China's former communist radicals and today's capitalist developers appear, in some respects, to have much in common. During the Cultural Revolution, with its almost visceral hatred of tradition, Red Guards were instructed to destroy anything "bourgeois," or tainted by the past. A decade earlier, Chairman Mao Zedong had already set the tone for a new age of urban remodeling by ordering the demolition of Beijing's imperial arches and city gates and the replacement of its ancient ramparts with a ring road.
Today, the city is under siege from a different kind of vandalism. Soaring land prices in central Beijing have seen entire districts replaced with shopping malls, retail complexes, luxury condominiums and office towers. Part of the problem is that buildings may be owned in China, but not land, making it very difficult for individuals to challenge the state's plans. It is easy for authoritarian countries like China to accuse preservation-minded ecologists and architects of being unpatriotic opponents of progress. Yet preservationists in Beijing are now fighting as hard to save the city's colorful "hutong," or alleyway districts, with their unique courtyard houses, as Mao's disciples did to desecrate them. Propelled by fear, residents scratched out painted panels, pulverized decorative stone statues and burned beautiful wood lattices and lintels in an effort to make their homes appear more humble. As the Cultural Revolution shifted into high gear, makeshift shacks were built by proletarian families inside the courtyards.
Known as "siheyuan," the courtyard residences that have survived the developers are mostly in a sorry state, overcrowded and many don't have plumbing. Despite the official belief that in a city of 13 million it is cheaper and more reasonable to build modern apartments than to renovate the courtyards, a countertrend is evident in Beijing, best exemplified in new legislation that safeguards 25 historic Beijing neighborhoods and requires any contiguous developments to adopt a late Ming- or early Qing-era style of architecture.