In October 2019, I received what turned out to be my favorite commission of my entire time reporting in China: a chic European design journal, Disegno, wanted me to write a review of the newly constructed Beijing Daxing International Airport.
The twenty-four hours I spent in Beijing for that piece stick in my mind more clearly than almost any other stretch of time in my life. The morning I arrived on a flight from Chengdu was brilliant and unpolluted. I walked around the airport then made my way up to the city, where I paid a nostalgic visit to the Temple of the Earth park near my old apartment and worked in a cafe. In the evening I met up with some Beijing friends at our favorite rotisserie lamb leg place in the hutongs. We drank and ate copiously while I made sure to mention as often as possible that I was in the city “on assignment.” When I woke up the next morning in a tasteful cubby in the airport capsule hotel the magazine had booked me it was my 27th birthday. Vaguely hungover, I wandered into one of the glistening new airport gift kiosks and bought myself, on a whim, a plushy pig-shaped purse.
I remember grinning to myself as I boarded the plane back to Chengdu, stupidly stroking my overpriced pig and thinking that my life was shaping up to be very cool indeed.
With my pig, a balloon and a “doctor” at a high-concept theme party in Chengdu, November 2019. Photo by my friend Mia.
Any further reminiscence belongs to a different post, however (likely this one, which I promise you I will finish eventually). All I want to do here — aside from opportunistically dust off one of my best pieces now that its subject is in the discourse — is engage in some light gatekeeping.
You’ve probably heard about Abundance. If you’ve been under a rock: some big brain guys have coalesced around the idea that America makes it too hard to build stuff like housing and trains; that unnecessary regulation slows down projects while “citizen voice” statutes let incumbents block pretty much anything; and that we should do a bunch of policy reforms to unleash an era of big beautiful infrastructure. I find this all pretty hard to object to. (Full disclosure: I am now quite happily employed as a big brain guy working on climate and energy at an Abundance-aligned think tank).
China plays a crucial role in Abundance discourse by serving as an example of what we could have, if not for the stranglehold of the regulatory state and tedious citizen input processes. Abundance guys point to China’s tens of thousands of miles of high-speed rail; to forests of high-rise apartment buildings ripped straight from a YIMBY fever dream.
I find myself getting oddly territorial whenever I encounter this part of discourse, as if, you know, I invented being obsessed with Chinese infrastructure. Which of course I didn’t. But I did spend a lot of my twenties wandering around the Chinese built environment, and thinking about it, and writing about it. And a lot of that writing had to do with what is now an important theme of Abundance discourse, which is the tradeoff between protecting citizens from harm and building big.
Back then I was very preoccupied with the phenomenon of destruction and forced resettlement, or chai-qian (literally: destroy-move). I wrote a bunch of articles about it, including one about an artist colony in Beijing and one about a historic neighborhood in Nanjing.1 These were only very tiny instances of a phenomenon so enormous in scale it can be hard to get any mental purchase on it. During China’s most frenetic period of building, you would see about a Robert Moses’s lifetime’s worth of chaiqian in a week. The displacement toll from the Three Gorges Dam alone is thought to have amounted to around 1.5 million people.
I think the review that follows does a pretty good job of dramatizing China’s building boom - the forces that shaped it, as well as its toll. An event I mention in the piece is a 2017 fire at a migrant village in Daxing near the future airport that killed at least twenty people and led to the settlement’s swift disposal by the local authorities. I was living in Beijing when that happened and really disturbed by it - I even took a cab down south to walk around the remnants, although I was too afraid then to actually do any reporting.
It’s interesting to re-visit this review five and a half years later and see where I agree with my past self and where I don’t. I find I pretty much stand by my [SPOILER ALERT] harsh critique of the structure itself. I’m not sure I find my critique of China’s urban development ambitions as compelling, however. Back then I leaned a lot further Left and was basically on board with the “city as growth machine” concept, which I no longer find very profound.2
As I’ve gotten older I’ve also become more circumspect about chaiqian. I still think the amount of demolition and displacement was excessive - but a lot of it was inevitable, and necessary. When you are living through the most rapid economic transformation of all time, it is somewhat unavoidable that you will be tossed around by the bulldozer of history.
For what it’s worth every Chinese person with whom I discussed chaiqian (aside from those directly affected) was extraordinarily unsentimental about it. Whenever I would bring it up, my interlocutor would grin and invoke a mythical class of people called the “chai-er-dai” or second-generation displaced - people supposedly generationally wealthy due to resettlement compensation.3
In the end I guess where I come boringly down on this tradeoff is that there is probably, to bastardize the old Stalinist adage about omelettes, an optimal amount of egg-cracking to be done. China cracked too many eggs, and America too few. Now China has a bunch of rotting useless omelettes and we’re starving for them. But really this duality was already characterized annoyingly well by the tech commentator Dwarkesh Patel on his recent trip to China:
It’s funny how China has basically the inverse problem as America. We subsidize demand and restrict supply. They subsidize supply and restrict demand. We can’t rebuild fallen bridges. They build bridges to nowhere. In the most desirable cities in this country, every random Victorian house and park bench is a historic site that can’t be disturbed. There, they’ll bulldoze a 500 year old temple to build an endless skyscraper complex that no one wants to live in.
A final thought: Beijing Daxing Airport was in many ways the quintessential representative of China’s triumphal building era, but it was the also the end of it. The same month this review was published in print, I started hearing rumblings of a mysterious flu-like illness in Wuhan. China’s economy has been sluggish ever since. One of the problems with it seems to be that there are now, irrefutably, diminishing returns to building. The real estate bubble finally popped as everyone knew it would and a lot of people have taken a hit to their wealth. I haven’t returned since February 2020 but I’m sure the environment - built and otherwise - is very different now.
That’s enough! Here’s the review:
A Lovecraftian Monster
This review originally ran in the December 2019 edition of Disegno. Photos included are those that ran alongside the review. Forgive the British spellings; my editors were English.
It’s hard to imagine a city on which the late Zaha Hadid left a deeper imprint than Beijing. During the building binge of the late aughts and early teens, Hadid’s firm designed two monumental projects: Wangjing Soho and Galaxy Soho, both commissioned by real estate developers Zhang Xin and Pan Shiyi of Soho group. Today, these buildings are unmistakable features of the Beijing cityscape. Their gargantuan camel humps and swooping cowlicks jump out at you, sometimes quite jarringly, as you navigate the city – usually from within a vehicle chugging down some eight-lane arterial road. Beijing has long since ceased to be a city navigable by foot.
Hadid’s designs were perfect for the new Beijing: shiny, triumphant and completely indifferent to the city’s existing social fabric. The new Beijing, birthed in anticipation of the 2008 Olympics, was obsessed with face. The idea that buildings ought to be functional and in harmony with their environment came a distant second to the demand that they be big and impressive. It was, in short, a showcase rather than a place where people lived.
Needless to say, neither Galaxy nor Wangjing are loved by locals. This year, an independent Chinese media company published a post describing the energy of Wangjing Soho as “noxious” and “heart-piercing”; through many explicit diagrams, it compared the trio of hump-shaped buildings to pig’s kidneys. The blogger also criticised the building’s poor feng shui and suggested that this might be why all of the businesses that have taken offices there have failed. A Chinese court subsequently fined the media company 30,000RMB (£3,320) for this post, citing “superstitious” behaviour. This wasn’t actually out of concern for dispelling superstition, of course (the government continues to promote traditional Chinese medicine relentlessly): Wangjing is a crucial landmark of the new Beijing and anyone who dares to poke holes in its glistening facade must be punished.
You’d think these issues would be less salient when it comes to Hadid’s third and final Beijing building: Beijing Daxing International Airport, which the architect designed before she died in 2016, and which was completed and opened for business last month. Airports are, almost by definition, not supposed to be human-scale. If any type of building has licence to be indifferent to its environment, it should be the airport.
Yet not even this most placeless of spaces is built in a vacuum. In November of 2017, two years before Daxing airport landed, tens of thousands of migrant workers – a group considered “low end” by the Chinese state – were forcibly evicted from the shantytown “urban villages” in far south Beijing. The proximate cause for this action was a tragic house fire that took at least 19 lives, possibly more. But most long-standing residents suspected that fire safety was being used as an excuse to clear out an area that the city government hoped would soon be filled with more “high quality” people in light of the new airport. In all, at least 11 villages have been demolished and upwards of 20,000 people have been relocated, sometimes with compensation and sometimes without.
It’s not even clear if Hadid’s project, which has cost 120bn RMB (£13.3bn), as well as the livelihoods of so many people, was necessary in the first place. Norman Foster’s Beijing Capital International Airport opened a little more than 10 years ago in northeast Beijing, and in 2017 was the second-busiest airport in the world, handling more than 100 million passengers a year. But as a recent New York Times article points out, Beijing Capital is severely constricted because of China’s defence policy. The Chinese military currently controls more than 70 per cent of the nation’s airspace, while the figure in the US is only 20 per cent. “The congestion takes place in the sky because the military only allows for a certain number of tunnels,” Guo Yufeng, chief executive of aviation advisory firm Q&A Consulting told The New York Times. “If that doesn’t change, the ground infrastructure needs to be expanded.” Although Beijing Capital is the second-busiest airport in the world, it only rates fifth in terms of take-offs and landings because flights are frequently cancelled. It’s perfectly possible it could have accommodated the needs of the Beijing metro area if the military had allowed more pathways for commercial flights.
This possibility was not explored, partly because of the obstinacy of the Chinese military and partly because of the Chinese government’s morbid addiction to big infrastructure investment. In the face of slowing growth, the first and sometimes only solution for China’s planners is more infrastructure spending. That is why the country is filled with unnecessary airports, dams and high-speed rail lines, such as a $6m refurbishment of an airport on the small island of Dachangshan, just off the coast of northeast China, which welcomes no more than 10 passengers a day. Or an expensive high-speed rail line connecting the cities of Lanzhou and Urumqi in the sparsely populated Gobi desert acrossharsh terrain. Authorities hope the new airport, which is 46km from central Beijing, will stimulate economic development of the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei (Jing-Jin-Ji) “megalopolis”, a long-time dream of growth-obsessed officials in this part of China.
It should be clear at this point that I was not predisposed to like Beijing Daxing International Airport when I flew in from Chengdu one Monday morning this autumn, not long after it had opened. My plane landed at the very tip of one of the five flight piers that radiate out from its central atrium. It took me maybe five minutes, not counting time taken to snap pictures, to walk from that pier to the central atrium and then through to Arrivals. This radial design saves travellers from the pain of inter-terminal shuttles and monorails. It is indeed efficient and Hadid’s firm says the longest trip for customers from security to their plane will be eight minutes.
Unfortunately, this floor plan is the only sensible thing about the airport. The structure, which seemed reasonable at first, started getting more and more ludicrous as I walked toward the central atrium, which Zaha Hadid Architects (ZHA) says was inspired by “principles within traditional Chinese architecture, which organise interconnected spaces around a central courtyard”. I suppose that if you go by this loose definition of “stuff around some open space”, it is Chinese-influenced, much like sticking a house in the middle of an open yard might be said to be influenced by principles from within traditional Western architecture. Of course, even this diluted definition of traditional Chinese architecture doesn’t hold up, since the five tendrils of the airport are not really interconnected: you must go down to the atrium and back up if you wish to access a gate in a different flight pier. You cannot circulate through the structure as you might in a courtyard home enclosed on four sides by buildings that face one another.
Even more offensive is the suggestion that the atrium (which is what it is), a soaring and blindingly white multi-storey phantasmagoria of luxury stores criss-crossed by sky bridges, can be reasonably likened to a Chinese courtyard, or that it was a painstakingly proportioned swathe of negative space that builders took great care to make sure was in harmony with the wings surrounding it. As if fearing the “Chineseness” of this atrium would be lost on travellers, more literal courtyards have been installed inside each of the five prongs. The courtyard inside my prong was closed at the time I visited, but I noticed it was peppered with a number of perfunctory grey “Chinese-y” pavilions and spirit walls. No display, unfortunately, of the skeletons from the Qing Dynasty graveyard that were reportedly discovered during excavation for the airport. Beijing has always liked to keep things ahistorical.
The opposite of an intimate and enclosed Chinese courtyard, the central atrium is ostentatious, neck-craningly huge and, as we should expect of a Hadid, relentlessly curvilinear. There is an obligatory undulating roof, supported by an intricate spiderweb-like lattice of curved beams, in between which have been installed glass skylights, themselves criss-crossed by a triangular lattice. It is interesting and then exhausting to look at. On the morning I was there, grainy Beijing sunlight poured through and made the already psychotically polished white floors and staircases even more blinding. Immediately surrounding the atrium are a number of massive flowing vertical shapes that reminded me of the cross-section of a tulip; these are capped with domed skylights, also overlaid with a triangular lattice. These project a high-definition grid pattern onto the white floor at all times of day, making the atrium doubly draining. ZHA is promoting the line that the airport looks like a “starfish” (a starfish with a Chinese courtyard), but from a bird’s-eye view, between the incessant webbing and massive, tulip-dome skylights resembling so many insect eyes, I thought it looked more like a Lovecraftian monster. A starfish-shaped Lovecraftian monster.
The concern for natural light demonstrated by the proliferation of skylights is reasonable in buildings where people live and spend a lot of time, often in cramped areas surrounded by other structures. It makes less sense in the context of an airport, a place people mostly move through rather than linger in, especially in the case of one set in the moonscape of southern Daxing. What are all of these skylights and glass-panelled walls supposed to expose us to? Daxing is not like Hong Kong or San Francisco. There is no spectacular landscape upon which the visitor can immediately look out and feel welcome and relaxed. There is only endless bulldozed flatness. This surfeit of light and glass exposure actually makes the airport more agoraphobic than anything – and agoraphobia, I should know by now, is endemic to Chinese infrastructure projects.
Before I could develop snow blindness, I left the shimmering atrium and passed into the comparatively serene Arrivals. With a long open facade and exposed columns of elevators, it basically resembles a bigger Beijing Capital, an airport through which I have flown many times and found to be perfectly fine. This brief moment of peace, however, is soon shattered by the fact of having to get into downtown Beijing. The sixth leg of the starfish is a much-vaunted inter-city transport centre that offers subway and express train connections. Unfortunately, neither of these will take you into the city in less than an hour and a half. The Daxing Airport Express will take you all the way to Caoqiao subway, but that’s outside Beijing’s fourth ring road and requires another hour of subway transfers to get downtown.
My Chinese navigation app suggested that it would actually be faster to take an express bus that would drop me off at a relatively close-in subway, so I ditched the transport centre for the bus station, which turned out to be a few dozen waiting chairs and a ticket kiosk plopped at the far end of Arrivals. Outside, a man chain-smoked as he waited for enough people to fill up his van. I was the last and got to ride shotgun as we chugged down the slow lane on a 20-lane highway with no other cars in sight. Out of the window, farms and orchards turned into light industrial parks. One day – sooner than we can imagine – all of it will be gone. It will be replaced by more high-quality people and high-quality industries, the growth engines of the Jing-Jin-Ji megalopolis. At the centre of that megalopolis will be the webbed eye of Beijing Daxing International Airport.
I tried to find those articles to link only to discover they are no more- they were both published by an outlet called SupChina which has since gone under.
Sure, cities are totally instruments of elite accumulation - but does it matter as long as the benefits of growth redound to ordinary citizens (which they usually do)?
I don’t doubt some chai-er-dai exist, although I find it hard to believe all 1.5 million people displaced by Three Gorges are eating bonbons.
This was a really good read thanks Lauren! Having flown throw Daxing several times (and usually preferring capital) I share your feelings and the reflections about abundance discourse. Also, you captured the grainy quality of the light well! Curious if you have thoughts or writing on the ZHA designed sci fi museum in Chengdu?