The Structural Bones

Bingbing Shi (ed) – The Book of Beijing (Comma Press, 2023)

Comma Press’ new Cities book – a collection of ten stories from Beijing – ends with a powerful image. The city, revealed in the near-future to be a self-aware germ cell, decides to celebrate Chinese New Year by floating into the air and roaring off in the direction of Hong Kong.

It’s the closest that the collection comes to an explicitly geopolitical critique and yet, even here, it remains ambiguous. Is the germ cell roaring off to crush the Hong Kongers, or is it merely wishing to celebrate the New Year with them? Certainly, the germ is out of control, but, as result, Han Song tells us, it is the last place in China where those who wish to live free can avoid the government’s watchdogs.

If the whole collection was like this, it would fit neatly into the box that Western observers have made for China: a country on the rise, but at what human cost? The strength of the collection, however, is in its multiplicity of voices. It doesn’t aim to overturn our understandings of contemporary China, but neither does it confirm them.

From the very start, the collection opens with two college graduates meeting during the morning commute – Fu Xuiying “On the Subway” – discussing who from their class is now doing what, what areas of Beijing they like, how things have changed. It’s so comfortably middle class one need only change the street names for it to be perfectly fitted to New York or London, Tokyo or Singapore.

Abruptly, we switch to an underworld of fake ID sellers – Xu Zecheng’s “Secretly” – that shows us that loveable rogues can be found anywhere; although, in Beijing, rather than drugs or guns they deal in the endless passes and tokens, cards and certificates required by Chinese bureaucracy.

The world of extortionate property markets – familiar to any capital city dwellers – is explored in Yu Wenling’s “The Second Ring Road” – albeit with a particularly socialist twist: the property that the buyer finally settles on happens to have an “unofficial” mortgage taken out on it. Is it still worth taking the risk on buying?

The city depicted in The Book of Beijing is an almost entirely familiar one. Compared with Comma’s earlier collection, The Book of Shanghai, which offered some provincial markers to look out for, Beijing is defined here as all capital cities are: rich rubbing elbows with poor, spiralling house prices, crime and overpopulation, immigrants living terrible lives but dreaming big, and a range of cultural and historical centres around which one can live and still feel, at least slightly, a sense of place.

For the floating germ-city floats for good reason. The more we are connected, the more we are aligned. The cultures of the world become one. The only differentiating factors left are those hangovers from previous eras: in London, class, in Tokyo, etiquette, in America, the guns, and in China it’s the power of the CCP.

Three stories engage directly with the legacy of the Party. In Wen Zhen’s “A Date at the Art Gallery” a couple is slowly driven apart by a generational divide: he was eighteen when the Tiananmen Square massacres happened, she was only nine. Neither, as a result, can really understand the other.

In “Is Mr Zhang Home?” by Shi Yifeng, the apocalypse has come and two children are holding out in one of the military compounds; complexes, each with three buildings and a garden, originally built to house army officials and now the exclusive domain of high up nomenklatura. We are reminded, if only subtly, that some are born “Redder than Red”. The boy’s hide-out is the kind of place all Beijingers know about but few ever have the privilege of seeing inside.

Only Ning Ken’s “Blue Peony” is actually set in the revolutionary era. The avoidance of too much historical fiction is typical of Comma’s Cities series, but the inclusion of this piece is well-judged. As with London or Paris, it’s hard to inhabit the modern metropolis without at some point thinking back to its past, even if that past has been almost entirely eroded.

The best story of the collection is Gu Shi’s “The MagiMirror Algorhythm”. Set only a few years in the future, Gu invents a contact-lens – VisRealm – similar to Google Glass, except it actually works, then takes us through its unsettling range of affordances. Most unsettling, the MagiMirror app, analyses facial expressions for you then, if you pay the subscription fee, tells you how to react to people, what to say, how to get ahead.

The terrifying realism of Gu’s story lies in the reactions of characters to MagiMirror. They adapt it as a “neat little solution” to social problems and, before they realise it, they allow it to dictate their entire lives. At no point in the story does the character worry about it. Within a couple of months, it’s those who are still hanging on to their phones, not upgrading, who are the weird ones. Restaurants all require payment through VisRealm. Socialising and romance are all determined by VisRealm, which reveals one’s entire internet, personal, romantic, educational and financial history to those one “matches” with.

In China, WeChat acts as an all-in-one portal: it is your banking app, your social media, your Tinder, your camera and your ID card. In the West, people have all this on their phones, but it’s on different apps. If you post something on WeChat that goes against the majority’s moral values, you lose access to your banking on WeChat. In the West, you post something on Facebook and you lose access to your Paypal.

Just as you, fair reader, are thinking “well, that only happens to racist, sexist, homophobic…”, so the average Beijinger writes off their dissidents using a similar string of adjectives. All the while, the total subjection to technological algorithms moves ever-closer. The floating city is taking off.

“Every last high-speed train soared into the air in a transversal, pick-up-stick crisscross, blanketing the cloudless, sapphire heavens of winter Beijing. The structural bones of the Station looked more and more like a proud-yet-greedy emperor.”

The Book of Beijing offers that rare thing; a crystal clear view of our present. Its contributors are writing about one city, but they are writing about all of us.

Joe Darlington