Random scrawls...

Well, things kind of ran away from me in Beijing. I'm back in Taipei now, but I might keep writing stuff on here until I get bored...

To wrap up the whole China trip, the following was scrawled down in a taxi on the way to Beijing airport, in an overly optimistic to at least get a few of the tangled lines of thought that had been bouncing around in my mind down on paper. I haven't bothered editing or explaining...I might need some assistance to do the latter!

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23.11.06 Beijing: Enroute Airport

Beijing as "city of eternity"（at Urban Planning Exhibition Centre)

vs

"instant city": Zhongdu, Dadu, Ming/Qing Beijing, Beiping, Maoist/Danwei Beijing, Olympic City, magnet for global capital. [and cf. Shenzhen: "the overnight city"]

Ian's metaphor of Black Rock City

instant population of immigrants (why taxi drivers here never know where they are going)

reordered symbolic/spatial system

798, 草場地: global cultural economy

"All that is solid melts into air" - daily reality here more than most places
- token gestures made to "cultural preservation" (of monuments and representative fractions of old neighborhoods) while cranes rule the sky..."today's dream, tomorrow's nightmare" [i love misquotes]

Billboard: "再見，我愛你" [Goodbye, I love you.]

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