From Overseas Press

Beijing's vision for the future

(chinadaily.com.cn)
Updated: 2010-09-10 10:24

Visitors can appreciate Beijing's determination to continually transform itself from a very old city into a new one by watching virtual imagines in a movie hall, said an article in the New York Times on Sep 9.

In the Dynamic Movie Hall, seats are "equipped with safety belts to ensure against mishaps as they titled and turned." These moving chairs "combine with high-tech images on a screen to provide a virtual-reality experience, a simulation of speeding through tunnels or soaring over skyscrapers."

These imagines represent Beijing in the year of 2020, when the Beijing City Master Plan is due to be completed.

The main theme of the Exhibition Hall is "unspoken and yet obvious". It is "the intention of Chinese leaders to make this city of 20 million people a glittering, efficient, eco-friendly, architecturally distinguished and even beautiful city, appropriate for the great capital of a rising world power."

In this sense, the Exhibition Hall "skips over some of the city's deficiencies, like its frequently occurring, eye-burning pollution, its monumental traffic jams, or the way its very vastness makes it generally unfriendly to pedestrians." And some of these new buildings that have stirred controversy are unmentioned in the hall, for example, the "Big Shorts" called by some locals.

Still, these buildings "reflect what the Exhibition Hall shows, which is the determination of the Chinese authorities to use a portion of this country's newly earned wealth to transform their capital from the dilapidated, overgrown village it was a few years ago into a sort of international, planned model city."

Other "separate exhibits on local environmentalism show models for low-carbon-footprint housing, plans to increase wind and solar power, designs for the recycling of garbage and water and for the preservation of some old neighborhoods of courtyard houses, with their elaborate attention to feng shui, the ancient Chinese way of ensuring harmony between man and nature."