites]

"Those who chase their dreams of success are now escaping [Beijing]. They’re off to Australia, New Zealand, Canada, or the West Coast of the United States."

I was reading on r/China the other day that the Great Chinese Dream was to move to Canada. I thought it sounded hyperbolic, there are a lot of bitter people in that sub. But the crowding and noise and pollution and traffic have to take a toll. And people, especially as they get older, don't like change.

Much higher real estate costs and rents seem to be a theme around the world.
posted by Bee'sWing at 12:05 PM on August 5, 2017 [1 favorite]

I've had two week-long trips to Beijing this year. An emphatically confident city. The gorgeous and huge T3 terminal, opened for the Olympics less than ten years ago, is already being replaced by a giant new airport. Inexpensive taxis and Uber-equivalents. No whiners.
posted by MattD at 12:27 PM on August 5, 2017

No whiners.

I don't know what this means. Is this a reference to something the article I'm missing? Were there lots of malingerers before?
posted by queseyo at 12:34 PM on August 5, 2017 [6 favorites]

When I lived in Beijing in the early 2000s what I saw was the forced displacement of working class Beijingers from the hutongs, which were being bulldozd for new development, and the forced displacement of working class Beijingers city-wide to create new Potemkin style infrastructure for the Olympics (the decision had just been made). It was an open scandal then and from what I hear things are worse now. Beijing is big, so I'm sure that, like in New York, there are still parts of it that are unchanged, but that doesn't mean displacement and gentrification aren't happening. Like NYC, Beijing is a beautiful and world-class city and also a city of great inequality.
posted by Frowner at 1:04 PM on August 5, 2017 [9 favorites]

It is about an year since i left Beijing. As a foreigner i only have the top layer of perception of what the article is talking about, but it all sounds true.
Yet, despite the polution and the politics, there is not place that feels to alive like Beijing. Stuff is always happening, stuff is always changing, for better and worse.
posted by thegirlwiththehat at 1:37 PM on August 5, 2017 [2 favorites]

I've had two week-long trips to Beijing this year. An emphatically confident city.

The guy who wrote this article has only lived there for eleven years -- I'm glad you were here to set us straight about this!
posted by escabeche at 1:40 PM on August 5, 2017 [28 favorites]

If you let Chinese choose their must-go cities in this lifetime, I believe that most people would pick Beijing. Because here is the capital, here is Tiananmen, the Forbidden City, the Great Wall, the hundreds of theaters, big and small. Drama, opera, traditional drama, crosstalk, two-person skits, whether you like highbrow or popular art, you can always find what your spirit needs in Beijing. But these things actually do not have much to do with Beijingers.
…
When bringing up Beijing, so many people think first of the Forbidden City, Houhai, and 798 [Art Zone], of how Beijing has history and culture and high-rises. Are these things good? They are good! Am I proud? I am proud! But these things cannot be what we live off. What Beijingers experience more deeply is the congestion, the smog, the high housing prices; it is how, when leaving the house, you cannot move, and when at home, you cannot breathe.

I can’t but think these are universal sentiments for major American cities as well - cultural landmarks are for visitors, not natives. (The note about theater, maybe less so? Small theater can’t survive on tourists.)
posted by Going To Maine at 2:07 PM on August 5, 2017

In Beijing, exchanging business cards counts as recognition; calling a couple times a year counts as best friends; if someone is willing to go from the east to the west side to have a meal with you without talking business, then you could be called friends for life; as for the people you see every day, eat lunch with every day, they are only coworkers.

This really struck me.
posted by rebent at 2:19 PM on August 5, 2017 [13 favorites]

It's 'bowling alone' carried to the logical end.
posted by Bee'sWing at 2:36 PM on August 5, 2017 [2 favorites]

In Beijing, exchanging business cards counts as recognition; calling a couple times a year counts as best friends; if someone is willing to go from the east to the west side to have a meal with you without talking business, then you could be called friends for life; as for the people you see every day, eat lunch with every day, they are only coworkers.

This really struck me.

Is this not how most people live?
posted by Going To Maine at 2:41 PM on August 5, 2017 [5 favorites]

Is this not how most people live?

I call it middle age.

More seriously, this is happening everywhere. In my own personal experience, over the past fifteen years Seoul has gone from the most magical place on earth to a glistening, soulless nowhere.
posted by Literaryhero at 3:22 PM on August 5, 2017 [1 favorite]

This was way more universal and interesting than I expected.
posted by sieyin at 4:08 PM on August 5, 2017 [2 favorites]

Reminds me of the transition of the Valley of Heart's Delight into Silicon Valley.
posted by Rash at 4:11 PM on August 5, 2017 [2 favorites]

yes that's what struck me so - the universality of the feeling. Beijing is (according to Wolfram) 111.2 times larger than the city I live in. And yet across town is so far. But at the same time - the author eats lunch with these people every day, just like me. And the possibility of connecting is there. If he were my coworker, i wish he would connect to me. There is always time and only time if you make it.
posted by rebent at 9:01 PM on August 5, 2017

Wai Di Ren is almost an euphemism.

For long I've been thinking about writing a parody encyclopedic entry about the "Res Publica Serenissima Pechinorum" based on my experience as a Wai Di B- ('c-nt from outside the city'). Beijing is, in a sense, sovereign, and the throne is empty. It is an empty-throne republic occupying the heart of an empire, and colonised by the low-privilege people from the empire it commands.

It is a frontier occupying a highly congested geographical span, but it's constantly expanding in new dimensions that are beyond geography and maybe... "normal" human experience?

In Beijing you must be constantly aware of privileges, the powers that permeates the pea-soup air, and the place (in extension, perhaps a high-dimensional trajectory) you should supposedly occupy. You must be constantly aware of your own otherness. The Bei Jing Ren, except for the selected few, are similarly othered by this city that includes you, but you are not allowed to participate in their Imperial otherness, because it is theirs.

Of course you can still ignore it and pursue the immense possibilities there. It is a place where the kind of people like me -- sensitive, eager, and once self-assuring -- can thrive like heck, but I didn't want to thrive there. It might have been a mistake, but then again, perhaps I wasn't really important enough to tell a mistake from a right choice.
posted by runcifex at 10:01 PM on August 5, 2017

Just for the record, I did at the time try to stay there. The pay was incredible at time for me, and the work was very fulfilling. But I still left anyway. It was a mistake, but I as I am now is intellectually too weak, insignificant, unqualified, and discredited to even labelling it as one. How can I be the judge of my own action? I am still struggling to understand it, the part of the personal history connected to, devoured by, and mystified all over that city.
posted by runcifex at 10:15 PM on August 5, 2017 [1 favorite]

forced displacement of working class Beijingers from the hutongs, which were being bulldozd for new development

The flip side to that, as many Chinese people will tell you, is that people displaced from hutongs are essentially lottery winners. They can make a small fortune in compensation from the government. I don't know how true that really is, but I've heard it spoken of enviously from several sources.
posted by qxntpqbbbqxl at 11:43 PM on August 5, 2017

qxntpqbbbqxl, financially, that is largely true and especially so in gigacities such as Beijing and Shanghai. The rewards can be a bonanza. But is it good? Hard to say when you find that the same force that grants you the riches is the same that pushes against your will and dreams in every other direction.

The Chai Er Dai, or "second-generation displaced", is a moniker coined after Fu Er Dai (2nd-generation rich) or Guan Er Dai (princelings). More often than not you hear the stories about how the sudden rich, compounded by their inability to adjust and internal hollowness, condemns them to utter ruin.
posted by runcifex at 1:33 AM on August 6, 2017

It sounds kind of like Chinese can be as navel-gaze-y as us Americans, from what I can tell. Honestly, the links are almost as impenetrable to this American as China overall. Could it be that Beijing has more in common with San Francisco or Los Angeles or NYC than one might expect?
posted by 2N2222 at 3:39 PM on August 6, 2017