China Malls Replacing Landmarks

BEIJING -- The irony was probably lost on Beijing's city fathers: While they spent last week celebrating the most famous Peking Opera star of this century, workers were hauling away the remains of the theater where he gave his greatest performances.


In the century-old theater's place? A faceless shopping arcade to cater to Beijing's nouveaux riches.


Unfortunately for China's cultural heritage, the recent demise of the Jixiang Theater is being repeated across the country. In Suzhou, for example, unplanned urban growth has badly polluted the city's famous maze of canals, spoiling a city that once drew comparisons with Venice.


This onslaught of thoughtless development is one of the downsides to China's double-digit economic growth. While China's cities are gaining wide new roads, shopping centers and luxury apartment blocks, they have been losing many of the landmarks that somehow survived revolution, war and the anticultural destruction of earlier Communist rule.


The latest assault against the old has all but overwhelmed the best efforts of the country's nascent urban planning offices. Woefully underfunded and lacking teeth to enforce the rules that they write, city planners are finding that their color-coded zoning maps are easily overridden by investment-hungry politicians.


The situation is especially acute in Beijing, where fast economic growth is clashing with a city that brims with artifacts stemming from the 700 years when it was home to China's emperors and center of the country's universe.


"There's terrific pressure between economic growth and urban protection. We hope to win, but we don't always win," said Dong Guangqi, deputy director of the Beijing Municipal Institute of Urban Planning and Design.


One loss was the decision to tear down the Jixiang Theater, off Beijing's biggest shopping street, Wangfujing. The theater, the only remaining one in Beijing solely devoted to the Peking Opera, was where Peking Opera legend Mei Lanfang performed many of the female roles that made him famous.


Although the theater was originally on the city's list of protected buildings, it lost this protection when a foreign investor proposed a 17-floor shopping and office complex. Part of the deal is that another, much smaller theater that will cater to tourists will be built on the seventh floor of a nearby office building.


The old theater's loss was another shock for many Beijingers, who have seen how postwar politicians sacrificed the city's mighty walls, most of its massive gates, and scores of temples, restaurants, bridges and ceremonial archways.


All told, Beijing will see about 200 major projects completed over the next three years that will add 21 million square feet of commercial and residential floor space.