7gen Bloc

The Beijing South Station looks more like a modern airport than a train station. It’s designed to move millions of people efficiently throughout the country. The chairs in the waiting room more closely resemble those in my dining room. This is not the city I visited 23 years ago, when we spent half the night standing on our beds till the small rats in the room settled down to sleep. Last night we ate the best Chinese meal I’ve ever had, in a restaurant designed by Philippe Stark.

Beijing sprawls endlessly in every direction. In its Olympic afterglow, it’s spotlessly clean with flower sculptures lining many streets. A car culture now dominates the bicycles that were so pervasive two decades ago. While Starbucks, McDonalds, and KFC are to be found, so too are high-end retailers like Cartier and Burberry.

This is not a beautiful city, but a city that seems to work. Beggars are hard to find, traffic flows in an orderly way, the air is cleaner (but for how long?), and trash is scarce. Having been to both New Delhi and Mumbai last year, my sense is that the Chinese are running circles around their Indian rivals. If China needs just two short decades to transform itself from a chaotic backwater to a real-world vision of the future, the rest of the world had better hold on for a wild ride.

In every taxi, Chinese music played—an unusual experience in a world often dominated by American pop culture. There is an order and discipline that pervades this society, again in sharp contrast to my experience in India. We spent yesterday walking through Beijing’s new art district. Hundreds of galleries are carved out of an old industrial area, complete with endless skylights and cafés. Nothing quite compares to China’s intense commitment to the arts.

Thomas Friedman has often warned westerners to watch out for this new global power. How right he is.

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photo: Josh Nguyen