BEIJING — “Henry Kissinger sat in this seat,” the guide said. “Henry Paulson” — the former U.S. treasury secretary — “sat there.”
The seats in question were equipped with safety belts to ensure against mishaps as they tilted and turned in the Dynamic Movie Hall, where the moving chairs combine with high-tech images on a screen to provide a virtual-reality experience, a simulation of speeding through tunnels or soaring over skyscrapers.
The tunnels zoomed through and the buildings flown over represent Beijing in the year 2020, when the Beijing City Master Plan is due to be completed. The movie is a featured part of a visit to the high-tech Beijing Planning Exhibition Hall, which, as the references to Mr. Kissinger and Mr. Paulson showed, has lately been on the itinerary for some of this country’s most honored visitors.
The main theme of the three-story Exhibition Hall is unspoken and yet obvious. It is the intention of Chinese leaders to make this city of 20 million people a glittering, efficient, eco-friendly, architecturally distinguished and even beautiful city, appropriate for the great capital of a rising world power.
To someone like me, who comes here for a month or so every year, the exhibition had a touch of propaganda about it, or, at least, of advertising. The exhibits are a bit reminiscent of the images of socialist plenty that decades ago appeared in the official glossy magazines.
In this sense, the Exhibition Hall skips over some of the city’s deficiencies, like its frequently occurring, eye-burning pollution, its monumental traffic jams, or the way its very vastness makes it generally unfriendly to pedestrians.
This is not an exhibition showing debates over urban philosophy; it’s designed to celebrate the Beijing City Master Plan, approved by the Chinese rubber-stamp Parliament a few years ago. There is nothing, for example, on the role of the hundreds of thousands of migrant workers who have provided the low-cost labor involved in the city’s frantic pace of construction.
Still, the Exhibition Hall is a stunningly designed and informative museum, right in the center of the city, just south of Tiananmen Square, next to the Victorian-era former central railroad station, which has always been a touch of Old Europe in the heart of Old Beijing.
One small display provides a large demonstration of how things have changed here, and how the attitude toward city planning has changed with it. On the ground floor, there is a row of bronze sculptures of figures influential in the historical creation of Beijing.
There is Kuai Xiang, for example, who, legend has it, designed the massive Tiananmen Gate at the entrance to the Forbidden City during the Ming Dynasty, some six hundred years ago.
Alongside the more ancient figures is a bronze bust of Liang Sicheng, who was the pioneering figure in modern Chinese architecture, famous among other things for having pleaded with Mao Zedong in the years after the Communists took power to preserve Beijing’s old monuments, especially the Ming wall that encircled the entire city of that time, and its numerous gates.
Mao didn’t listen, and Beijing paid a heavy price in the destruction of the wall and much else, a loss that is at least implicitly acknowledged in the small monument to Liang, who was savagely persecuted by the Communist Party in the mid-1950s and again during the Cultural Revolution of 1966-76.
The centerpiece of the Exhibition Hall is a scale model of 1,302 square meters, or 14,000 square feet, that shows in fantastic detail the entire city inside the present-day Fourth Ring Road. This includes the Bird’s Nest and the Ice Cube, main sites of the 2008 Olympic Games, as well as other newly created signature structures, like the architect Rem Koolhaas’s headquarters for China Central Television and the ellipsoid titanium-and-glass National Center for the Performing Arts, designed by the French architect Paul Andreu.
Some of these new buildings have stirred their share of controversy, unmentioned in the Exhibition Hall — Mr. Koolhaas’s building in particular.
It’s called the Big Shorts by some Beijingers, and it does indeed resemble a massive pair of short pants striding across the North China Plain. Given that it’s the headquarters of a national television network directly supervised by the Communist Party’s Propaganda Department, it’s also known, in a touch of Orwellian satire, as the Ministry of Truth.
Still, these buildings, examples of world-class architecture, reflect what the Exhibition Hall shows, which is the determination of the Chinese authorities to use a portion of this country’s newly earned wealth to transform their capital from the dilapidated, overgrown village it was a few years ago into a sort of international, planned model city.
There are many ways in which the plan does not conform to current notions in the West about urban spaces being designed on a human scale. The vast network of ring roads, the annihilation of old neighborhoods, and the frantic construction of huge new shopping mall complexes all reflect the out-of-scale monumentalism of the overall plan.
Beijing is not a city of casual strolls through neighborhoods that have grown organically, mixing living, working, shopping and entertainment spaces. Still, the Dynamic Movie Hall shows a plan for public transportation that makes New York seem veritably antiquated and sluggish by comparison. There is already an excellent rapid transit link from the gleaming new international airport to the center of town, something that New York has simply never managed.
Then there is the nationwide network of high-speed trains, which the United States also doesn’t have. In Beijing, the trains will connect with a network of 22 fast, efficient subway lines, nine of which have been completed.
There are separate exhibits on local environmentalism as well, showing models for low-carbon-footprint housing, plans to increase wind and solar power, designs for the recycling of garbage and water and for the preservation of some old neighborhoods of courtyard houses, with their elaborate attention to feng shui, the ancient Chinese way of ensuring harmony between man and nature.
It’s an impressive demonstration of the continuing transformation of a very old city into a new one.