And they are built poorly to boot. All you need to do is look at Xiandai SOHO to see where the newer additions will be in a few years. How ironic that this is “Modern SOHO,” but the apartments are concrete, overheated boxes. Everything about SOHO is a painful reminder of the results of poor urban planning.

So today, when I read that the horrible SOHO monstrosity development company is running into trouble as it tries to take over one of the great old areas of Beijing, Qianmen, I took more than a little pleasure in their difficulties. For one, I never understood why Qianmen had to end up like Wangfujing. I get that it is good real estate, and I get that it’s much nice to have plumbing in your apartment than not, but couldn’t you just rebuild the hutongs to make them modern? If you added a floor to all of them they would still retain the neighborhood feel, and double the amount of housing.

But my favorite part of the article is that the WSJ authors imply that SOHO builds anything but junk to begin with:

Headed by the husband-and-wife duo of Pan Shiyi and Zhang Xin, Soho rose to prominence by buying up old industrial plots and hiring Western architects to produce glitzy commercial property that it sold to newly wealthy Chinese. Along the way, the media-friendly couple earned attention and acclaim around the world, making them emblems of China’s economic rise.

I readily acknowledge that most of the places they have built have not been in historical Hutong areas, but so what? They make the city worse. So tearing down Qianmen, which was one of the last remnants of old Beijing, just adds insult to injury.

It never makes sense to me when developers build ugly crap, and then the government turns around and rewards them for it. This isn’t a China-only phenomenon either. In Brooklyn, Bruce Ratner built the Atlantic Avenue Mall, which is hideously unnatractive. Then he built a neighboring facility, which is only marginally better. Finally, he bought the New Jersey Nets, and immediately got rid of a good player (Kenyon Martin) because he wanted to be cheap. His reward? He has been given permission to build a stadium and residential housing (which requires him to demolish fairly new housing) right next to his first two pieces of garbage.

Mr. Ratner, much like the SOHO power couple, is running into trouble. For him, however, the issue is the financial and real estate meltdown, which is shrinking the amount of money he can sink into his next land fill–I mean development–project.

I digress, but at least I connected the failing SOHO project in Qianmen with the New Jersey Nets. In the new year, here’s to both projects falling apart, and two neighborhoods staying in tact.

While it’s probably true that the restrictions only have a small amount to do with the recent relatively blue skies, they (a) contribute and (b) will play a bigger role over time (particularly the trucj restrictions). Futhermore, it discourages car buying, and with the increased number of subway lines, some people only need a little more incentive to skip that car purchase and hop on the ole mass transit (24-hour subway service would help too).

And there are indications that a continuation of the odd/even scheme, if not the ban on the more problematic night trucks, is being seriously considered. This from the China Daily last week:

56 percent of the more than 10,000 people surveyed online said they were in favor of continuing the restrictions.

Wang Li, deputy director of the Beijing Traffic Management Bureau, was quoted as saying by state media on Aug. 23 that there had not been a decision over whether to continue the policy.

But an editorial last week in the Beijing News daily newspaper said a continuation of the policy faced many challenges, especially from car owners and government officials reluctant to give up their freedom to drive.

So it looks like the papers are, at the very least, trying to float the idea out there, if not outright push it. We’ll see how it works out, but an extension of the ban, which would show that the government is serious about solving the pollution problem and not simply put on a good face to the world, would be a good first step to tackling Beijing’s worst problem.

But don’t believe me, just because I say it. Instead, listen to the words of one of Senator Clinton’s recently-resigned top East Asia advisers, Richard Baum.

Richard Baum, a political science professor at the Center for Chinese Studies at UCLA, resigned in light of what he called “grossly misguided accusations” made by Clinton about China.

“As a lifelong Democrat, it saddens me that Sen. Clinton has chosen to take the low road in her effort to gain our party’s presidential nomination,” Baum said in an e-mail to Politico.

The problem is that Senator Clinton is clearly much more concerned about the political points that she can score in the short-term, than any long-term policy goals. This is a pattern that we have seen over time. She claims that she wants to promote the Democratic agenda, and yet she has repeatedly said that John McCain has better qualifications than Barack Obama.

There are only two possibilities here:

1. Ms. Clinton actually believes that announcing in April that Bush should boycott the Opening Ceremony will actually help to change China’s (the government, folks) stance on Tibet, human rights and Darfur, which would be stunningly ignorant about how China’s government works, or
2. Ms. Clinton doen’t care about the impact that the move would have in China, which would be to make the leadership dig in its heels. It would mean she only cares about how it plays out in Pennslyvania.

It makes me sad that I suspect the latter is the correct rationale. She is willing to slash and burn everything in that perpeutal goal to make it to 50.1% of the vote. Imagine if she wins the nomination by having the superdelgates overturn the will of the people. Even if she won the presidency, which she wouldn’t, she would be so reviled that she wouldn’t be able to govern. Now imagine if she keeps advocating this dumb idea that Bush should publicly humilate China’s government by pulling out of the ceremony at the last minute. How much leverage do you think she would have with Beijing to implement the changes she hopes for when she becomes president?

None. And the point is she doesn’t care. For someone supposedly so dedicated to good policy, she seems disturbingly tied to short-term politics.

[Update]

I noticed this bit today. I’ll let Senator Clinton’s words speak for her.

This quotation is from Sunday as cited here:

“We need a nominee who will take on John McCain, not cheer on John McCain,” the New York senator said in Johnstown. She said the Arizona senator would follow “the same failed policies that have been so wrong for our country the last seven years.”

It came in response to this (note that Obama never criticizes Clinton in this):

“You have a real choice in this election. Either Democrat would be better than John McCain. And all three of us would be better than George Bush,” Obama said.

“But what you have to ask yourself is, who has the chance to actually, really change things in a fundamental way?”

Now here is what Senator Clinton said March 1, according to CBS:

“I think you’ll be able to imagine many things Senator McCain will be able to say,” she said. “He’s never been the president, but he will put forth his lifetime of experience. I will put forth my lifetime of experience. Senator Obama will put forth a speech he made in 2002.”

Or maybe we should look at this speech she gave five days later:

“I think that since we now know Sen. (John) McCain will be the nominee for the Republican Party, national security will be front and center in this election. We all know that. And I think it’s imperative that each of us be able to demonstrate we can cross the commander-in-chief threshold,” the New York senator told reporters crowded into an infant’s bedroom-sized hotel conference room in Washington.

“I believe that I’ve done that. Certainly, Sen. McCain has done that and you’ll have to ask Sen. Obama with respect to his candidacy,” she said.

Calling McCain, the presumptive GOP nominee a good friend and a “distinguished man with a great history of service to our country,” Clinton said, “Both of us will be on that stage having crossed that threshold. That is a critical criterion for the next Democratic nominee to deal with.”

There is a distinct pattern of political oportunism extending from the campaign to China policy.

When I wondered aloud once what was out there, someone told me that it was actually quite beautiful, although never really explained more than that. It is seventeen stops west of Jianguomen, the station where I transferred lines. About halfway there the bustling and crowded subway car filtered out enough that I was able to sit down. No longer were people anxiously standing by the door, hoping they could push their way off before the conductor impatiently sealed their passages back home. Instead, riders were mostly sitting quietly, waiting for the long ride to end, where the train would drop them near their homes, or more likely, near a bus that would scatter them even farther from the city’s business center.

Going west in Beijing is an odd experience. When I came back to China about a year ago, a former colleague, then studying in England, was nice enough to put me up in her empty apartment. It sits about 2 kilometers south of the Muxidi subway stop. Usually when foreigners would ask for a more useful description I would say, “You know the west train station? Near there”, although in reality that is about a 45 minute walk away. In a city with a huge foreign population, much of the west, particularly the southwest, remains No Man’s Land.

I’m not exactly sure what I expected the end of the line to look like, but it did feel eerily like I was at the edge of the city. Las Vegas always seemed like a place that thinned out until it was just sand, and that is kind of what happens in Chinese urban areas. Going northeast, or due west, in Chengdu, the buildings and businesses suddenly give way to rice paddies. You might think that the agriculture was seeping into the city to swallow modern life, if only you didn’t not know that quite the opposite is taking place.

At the end of the old line one it looks like any industrial rust belt in China. It more resembles Beijing from when Seoul hosted the Olympics, than a year before the Chinese capital will. In the near distance, only a few hundred meters away, I could see a few hills. This was probably as far away as you could be and still have them in view on a day when the fog, smog, and smoke conspired to turn the sun a dim orange. Make-shift homes dotted the rising earth, like they might in South American slum. Except in China these types of houses never have the desperate feel of Africa or Brazil, but instead, they just are, meager existences, but without the enveloping influences of gangs and drugs.

I walked down the street, relatively empty, with cars and bicycles going by every few seconds. Billboards lined the sidewalk advertising a clinic for the child-planning center. They way they phrased it I wanted to believe it was for advice on young parents, maybe with some contraceptives. But inside I knew that the goal of fewer kids was the most critical goal. If you did not show up before to get your birth control, well then, that smiling young woman would just have to come up with an alternative. After all, this isn’t rich Beijing where people can simply pay the tax for a second or third child.

Across from me I could see a building with the scarlet letter 拆, indicating that even out here, on the edges of Beijing society, someone had bigger plans for the lot where a one-story grocery sat. But the characters were old and peeling. Perhaps it once seemed like a good idea to build something here, but so much time seemed to have passed I wondered if developers had given up, or even forgotten. Outside the store were stacks of cabbage–or is it bok choy? I can never get that right–sitting on the dirty ground, lined up for sale.

As I reached the corner I noticed on a sign that I had been heading west, not south as I had suspected. Most subway maps do not bother to show that the tracks veer north just before the last stop. Why would they? If you needed to know, you already would.

To my right was an open air market where people from the countryside came to sell their vases and knick-knacks. A hidden treasure I thought to myself. But the skeptical looks on the shoppers’ faces told the real story. This was not a great find, just a few country folks hoping someone would buy their shoddy copies of Chinese eras gone, and nostalgic memorabilia from decades for which few feel actual nostalgia.

I passed construction sites that seemed to be making little progress, and old Communist-era apartments that had not yet been designated for demolition, but surely would once the boom finally cast its eyes west. A huge factory, or possibly power plant, billowed smoke into the sky just past a highway pulling people toward the city. Such open displays of pollution can only take place outside the great cities, like stretches of New Jersey, and Pingguo yuan.

By the time I finally found a place to eat it was nearly 3 O’clock. The waiter informed me that they were out of bottled water, Sprite, and bottles of coke smaller than 2 liters, feeding into my already-budding suspicion that this neighborhood only received food deliveries after distributors were sure they had satiated the needs of the rest of the city. Finally I decided on Coconut Palm Drink, the official drink of state banquets.

As I got up to leave a waitress came over and blurted out, 我羡慕你们外国人, I envy/admire you foreigners. Why, I asked her. 你们会说外语, you can speaker foreign (non-Chinese) language. I wanted to ask her why it was so great to be able to speak ‘non-Chinese,’ given that English was my first language. But I did not. I just gave her a slightly blank look, and said nothing. Then I took my leftovers and headed toward the subway station for my 19-stops-and-a-transfer ride back to the other end of Beijing.