Volume 56, Number 5 · March 26, 2009
The Death and Life of a Great Chinese City
By Richard Bernstein
The Last Days of Old Beijing: Life in the Vanishing Backstreets of a City Transformed
by Michael Meyer
Walker, 355 pp., $25.99
Out of Mao's Shadow: The Struggle for the Soul of a New China
by Philip P. Pan
Simon and Schuster, 349 pp., $28.00
Serve the People: A Stir-Fried Journey Through China
by Jen Lin-Liu
Harcourt, 341 pp., $24.00
Judging from the evidence of Michael Meyer's portrait of life in a narrow backstreet of Beijing as China prepared for the Olympic Games, old Beijing has been vanishing for a very long time. 'Peking you simply would not be able to recognize except by its monuments,' the British journalist George Morrison wrote in 1916. His complaint was eerily similar to those of many Chinese and others today, included by Meyer in The Last Days of Old Beijing, who are sensitive to what has been lost as China's capital has been transformed into a modern city, bristling with the massive creations of big-name architects. 'Macadamized roads, electric light, great open spaces, museums, modern buildings of all kinds, one or two of them on a scale that would not be out of place in Whitehall, motorcars (there are I think at least 200), motor cycles more numerous than we care for, and bicycles literally by the thousand,' Morrison wrote.
Review, 4116 words
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