I first went to Beijing in 1984. Except for the buses and some taxis,
it was essentially a city of millions of bicycles. There certainly were
no privately owned cars and the very few cars on the road were primarily
for officials. You couldn't hail a taxi in the street. You had to go to
a special taxi booking desk in a hotel and then wait around up to
half an hour before one of the drivers sitting next to you in the lobby
would feel motivated enough to get up and drive you. It was a relatively
quiet place except for the tinkling sound of millions and millions of bicycle bells.
As a foreigner, even in Tien Mien Square or the Forbidden City, you
were somewhat of a curiosity and now and then some people
would be so shocked at the sight of you as to give out a little startled scream.
It was if you were from Mars. Foreigners were thin enough on the ground that
they would usually acknowledge each other with a glance, a nod or a smile
if they passed each other.
This is long before China transformed itself into an industrial powerhouse.
The waiting list for a bicycle was several years. Nobody owned a camera.
If you were lucky, you had a black and white group portrait taken by a professional
using a Chinese Box Brownie look-alike large format camera called a "Seagull".
Travel by Chinese within China was somewhat controlled by the issuing of
food rationing coupons which could only be redeemed in the province in which
they were issued.
Yet Beijing was often atmospherically hazy even then. The yellow dust from the
Gobi desert which would get blown in from the north combined with other
meteorological conditions resulted in the sky transparency often being poor.
Today, the millions of cars and the output of coal fired power stations have
made Beijing far worse, as has been shown on the TV over the past few months.
However, it always seemed to me, even twenty-four years ago, that Beijing
would not be high on the list of places to go for clear skies. Therefore, when they
announced the Olympics to be held there several years ago, I foresaw that
that there would be complaints about the air quality long before the media
started to run with the story.
It certainly is a place that has undergone remarkable transformation in such
a relatively short space of time.
Best regards
Gary