Letter from Beijing: I returned again recently to my old neighbourhood in Fengtai district, on Beijing's western outskirts. When I first came to the city I lived near the ancient Marco Polo bridge, crossed by the famous explorer on his entrance to the Chinese capital.
Down by the Chinese-Japanese War Memorial gardens the city tapers off into stretches of pretty tile-roofed cottages built along narrow alleyways. The skyscrapers of the inner city have barely reached this hard-scrabble part of town. Locals here live in quadrangular red and grey-bricked bungalows, the small houses being typical of Beijing.
A bus ride along the Jingshi freeway, westward toward Hebei province, reveals a neighbourhood in deconstruction. Sundays are particularly busy, little blue Futian trucks moving household possessions as armies of men in their seven-day suit jackets scramble over roof rafters with pickaxes and sledges, setting about the walls of the three-roomed brick cottages. Helpers below pile up bricks and scavenge for salvageable metal.
In a year this neighbourhood will have been changed utterly. High-rise blocks are planned for the area. Peddlers are already handing out brochures for the scheme down the road at the busy bus junction of Luliquiao. The dalou or high-rises are pictured beneath an impossibly blue sky, the trees and grass optimistically plentiful and a verdant green. The apartment blocks when finished will rise to 30 storeys.
Many Beijingers are glad to see the back of the city's traditional housing. While looking quaint and pretty, hutongs are often cold and damp in the depth of Beijing's cold winter. Most have no toilet, residents sharing dank and fetid smelling public toilets.
Standing in the courtyard of a hutong, the city's imperial courtyard housing or walking the alleyways that wind through the houses, one could only be in old Beijing, the city of Maoist fervour and legendary community spirit. Most prized among city historians and architectural heritage buffs, hutongs are ancient city alleys composed of a series of courtyard homes. Many were built around the Forbidden City during the Yuan, Ming, and Qing dynasties, and are considered unique to the Beijing landscape.
The uniqueness of the buildings isn't lost on many who live there. Grey uniformed security guards outside Beijing's municipal complaints office had an unusually busy time this summer when former residents of hutongs came out to vent their anger.
One protester's placard was unambiguous: "Because of the Olympics Games, the government ordered my house to be demolished and my right to exist was take from me." Carrying a loudspeaker, an old man urged fellow protesters to come to the office every day until justice was done. Hundreds of disgruntled Beijingers took their placards to the streets in sporadic protests this summer after being pushed out of their homes to make way for government-backed real estate developments.
Owners of a typically-sized three-room hutong will be paid 110,000 yuan (€11,400) to move out. Demonstrators claimed that those who dared to stay put had their houses torn down.
Filmed discreetly by police, the protesters were largely elderly people whose old-style bungalow housing was levelled to make way for new apartment blocks.
City bosses have claimed that the new developments are intended to beautify the city, but protesters' placards claimed the schemes are purely for profit.
Last week I visited a new housing development in Dongzhimen, a north-eastern city neighbourhood. Retaining the names of the 500-year-old hutongs which only a few months ago stood -here, the six-storey apartment blocks were snug and comfortable inside and brightly painted on the exterior. But they were as anonymous and universal as any mediocre apartment development in any of the world's cities.
Beijing's shortage of affordable housing is constantly aggravated by the incoming waidiren, out-of-towners moving to the capital in search of work. However, demolition and compensation quarrels are not confined to cities.
A Chinese farmer attempted to burn himself early one morning in Tiananmen Square in protest at the government moving him and his family off their land to make way for a new road. The compensation he was offered was below the market value claimed 45-year-old Zhu from East China's Anhui Province who poured petrol over himself after making the long train trip to Beijing with his wife.
Not far from Tiananmen Square, Shichahai Lake on Beijing's north-western side is part of an artificially-created system of waterways and lakes stretching from the legendary Forbidden City and dating back to the Yuan imperial Dynasty of the 13th century. Surrounded by palaces, temples and hutongs, and lit by red lanterns, night-time dinner boats pass from here on and under the Yinding bridge towards Houhai lake.
Houhai is Beijing's latest mistake. Guests on the boats make a wish while lighting candles are carried along the water on paper boats. Meanwhile, on the banks charming old houses are being gutted and turned into gaudy western-style bars hung with fairy lights. Cars now clog ancient bridges and alleyways designed for handcarts and bicycles.
City officials grabbed at the stable door after the horse had bolted when they announced this summer that 200 of the city's siheyuan or traditional courtyards will be protected, years after thousands of such buildings began to face the developers' bulldozers to make way for bars, nightclubs, supermarkets and unremarkable high-rises.
China's new breed of fast-buck builders rarely allow aesthetics or morals to get in the way of a new block of apartments. A family of three was tied up and their house torn down by a gang of 'heavies' hired by a developer in Beijing's north-westerly Haidian district in August this year. The family had refused to move as the developer had offered them too little compensation.
In an interesting twist to the tale, several Beijing real estate agents are doing a roaring trade selling and leasing renovated hutongs to foreigners. The old houses, fitted with a kitchen and bathroom, have proven particularly popular with business people who like to entertain in the hutong's courtyard.
"The city government has had little or no vision to preserve the old city," laments US businessman and architectural conservationist Laurence Brahm, who has purchased several hutongs. Brahm recently participated in a TV discussion on the preservation of the hutongs with a senior government architect.
The government official suggested during the programme that all of Beijing's old architecture should be replaced by modern developments. Only the Forbidden City, the Temple of Heaven and some lesser temples deserved sparing. The architect also claimed it was impossible to restore old brick and wood structures. "That's pure idiocy!," said Brahm, himself the veteran of several successful hutong renovations.
As Beijing's forest of cranes gets thicker every day, there's no sign of any leashing of the developers' bulldozers. Beijing is all the while readying itself for the 2008 Olympics Games. By that time, alas, there may not be much of the original Beijing left.