Every time I move in Beijing, I hope that
this is the last flat I’ll ever live in China. It
never is; with clockwork regularity each place
gets sold out from under me as the tempta-
tions of the housing market or the need to
put a relative in the right school district be-
come too much for even the most well-inten-
tioned landlord.
Most of my adult rental life has been
centred around two cities; New York and
Beijing. Both of those have a combination
of super-high housing prices and an influx
of newcomers every year. So I’d got used to
thinking of the rental process as a matter of
tangled Byzantine politics; referrals through a
friend of a friend, places disappearing at the
last minute for no reason, the ever-present
danger of getting scammed.
It took my wife, a Washingtonian, to re-
mind me that that’s not the case in most cit-
ies. “I just used to go to the housing complex,
talk to the manager, and then they’d show
me what they had. No agents, no fuss, no
guanxi.” We’d been tramping round the city
all afternoon looking at places, after the origi-
nal place we wanted was given to a friend of
the landlord’s at the last minute.
And at every place we’d looked, I’d been
reminded of one of the things I find strangest
and most depressing in Beijing. No matter
how nice the interior of an flat, the outside- the staircase, the courtyard, the shared hall-
way – will always be filthy. Mops and broken
bricks, covered in dust. Piles of bricks and
discarded rubbish. Crumbling old furniture
chucked out a decade ago and never removed.
I used to have an occasional photo series that
I called “Fallout 4 or Beijing.” Fallout 4 is a
game set after the apocalypse; the scenes are
often a little prettier and more organised than
Beijing compounds.
What’s so strange about this is that Beijing
has a very vibrant outdoor life. Everywhere
you go, whether it’s on an alleyway or inside
a compound, there’s clusters of retired people
sitting out, playing chess, talking, walking
their dogs or gossiping.
And inside, any honest dama would be
shocked by the thought of things getting
that untidy. So why do they put up with it in
shared spaces? There’s lots of countries where
this isn’t the case; on holiday in Budapest in
the 1980s – much poorer than today’s Bei-
jing – every shared space in the Hungarian
capital’s flat compounds was immaculate.
The same goes for some of the poorest South
African townships.
My friend Guo – herself a neat freak, and a
middle-aged householder – speculated about
it. “People are afraid of being held respon-
sible,” she suggested, “They think if they take
up the responsibility of cleaning, they’ll be
taking on more than their share, and others
will automatically assume that when it’s not
clean it’s now their fault. It’s like when old
people fall down and nobody wants to help
them up for fear of being blamed for the fall.”
Mr Zhang, one of our neighbours, had
a different explanation. “Look,” he said,
stroking the back of his old yellow dog –
the two of them wearing something of thesame gloomy expression – “Everything in
Beijing gets demolished eventually anyway.
So nobody wants to make things better,
because they know it’ll just get torn down.”
He gestured around him to the skeleton of
a former building, just demolished as part
of the capital’s central “clean-up” campaign.
“And they know if they clean out the rubbish,
somebody else will just dump more rubbish.”
“Plus the city is covered with dust every year,”
his friend interjected, “So much dust! I used
to work in Hangzhou – the south isn’t like
this.”
And yet, here’s a doubly-weird thing. Bei-
jing’s little parks – the miniature green spots
that cut inside highways and to the sides of
compounds – are almost always immaculate.
I’ve seen Western parks strewn with rubbish,
and yet Beijing’s are almost always fantasti-
cally pristine; tiny paradises in the middle of
the grey city.
It was one of those parks that persuaded
us to take the place we eventually rented this
time – a strip of fantastic green. As we strolled
through it, I saw a woman stoop to grab a
piece of plastic that had blown out of a rub-
bish bin and put it back in.
Sitting on the roof of my soon-to-be new
house, looking out at the pagodas in Jing-
shan Park, I thought about how spectacularly
beautiful Chinese public spaces can be. Then
I looked into the courtyard of the house next
door, and saw a picture of domestic neatness
and harmony. Then I looked at the shared al-
leyway of the two houses, and saw a pile of
dirt, a broken chair and a bucket full of filthy
water.
“Parks are properly public spaces,” Guo ex-
plained. “So you can behave well there and
nobody will hold you responsible for the fu-
ture. We Chinese – if it’s a purely private mat-
ter, then we’ll do the right thing. And often
if it’s totally public or anonymous, we’ll do
the right thing. But if it’s somewhere in be-
tween, that’s where the really bad behaviour is- where there’s enough fear, but not enough
trust.”
If it’s somewhere in between,
that’s where the really bad
behaviour is – where there’s
enough fear, but not enough
trustdirty floors
By James Palmer
Illustration by Liu Xiaochao