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High Beijing, low Beijing: City where the super rich and poor mix

By  Ikenna Emewu (People's Daily Online)    14:04, August 29, 2016

If you know Beijing, you would also know affluent living and high flying lifestyle. If also you know Beijing, then you must have seen, surely experienced and possibly felt low life and especially contrasts.

It is a large city as many know bursting at the seams with about 22m people. There is no way anywhere with that number of people will all belong to the same scale and standing.

The city is the power base of the large country, China. Beijing has hosted the world in one fell swoop like in the 2008 Olympic Games and keeps hosting the world with a tourism data that quotes the city as receiving more than 100m visitors every year.

As China’s city of power, all corners of the country flock to it for one reason or the other as the policies that run the second largest and most influential country of the world is cooked here. So there are more than enough reasons for Beijing to stand tall.

Last year, the Forbes account for billionaires in the world indicated that the city overtook New York in the pool and cluster of the super-rich. The most expensive hotel in the downtown of the city around the awesome Guomao opened for business middle of this year and announced that a suite in the facility bleeds your purse of $12,000 every night you spend there. The bill sure looks attractive? It’s just ok for a city with the largest number of deep pockets.

The same year, the Fortunes List of top 500 corporate organizations of the world listed about 110 in China and about 75% of them are either fully domiciled in Beijing or have their corporate offices in the city.

Even in the local economy, the state owned enterprises control large percentage of the economic pool of China and the top of them, including those powerful Fortune 500 firms are in Beijing. For every reason there is, Beijing has the factors of affluence. Certainly, the city flaunts them so well. The class and panache are displayed in the cars you see in the pools and in the traffic. They also manifest in the architecture and the posh and delicately beautiful and orderly environment.

But in this mix of cash, class and swirl of businesses, the low side still finds a spot to squat. For anybody that loves contrasts and the beauty of variety, while the city takes you in the reverie of wealth, you can’t help being moved to see in the traffic, just beside the top range of cars, a couple riding their manual bicycle, the old school way, with the wife seated at the back with her legs to one side of the bike, not the digital formula of sitting astride the rudimentary mobile machine.

For you to better see the contrast of Beijing and how the large city has reserved a space for everyone, a visit to the outskirts and countryside where the citizens of lower economy reside will be worth the take.

Apart from the city center and highbrow areas with some flavoring of the lowly bikes of various types, step out to the Daxing, Sunyi, Tongzhou and some other far-flung districts and you will find the flipside of Beijing.

Last week’s trip to Tongzhou, the area the Beijing Municipality would be moving office to on completion painted a better picture of the contrasts that add spice to Beijing holding dear the reality that variety remains the excitement about life.

Stepping out from the subway at the Beiyunhe West Station, and confronted with what you might call the largest pool of bicycles in either Beijing or anywhere would make you marvel how large and diverse the city is. After a tour of Tongzhou and returning to the subway station at Beiguan, another enormous bike pools occupies there.

Why the bike pools at the train stations you may ask? Yes, it’s because the poorer residents in those lower neighborhoods are menial workers and low income earners, most of them unskilled and they ply their way to stations from the outer locations on their humble bikes. There they catch the fast mega vehicles to the higher areas where they engage in labor to make a living and ride back at the end of the day’s work.

As they drop the bikes at the subway premises, ride the train in the morning, they repeat the same journey back to their base stations in the evening on their journey home. So at the later hours of the evening, the bike pools are decongested, to re-congest the following morning.

That way, their lives go in cycles in hope for a better day. With such formula, Beijing fulfills their dreams of making a better life and remaining in touch with the big city of a million lures as many of them are migrant workers that come from other parts of the country in quest of better living in the city of aspirations. 

Ikenna Emewu ([email protected]) is senior editor of The Sun Newspaper, Nigeria and Fellow of the CPDA and intern with People’s Daily online, Beijing

(For the latest China news, Please follow People's Daily on Twitter and Facebook)(Editor: Wu Chengliang,Bianji)

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