Beijing's ancient buildings are being destroyed in the name of progress and the architect favoured to rebuild the city is Albert Speer's son, writes Jasper Becker
As the world's top architectural firms compete to flatter China's Communist Party's leaders for the chance to realise their most daring designs in Beijing, there is something undeniably symbolic about the son of Hitler's architect, Albert Speer, being so well received here.
The 68-year-old Albert Speer Jnr, who runs one of Germany's most eminent architect firms, has put in the most favoured design for a central axis through Beijing, which recalls the 30-mile long Great Axis Avenue his father proposed to Hitler for his new capital, Germania.
"The comparisons with my father are unfortunate but cannot be avoided," Speer says, but argues that "Berlin in the 1930s - that was just megalomania".
Yet China's paramount leader Jiang Zemin, who likes to be praised as China's supreme architect, is transforming Beijing with a series of mega-projects whose giganticism equals, if not exceeds, what Hitler was prepared to do for Berlin.
The price tag for the new Beijing is never openly stated but runs to well over $100 billion, making it the largest such infrastructure project in the world.
"Who has in his life had such a chance to plan a city that is 3,000 years old?" says Speer.
No one could dispute that China needs to make up for the neglect of its cities in the 1960s and 1970s. A huge rebuilding programme is called for, but the necessity of demolishing all but 5.5 square kilometres of the 62 square kilometres within the old city walls is questionable - and so is the ruthless way it is being carried out.
All the courtyards, temples, alleyways and palaces of old Beijing where so much of China's history unfolded since the days of Mongol Emperor Kublai Khan, over 800 years ago, are being swept away. Peking is a unique city, in the way Rome is and even Mussolini did not dare touch the fabric of that city.
"Peking was conceived as a harmonious whole," says Prof Zhao Zhongshu of Qinghua University, noting the unity of its original architecture, colours and layout.
Until a few years ago, Peking had preserved the design of the great Ming Emperor Yong Le, whose 800,000 troops and labourers built it as a model of the cosmos and a glorification of his empire. Here, in the Forbidden City, the Son of Heaven ruled from the great halls of power at the geographical centre of the universe. Largely by accident, Ming Peking survived occupation by six armies.
After 1949, Chairman Mao started rebuilding Beijing when he moved the capital here and set about filling it with smoking factory chimneys, to create the proletariat that he insisted was now China's master class.
With the economic collapse after the Great Leap Forward, China lacked the means to carry out his ambitions to build a new capital. Mao went on to empty the cities and built underneath the streets huge nuclear bunkers to enable a select few to survive the coming nuclear apocalypse with the Soviet Union.
Now China is becoming wealthy again, President Jiang is able to fulfil what he often repeats is the Party's historical mission, to realise the dream of the 1919 May 4th movement to replace old backward-looking Confucian China with a new modern, advanced and scientific nation.
Jiang prefers modern, avant garde and foreign designs. Speer junior's design for the Beijing axis, one of many put forward by foreign architects, is to project an image of a Utopian future come to life.
The axis links the new Olympic Park in the north, the Forbidden City in the centre with a giant railway station in the south and covers 36 square miles. Actually, even this is just a minor part of a plan so grandiose that it recalls the 1930s.
The intimate tree-lined neighbourhoods of old Beijing, with their tiled one-storey courtyards where rich and poor lived side by side, are being swept away at a reckless speed. In their place are emerging blocks of giant steel and glass skyscrapers sitting in the grid of broad motorways. The planning ignores the particularities of old Peking and creates a city of huge, impersonal and dehumanising scale.
Most of the six million inhabitants are being rehoused in nondescript satellite towns of high-rise blocks and around 2.5 million are being ejected from the old Peking. There is no public consultation and no chance for resistance.
Every month, the good people in some quarter of old Peking wake up and emerge from their hutong to find someone has daubed the giant character for "destroy" across the walls of the housing. From then, it is clear that any preservation is hopeless.
Some try writing petitions or obtain court orders but nothing, not even the title deeds with the chop of some illustrious emperor can delay their eviction. The final eviction orders are posted at night with warnings that further resistance will meet with lengthy prison terms.
"Many people were not aware of their rights and property developers are illegally cheating them," says writer Hua Xinmin, who adds that the land deeds issued after 1949 are now discounted by local governments who run the real estate companies.
"It is all about money. It is not profitable to preserve an old building when you can throw up a new apartment block," says writer Shu Yi, who claims that no effort has been made to fund preservation.
The only voice raised in protest has been that of American Chinese architect, I.M. Pei, who since the 1970s has tried to warn Chinese leaders to limit building heights within the old city walls.
"They should have preserved the old walls and the old city inside, and built the skyscrapers outside, as Paris did," he remarked bitterly in 1999.
Squads of migrant workers labour on triple shifts and soon, deep foundations are readied for luxury hotels, shopping arcades, expensive housing blocks or huge ministries, some of which already march down the 10-lane Avenue of Eternal Peace.
Perhaps the most talked about project is the $300 million futuristic bubble opposite the Forbidden City which French architect Paul Andreu is building as an opera house. With a translucent glass and titanium dome, Beijingers are calling it, the "alien's egg" or, less imaginatively, "the giant turd".
On either end of the Avenue, Beijing is building rival central business districts (CBDs). One of them, Chaoyang's CBD will be a Manhattan of over 300 skyscrapers. Around the university quarter in Haidian, a great "Silicon Valley" of laboratories and research institutes is being constructed. The government is also spending $2.3 billion to "digitilise" the city.
With so many juicy contracts to be won, the Dutch architects Ole Scheeren and Rem Koolhaas of the award winning Office for Metropolitan Architecture opted to compete here than go for the rebuilding of the World Trade Centre in New York.
"It's the choice to associate yourself with a regime that is on the brink of opening up and propelling itself into a positive thinking world, or associate with another nation that is at the end of its greatness and propelling war plans into the world," said Scheeren recently.
His design for the $600 million skyscraper to house China's state television headquarters is a 700 foot-high loop of horizontal and vertical slabs with an irregular façade, that will be the tallest construction in Beijing.
Like many of those fascinated by this opportunity to build just how they want, he is not troubled by the association with China Central Television, which constantly runs hate campaigns against the Party's enemies, from dissidents at home to the Dalai Lama, the Pope or Taiwan's democratically elected presidents.
Beijing's lure is simply too hard to resist. "It's a blank sheet of paper. A fresh source of vitality. Here you have the freedom to build what you want," says one Western architect.
There is so much to build and so little opposition. Beijing is also completing six ring roads, 10 expressways, two new airports, a mass transit system, including light railways, a gas pipeline, new sewage plants, massive tree belts to stop the dust storms and a $50 billion water diversification project to ship water from the Yangtze River. Beijing, which has no river running through it, is perennially short of water.
Then there are 142 building projects, including 24 new competition venues, to equip Beijing for the three-week Olympic Games in 2008. China is spending more than anyone has spent on previous games. Among the greatest projects is the Olympic Park, with a 120-storey trade centre towering above the city, which will form the nucleus of a new urban centre for one million people.
Speer's design also envisages attaching a futuristic new railway station for a magnetic levitation train terminus, plus offices and shopping malls in the form of an "ecological model city".
Chinese propaganda also claims that the north-south axis symbolises the linking of the old and new - the Forbidden City and the Olympics. The declared goal is to "integrate the 2008 Olympics with Chinese culture and Chinese spiritual civilisation".
Yet there is little trace of traditional Chinese architecture visible anywhere, even though everyone bidding for the new contracts asserts with great conviction that they are deeply inspired by Chinese aesthetics.
The buildings may be huge and monolithic, like the new headquarters of the Bank of China, but the architects, I.M. Pei's sons, believe the design evokes the courtyard houses it replaced.
There may be a goldfish pond, but this is a rock garden with 10-ton boulders and it is hard to see how a giant sky-lit atrium, big enough to house a football match and 2,000 people, resembles an intimate courtyard.
The Brontosaurian city now emerging is so alien to China traditions that it seems Chinese leaders are engaged in what the Germans call Vergangen-heitsbewältigung, a way of dealing with the past.
In China this means stamping out the reminders of pre-1949 China, what the Party says is the bad old society, much as Mao Zedong intended to do when he launched the Cultural Revolution.