Grand Hyatt BeijingBeijing has for a long time been associated with the famous portrait of Mao Zedong, as though he's guarding communist austerity and discipline. But the Beijing he used to be watching is now hardly the city he left behind.
Change looms everywhere—in the clothes; in the increasingly paralyzing traffic (more and more foreign- and Chinese-made automobiles jam the streets); in the electronics (mobile phones, mobile phones, mobile phones); and in the construction (high-rises, high-rises, high-rises). If you scrub off the Gobi Desert dust, which is glued to everything with diesel exhaust, you'll find Beijing's true patina—a mixture of old and new. It may surprise you that you can still catch the glimmer of an ancient, lacquered temple or a traditional jadeite bracelet contrasted with the machine-made gleam of chrome and glass.
No doubt it's a calculated gleam. The Chinese government wants Beijing to be recognized as a modern world capital—modern enough for foreign investment, modern enough to host the 2008 Summer Olympics. Beijing is a huge, burgeoning metropolis, with bulldozers carving the way to its future.
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