A state of passing: Tongzhou and the committee grid

The bustling and densely populated Beijing suburb of Tongzhou, now home to the municipal government, serves as an example of the Chinese Communist Party’s vast infrastructure programme.

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For a central government staffed by engineers and a nation who finds its pride staring down the barrel of a cement mixer, infrastructure and its rapid development has long served as a cross-provincial cornerstone of modern China. The sky is lifted and terra firma resounds as “heaven’s magnate” remains clenched firmly in one or another Chinese Communist Party (CCP) mitt. Between 2010 and 2015, 189 billion US Dollars slipped from the self-same mitt into 232 yearly miles of subterranean rail - 31 cities across a country flexing with the electrified power of sunken transportation. To induce a sense of the Atlas-scale forces at play, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) was creating the entirety of London’s subway network and spending 1.5 times the GDP of Ukraine on an annual basis. With the ambition for subterranean activities racing at speeds faster than their accompanying jackhammer fleet, the urban networks screech and howl along 2,700 miles of track that is set to be elongated past 4,000 by the end of this year. Construction workers have swing targets for their sledgehammers across upcoming years and decades, the people “swarming like ants” around their industrial centres are provided low-cost, zero-maintenance ferries across otherwise formidable overland trenches and fewer cars are run upon the polluting trunks of by-lanes, highways and ring-roads - all to the general benefit of party and populace. As Wade Shepard remarked in “Ghost Cities of China”, his investigation of civic birth and destitution, “the role that China’s metro plays in the social and economic development of its new towns and cities cannot be underestimated.”

Nowhere does the CCP ferret more ruthlessly pursue its prize of infrastructural development than in Beijing, Tianjin and the province of Hebei that surrounds them. Since liberation, Beijing’s whirring anti-People’s Liberation Army of bureaucrats, typists, administrators and propagandists have trailed their imperial predecessors by crowding into the dense urban zone immediately proximate to the Forbidden City and its Tian'anmen neighbour. Like some expanded royalist retinue preaching against divine right, the ever-ballooning pew on pew of civil servant has pushed further and further away from the tight locus of its inception into encroachment on the surroundings and all their historicity. In part to combat any further destruction this corpulent bureaucracy will continue to inflict upon its neighbours, those reclining in the leather of upper management have sweated out a plan to unite some 130 million residents in a parody of the megacity described in official material as Jing-Jin-Ji. Jing for Beijing, Jin for Tianjin and Ji for Hebei’s traditional provincial designation. Spurring industrial development and uniting a workforce in some grandiose Asimovian fancy or other, the project’s most visible extraneous arm is the nascent city of Xiong’an - an envisioned green metropolis to occupy the farmed plains of northern Hebei and crowd out the sky while dominating industry in that most atomic age of ways. An initial loan of 28 billion US dollars was duly meted from the Development Bank in 2017 and Morgan Stanley predicts investment could reach 300 billion dollars before a decade is up.

Yet while Xiong’an may be Babel to the Central Committee’s architectural Old Testament, a foreboding concrete David has lain in Beijing’s suburbs atop the Grand Canal’s very northern extremity as a vital organ of the pulsating Jing-Jin-Ji prospects. With old Peking tensing beneath the fatalistic strain of its vast populace, such sprawling suburbs as Tongzhou are inflated with the kind of energy and self-sufficiency that characterises a full-scale city in many another nation. Districts dotted around the imperial centre - such as Shunyi in the north-east wing of the capital - come fitted replete with a full set of internal workings, such that one need never leave their limited compound. Tongzhou is unique not in its size, but in the tender touch allotted it by CCP mitt - Midas be damned, the Central Committee’s finger is pure alchemy. Residential complexes tower away from multi-storey flyovers cocooning leisure and retail complexes beyond a scale that Barbara Kruger could adequately ridicule while the Batong line plugging this external node into the mainframe was among the first expansions to be germinated from the initial Beijing core of lines 1 and 2 in 2003. The once fertile plain atop Tongzhou has cowered into submission before the heaving crush of urbanites and their planners - oozing quadrants of concrete stowed away in and over grass-and-wheat-land that simply does not hold the value it once did. A population of 1.2 million was totalled at the last recording - a figure likely to be held entirely outmoded by the time of the next census come December.

This apparently unstoppable hurtle along the road to greater development and closer integration of the extra-polis is hardly going to have the brakes applied by the Central Party’s executive ordination uprooting the municipal government from its “ancestral” home and out along the Batong into Tongzhou’s nominal suburbia. This forcible disengagement of tens upon thousands of civil servants from their limpet anchorage of so many decades amounts to a tacit acknowledgement by the Xi administration of a fact clear to urban planners since the 1950s - that ensconcing such enormous administrative clout within the unsubtle confines of ancient Beijing has deepened both the open sores of congestion and revolutionary destruction of Chinese heritage both intangible and otherwise. Of the mid-2017 exodus, Thomas Hahn, scholar of urban China, remarked: ”The move is ironic given that earlier planners advocated something similar in the 1950s. They were outmanoeuvred, which eventually led to the wholesale gutting of the traditional urban core”. Beijing mayor Guo Jinlong stood before the 13th National People’s Congress to declare “It is incumbent on Tongzhou to initiate a project that will bring about a major breakthrough,” his municipal commission subsequently outlining an unprecedented pair of work reports designed to mould the secondary centre’s burgeoning pulse. The new Beijing East Railway Station will be flicked into place with PRC nonchalance, connecting Tongzhou to the 16,000 miles of bullet-rail that criss-crosses mainland China while 10 of the 21 subway lines currently extant on blackboards and in the air of planning meetings shall touch sparks through the new sub-centre. Tongzhou has received its fingertip-blessing and seen upgrade from “Satellite City” to “Modern International New City” in party line and among party officials. As heady development block lacking either soul or concrete links to a discernible past beyond gauche ‘retro’ lip-gloss and import wine shops selling Chateau d’expense from 1962, Tongzhou certainly appears up there with the resolute grey of other, similarly flat, modern urban spurts across the globe.

Presenting itself as the architectural plaything of an alternate dimension, sensory-deprived Lin Benlin, its spread of post-communist buildings strike with their function over form - offending the visual cortex enough to remind even the most hard-edged of utilitarianists that beauty does hold inherent power. The flayed intestine of a canal doing its best to flow alongside the Batong line into the district is of form baleful enough to accompany its home. Banked by concrete flaked with the rayed attacks of daily heat and home only to the kind of browned weeds even a crustacean would see as beneath itself, it serves as manifestation of the whole suburb’s attitude to existence. Things need not exceed their most base function and to do so would equate with excessive budgets and limited expansion rates. Across millennia, this addendum to the east of Beijing has existed and served - finding coal-faced, mixer-poured destiny in our 21st century alongside the Central Committee and its little ferret limbs powering through the tubes and piping of infrastructural power. As illustrative node in the great web of concrete force that the CCP mitt gestures into being on an annual basis, Tongzhou - this less than sleepy suburb - serves the essayist well. Centred amidst the frantic locus of expanding underground transport, sporting enough blank-faced housing to host an army and crammed with all the strategic retail to satisfy any potential first-world requirement, it is an unsightly, ungainly spectre carrying all the good and much of the bad this government has and will continue to inflict on the Middle Kingdom in its care. A sad place that somehow musters confidence, a back-to-front void that somehow connects; Tongzhou is un-stuck, but both we and China are stuck with Tongzhou.