CONTRADICTION: "Developed" and "Developing"

This is the first in a series of posts I would like to write on how China is constituted by an enormous number of contradictions; it's a primary quality of the flux of this place, and one of the country's most interesting features. Let's begin would be with one of the centralmost points: China as both a developed and developing country.

The Beijing transportation authorities have just completed a subway line running underneath the entirety of the 3rd Ring Road. It's fast, clean, efficient... only time will tell how good the engineering really is, but for now it seems great. The CCTV Tower in Guomao, the so-called "pants building," is one of the most interesting architectural achievements I've ever seen. Terminal 3 at Beijing Capital airport is equally spectacular. Jinbao Jie boasts the Hong Kong Jockey Club and a Lamborghini dealership. All around you, there are constructed reminders of how Beijing has arrived as a global cosmopolitan center.

I am greeted every morning here by the crowing of a rooster outside my apartment building. I live in a typical apartment block, surrounded by other high-rises, malls, Starbucks and McDonald's. But the shop where I get my motorbike repaired still has a resident chicken from which the bike shop owner's family collects eggs for breakfast. The owner himself owns a clutch of finches, which he trains as what I think looks like carrier pigeons, to fly away and come back to him as he wills it. A good friend who visited Beijing last year observed how, despite all the modern trappings, the biggest first impression he received upon seeing the people in Beijing is the very slight remove everyone has from the rhythms and movements of a rural, agricultural lifestyle: shopping daily for fresh produce, chatting loudly to one another as if there was no one else around to hear, stolling carelessly on crowded city streets, spitting and bathroom breaks in public, extreme warmth and hospitality shown to foreign guests, a dedication to ancient medicines and practices. As built-up as Beijing may get, the countryside is never far away.