Hollowed-out hutong
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A cheap way to keep out the riff-raff
May 20th 2017 | BEIJING
SALARY ALLEY runs from the National Art Gallery to Dongsi North Street in downtown Beijing. It is one of the city’s surviving hutong (alleyways) from the pre-Communist period—a lane of single-story houses, grey brick walls and upturned eaves. It is also a microcosm of changes ripping through China’s cities.
Salary Alley is poor. Large houses have been subdivided into warrens. Few have kitchens or bathrooms, so the lane is lined with public bathrooms and restaurants which are cheaper than eating at home. The hutong boasts ten eateries, four public bathrooms, nine grocery or hardware shops, a pet hospital, brothel, barbershop, four-star hotel, pool hall and a community-police headquarters. Jane Jacobs, an American urban theorist who extolled the varied life of mixed-use streets, would have loved it.
About five years ago, Salary Alley started to gentrify. It already had one of the best Vietnamese restaurants in Beijing. Now it acquired a luxury sushi house, a couple of bars, and—sure harbinger of middle-class demand—a dainty coffee-shop. But recently it has suffered something more like degentrification. Gentrification means protecting old buildings and attracting new businesses, often at the expense of old residents who can no longer afford to live there. Salary Alley is seeing new businesses shut down, buildings torn up and new arrivals, not old residents, forced out.
The process began last summer when government-hired builders tore off shop fronts (windows, signs, even roofs), plastered over the gaps and went home, leaving the lane looking as if it was being demolished, rather than renewed. Since then, in the name of returning the hutong to its pre-Communist appearance, windows have been bricked up, glass doors replaced, commercial signs removed and houses refaced with old-style “bricks”—actually tiles made to look like them. Fake bricks are commonly used in Chinese renovations (see picture of a painted-on kind in a recent makeover in Shanghai). A flea market close to Salary Alley was shut and the stallholders—mostly migrants from the central province of Hunan—sent home.
Three of the alley’s restaurants have also been closed. All of the shopkeepers say business has suffered. The street entrance to one corner store has been bricked up; customers must climb three steps to place their order at a high window. If you want a cold drink, the owner gives you a photograph of the inside of the fridge so you can see what he has. The government says it wants to correct architectural violations, brick up entrances that do not comply with building codes and buy back land so it can be renovated and sold. Those motivations sound reasonable. But they are not the real ones.
One of the government’s motives is to squeeze out migrants, a brutal tactic in its campaign to control the capital’s size. On Salary Alley, most shopkeepers are from the coastal province of Shandong. Like the market traders from Hunan, they are vulnerable. “If the government lets us do business, we will do business,” says one fatalistically. “If not, we will return home.”
The government says it needs to repair the alleyways, many of which are indeed dilapidated. Yet on Salary Alley, most of the buildings being “protected” were rebuilt after 1980, while the few ancient ones are mouldering away. Building fake brick walls hardly counts as beautification. “I like variety,” says a shop owner. “For the government uniformity is beautiful.”
This year the city’s government says it will wall up or tear down 16,000 unlicensed shops and extensions. Not only are these illegal but also dangerous, it argues. Yet a microbrewery near Salary Alley was shut despite being up to date with all its paperwork—because it was in the way of another piece of city-mandated reconstruction. A local bar owner complains that his establishment passed inspections for years—until one day everything was mysteriously declared to be illegal. He is shuttering it.
China’s capital says it wants to be a global city. That will require allowing its street life to flourish as it does in New York or London. The government seems to have decided that greater control is needed. Salary Alley is suffering the chill.
