Absurdity, Allegory and China

A few months back (October 14, 2011) Rem Koolhaas, brand architect behind OMA, the architectural firm that has been involved with the design and building of the iconic CCTV Headquarters Building on the East Third Ring Road, was the subject of an article in Bloomberg’s BusinessWeek: Pritzker Star Koolhaas Frets Over EU, Tops Giant Beijing Tower.

How does he deal with a country where democracy is a work in progress? “I’m happy you use the term ‘work in progress,’ because I think that is the essence of China,” he says. “It’s not a perfect situation, but what is important is that CCTV [China Central Television] is not directly an element of the state.

In 2005 as the project began emerging from the ground, in a special issue of Architecture+Urbanism dedicated to the CCTV project, Ole Scheeren who was then the head architect of the project – in 2009 he left the firm and set out on his own – stated in the introduction to the issue:

As the national television station, CCTV has a direct relationship to the State — is information filter and propaganda machine — and receives subsidies to fulfil this role.

Scheeren goes on to say that the “economic dependency [of CCTV] is deceptive,” that the amount of tax revenues CCTV returns to the State through advertising revenues outlegs the State subsidies by “four or five times,” and that the amount of return could pay for the headquarters building in just a year. Whether that is true or not is anyone’s guess, since the only ones who might possibly know the true cost of the project are the bean counters in the State Council of the People’s Republic of China, though I imagine the duties are sliced and diced so thoroughly that no one other than a single guy – or a single Top Secret redline – knows the actual cost to date. Suffice it to say that any early estimates have long since been mightily heaved beneath the bus as costs have, literally, skyrocketed through the roof (remember the TVCC fire?). But I wander.

The more interesting comparison is what is the difference between Koolhaas’s “CCTV is not directly an element of the state,” and Scheeren’s “CCTV has a direct relationship with the State.” There is obviously a hair-splitting semantic distinction here, though the bigger question still remains, “If not ‘direct’ then how would one describe CCTV’s relationship to the State?”

The CCTV English: About Us page clearly states that “China Central Television (CCTV) is the national TV station of the People´s Republic of China and it is one of China’s most important news broadcast companies. Today, CCTV has become one of China’s most influential media outlets.”

Again, this doesn’t really clear it up, though “national” in relation to CCTV clearly has a different meaning than the “national” in, say, NBC. The National Broadcasting Company does not introduce itself as the “national TV station of the United States of America.” That sounds like something we’d expect to see from the Murdoch/Fox folks, though even they have just enough sense to restrain themselves; “fair and balanced” is about as far as they can stretch it without coming completely apart at the seams.

Wikipedia puts it thusly:

China Central Television falls under the supervision of the State Administration of Radio, Film, and Television which is in turn subordinate to the State Council of the People’s Republic of China [which is largely synonymous with the Central People's Government]. A Vice Minister of the state council serves as chairman of CCTV.
…
The network’s principal directors and other officers are appointed by the State, and so are the top officials at local conventional television stations in mainland China; nearly all of them are restricted to broadcasting within their own province or municipality.

The suctioning tentacles of “State” feel wetly icky and pretty direct to me. So, why this distancing by Koolhaas? Why this denial of directness? More Koolhaas leg-pulling? Perhaps. Or is this just wishful thinking, a musing attempt to deflect the criticism that OMA has received for building one of the great buildings of the age for a reactive totalitarian government that is getting more reactive and repressive every day? Hard to know. And I’m betting Koolhaas won’t ever say.

I had to make a quick trip to Guomao this morning, so, of course, I brought along my camera. I wanted to follow up on a story from a couple of days ago. Late Friday morning, December 23, 2011, during the demolition of a building near the CCTV Headquarters Building, a part of said building collapsed into traffic, damaging four cars, but miraculously not killing anyone. Wang Yu, a Chaoyang District police officer said, “We received a phone call saying a building had collapsed in the Chaoyang district. We immediately dispatched more than 20 policemen to keep order there.” This was reported in the China Daily. That ‘order’ was the first concern might seem odd, but this is China, where saving lives is secondary to the maintenance of order. Luckily, no one (that we know of) was trapped beneath the rubble, especially along this busy stretch of road beside the East Third Ring Rd. in the CBD. Though pedestrian traffic is never a real crush here as it is a block south at Guomao, it is usually constant. The photo below was taken on a Sunday morning, Christmas Day, when pedestrian traffic was light. The China Daily story is here.

One of my favorite barometers measuring backstage Beijing is the large billboard wall on the northeast side of the Goumao flyover between Guanghua Lu and and the center of the Guomao interchange. This particularly conspicuous message board has been one of the many sites that has prominently displayed Chaoyang District’s tiresomely adolescent PR broadside of Civilized Chaoyang. I first wrote about it 20 months ago here. The campaign has been underway since at least April 2010. That this billboard is now blank heralds an imminent change. Will it be as goofy as the last one, or will it end up being even goofier. Either way, we can pretty much count on it being witlessly puerile propaganda, which is about as close as China can get to implementing soft power. I’ll keep you posted on how this space changes, though I’m betting it will still refer to the 2008 Olympic foreign architecture. Some things, like Beijing’s nasal fishing fetish, just can’t be shaken.

And here is one more before I get into further mischief. Below is still, though barely, the building at the southeast corner of Guanghua Lu and the Third Ring Road. It has been an advertising cash cow for the owners, Tsinghua U or some other educational agency where the accumulation of money is the only measure of intelligence. Located across the street from the CCTV Headquarters Bldg. – the highest profile architectural project in Beijing – this ugly brick lump has been the site of giant advertisements, my favorite being “Air France Business Class, comfort” (with full moon rising) from the end of 2010. As I write on this Christmas afternoon, the once 16 (or so) story building is a crumbled nub. Here are a few of the final bricks in that once-expensive wall as gravity calls them home.

Happy Holidays!

(Click on the pics to see them bigger!)

Here’s a shot from late last week in Beijing when the air was somewhat clear, the man was somewhat short – though longer than the bed of his trike – and the Hyundai Elantra was max shiny. And the CCTV Bldg was the CCTV Bldg., since it’s hard for it to be anything else. (click the pic for a larger version.)

This morning I’m in pain. I take little comfort in knowing that I’m not the only one in Beijing suffering from the same symptoms: pounding headache, sore throat and burning eyes. It’s the air pollution that’s got us down, physically, spiritually, mentally and every other -ally I can possibly think of. I have my curtains drawn and my office door shut and an IQAir filter cranking away. But that’s still not enough to keep the filth of Beijing air out. Periodically I look out the window, but then quickly draw the curtains again. I just don’t want to look at what is happening outside. It’s disgusting. This past Friday it snowed, perhaps the most depressing snow I’ve ever seen. I thought, “If there were enough of it, would you let your child play in that?” I remember those early life moments of scooping up a handful of snow, eating it, rolling in it, coming home frozen wet and red. That wouldn’t happen in this place. @bokane expressed it best: “Signs you’ve been in Beijing too long: you look out the window onto a snowy morning and just assume that it’s ash of some kind.” When I saw what was falling from the sky on Friday I thought of kids eating snow and I shivered … in a Divine/Pink Flamingos sort of way. More snow is to come later this evening and tomorrow. It used to be just the yellow snow you’d have to warn the kids about, but in Beijing, it’s anything that falls from the sky and accumulates.

On November 22 I went to the Terminal 3 of the Beijing Capital Airport to meet a friend who was to stay with us for a week. At 11:00 AM when she arrived the air was ‘Very Unhealthy.’ According to the air quality readings tweeted nearly every hour by the U.S. Embassy – much to the chagrin and protests of the Chinese government – the PM2.5 reading was 273. (PM2.5 is the invisible particulate matter that works its way into your lungs and does the most damage, a standard international measurement that the Chinese have, though they refuse to make their readings public. As we left the airport I told her that the smog would probably clear over the next few hours since the wind was predicted to rise. And rise it did, taking all the nastiness south that day. By 3:00 PM it was a ‘Good’ 39 and the wind was ripping. In fact it ripped so much that evening it ended up ripping part of the roof off Terminal 3, though one of the architects involved with the project said that substandard materials or installation – not design flaws – are likely to blame for wind blowing parts of the roof off Beijing’s three-year-old Terminal 3. And it’s not hard to believe that assessment. The wind was barely over 50 MPH, not enough to damage a properly installed roof at the world’s largest showboat airport, though enough to drive Beijing’s toxic air somewhere else. The air quality remained in the breathable range, below ‘Unhealthy,’ until the following evening: 11-23-2011; 23:00; PM2.5; 72.0; 155; Unhealthy.

For the next 116 hours (4 hours shy of 5 complete days) the air quality stayed ‘Unhealthy’ or above, before returning to what would be considered ‘healthy’ for anyone without respiratory problems, though not for sensitive groups. 11-28-2011; 19:00; PM2.5; 64.0; 148; Unhealthy for Sensitive Groups. In other words for a 116 hour stretch Beijing air was deemed ‘Unhealthy’ or worse, and often the quality reading drifted into the ‘Very Unhealthy’ and ‘Hazardous’ ranges. Of that 116 hour stretch, 24 hours were deemed ‘Hazardous’, ranging from 301 to 393.

The days between then and now have not been all that different: a few ‘Good’ and ‘Moderate’ periods, though mostly ‘Unhealthy’ and above. The exception has been the period we are in at the moment. As I write the PM 2.5 readings have been pegged in the ‘Hazardous’ zone since yesterday (Sunday) afternoon, 12-04-2011; 16:00; PM2.5; 406.0; 438; Hazardous, more than 19 hours ago. A few hours after the air quality entered the ‘Hazardous’ zone it reached the unmeasurable range (what some have unofficially deemed “Crazy Bad”) @ 12-04-2011; 19:00; PM2.5; 522.0; 500; Beyond Index, which is somewhat akin to WWI trench warfare air. How far ‘Beyond Index’ was it? There’s no way of knowing that, though if the CN.gov folks do, they aren’t about to tell anyone. In fact I’m surprised they haven’t sniped the measurement machine on top of the U.S. Embassy, yet. They hate it. Recently there have been at least two smartphone applications that republish the hourly U.S. Embassy readings. But despite a rise in requests to come clean with the real information, the Beijing Environmental Protection Bureau has refused to make that data available. {In Chinese}

For more see The Ministry of Tofu’s Photos: Smog-shrouded China denies citizens right to know pollutant measurements. Also have a look at this photo taken at the Beijing Capital Airport last night by @kinablog who was on an Air China flight that was grounded due to the heavy smog.

Though Beijing is an international capital, the government has yet to learn how to responsibly deal with their people. My rough estimate is that at least 97% of the people who live in Beijing are Chinese, not expats. And as everyone knows, expats are whiners. We complain, because that’s what we do. We complain about staying here as this problem continues to worsen. And though I can hardly speak for anyone else, I do know someone close who has left, and we, her parents, will be leaving here in June at the end of contract. There are several reasons to leave, and general quality of 21 C. life issues are big (how can you be competitive when your internet connection is blocked, choked, and hobbled – my connection speed has regressed to 1995 dial-up speeds.) But breathable air has become the primary reason.

But this isn’t about us, China. This is about  the Chinese. The majority of people who are affected by this insane level of pollution are your parents and grandparents. But it will all catch up to you later. So before you start writing to me to call me what you guys sometimes call me, look at yourselves. This is damaging you and your families. It’s your health that’s being destroyed. Then if you still want to write a comment telling me to do things to myself that “just ain’t right,” in English that isn’t either, go right ahead. I’ll delete you as I always do while I’m still able to breathe.

Update December 5, 2011, 1900 CST
The irrepressible Global Times has just published Metrological authorities deny heavy fog is pollution. It is always difficult to know what to do with the Global Times. Reworking it into 4″ rolls and placing it in public latrines usually comes to mind, but they’re also digital, which means they last far beyond the first [s]wipe. My favorite lines are:

Zhang Mingying, a meteorological engineer at the Beijing Meteorological Bureau, told the Global Times on Monday that the recent fog is normal in terms of frequency during this time of year according to their monitoring.

“Heavy fog has occurred 6 times a year on average over the past 30 years and December’s fog was the seventh occurrence this year. Therefore, it is a normal climate condition in Beijing,” said Zhang.

I will not get into the classification of what is or is not normal, though I will say that periods of fog occur in Beijing with great frequency before winter sets in hard and after it loses it grip, which makes November/December and late February/March notoriousl