Sunday, November 14, 2010

A Young Professional, an Old City



















If you want to get a feel for the population size of Beijing, try taking the subway. Once the flood of people has pressed you up to a pole and you are sucking air from a vent in the ceiling, the scale of the city should become clear.

In Beijing words like "overpopulation" are not hypothetical scenarios, but lived, not to mention inconvenient realities. Just trying to get from A to B, whether by subway or expressway, can be a complicated - and sometimes harrowing - venture.

I recently sat down with Roy, an urban planning student who explains that they are putting in around 10 new subway lines for the city filled so far beyond its capacity.

"It would be unbelievable in other countries," Roy said, "but not in China."

Most of the masses, he went on to say, are not even Beijingers, but people from elsewhere in China. "Everyone wants to live in Beijing," he said with more than a little self congratulation that he was among those who had made it.

In this respect, Roy is a bit of a paradox in and of himself.

He is no native to the city, and while he has spent the last several years studying the ways in which people like himself are stressing the limits of the infrastructure, he has no intention of leaving.


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