The character chai ("demolish"), now often found on the side of older Beijing buildings. Detail of a collage by Wang Jinsong.
Writing in the Sydney Morning Herald, noted China scholar Geremie Barmé detects the hand of Chairman Mao in the Olympic opening ceremonies, even if us Westerners can't see him through the smog and the (digitally enhanced) fireworks. Avoiding the temptation, all too common in today's journalism, to view modern China as somehow sui generis, scholars like Barmé, author of a book on the Forbidden City, and Michael Dutton, author of Beijing Time, remind us of the continuity that exists even in a city that seems to have demolished and rebuilt itself before our very eyes. Watching the fireworks explode over the old north-south imperial axis, designed, as Dutton notes, to maintain the balance of qi in the city, it's hard not to marvel at how seamlessly the old insinuates itself into what appears to be wholly, terrifyingly new.
