Back to the Present

Twenty-five years ago, Beijing was a very different from the pulsating metropolis it has become today. Citizens had much different outlooks too, as Winnie Li explains ...

Every turn in China’s rapid transformation into one of the world’s leading economic powerhouses is being carefully scrutinized both at home and abroad. But while government leaders are grappling with potential threats to the economy posed by overcapacity and high inventories and are trying to engineer a largely painless “soft landing,” the country’s 1.3 billion ordinary people remain more than happy to enjoy the benefits attendant to the current economic boom.

This photographic essay is a study in contrast between people’s lives in Beijing today and a quarter of a century ago. But this contrast involves more than people’s attire or their new-found access to life-sustaining products or to western-style luxury consumer goods. Old attitudes, personal values and behaviour have also seen great change. Age-old personal inhibitions have largely been shaken off, and foreign visitors to the Chinese capital have long ceased to be head-turning curiosities.

For the city’s younger, more modern generation, a free-wheeling lifestyle bursting with promise and potential is nothing new, it is expected. These new guys and gals have grown up with it all around them…the arrival of fast-food outlets such as McDonald’s, the Starbucks coffee chain, mobile telephones and PDAs and other technological marvels, consumer goodies galore, discos, parties and funky dancing. For the lucky ones there will be a solid education, a challenging job and money in their pockets. Perhaps, too, there will be overseas holidays, personal vehicles and large, airy apartments.

The lives of their parents a mere quarter of a century ago were very different. It says much for these now middle-aged and senior citizens, still steeped in traditional values and behaviour, and who have endured so much, that they try earnestly to understand the social and financial changes that are taking place around them. Somehow, they seem to accept that their swinging, mini-skirted daughters and their carefully coiffed boyfriends inhabit virtually another planet. Happily, Chinese family ties generally remain strong, further reinforced during the Chinese New Year celebrations, and life goes on. 

The people’s general outlook and social mores 25 years ago may today be widely regarded as almost laughable, a good example being the first outraged reactions to attractive, young Chinese women who wanted to train as fashion models.

Shock and horror at a perceived brazenness and lack of shame met these young women who were scorned for allegedly “exposing and exploiting” their bodies; never mind that these youngsters were, in fact, unwitting pioneers, who merely dared to be different in their ambitions.

There would be no ill-paying job in a State factory for them. They knew that, given the chance, they could make just as much big money as their long-established Western counterparts and become equally famous. And so it has transpired. Within a few years, even quite elderly Chinese housewives were happily wearing bikinis on Asian beaches, a changed outlook indeed.

Even so, modern Chinese society still expects the new generation of young women to display a measure of personal modesty. Many of these children of a confusing transition, influenced by parents, try to toe the traditional line. But often they are pulled in contrary directions by more liberated friends and classmates.

Conflicting values and behaviour ensue, though experts say it is all simply part of a social transition that may arise in any fast-developing country. In this, China is no exception.

As one psychologist said, “At this time of great change, at all levels, social barriers can still come down or be fitted with stronger padlocks. Only time will provide the answer.”     

In evolutionary terms, the difference between yesterday and today is that these sea changes have occurred far more quickly than even visionary behavioural scientists may have imagined.

So what was the scene in Beijing and other parts of China like during the late 1970s and early ’80s?    

• Men and women, young and old, wore clothes limited to a choice of just three colours: black, blue or grey. Today, even the most elderly of country women sport brightly coloured clothes with the same aplomb as city-based teenagers.
• Chinese people were issued with vouchers, liangpiao, to buy rice and edible oil under a quota rationing system. Such necessities and vast supplies of countless other commodities are now available in thousands of Western- and Chinese-style supermarkets and convenience stores throughout the country.
• Large families, commonly of four generations, lived cheek-by-jowl in often tiny, dimly lit dwellings. Today, countless young and middle-aged couples own and reside in mortgaged high-rise “all-mod-con” apartments. The elderly usually live in city public housing or opt to rent their own modest homes outside the city. Increasingly, super-rich business people are investing in architecturally designed luxury homes in quiet suburban surroundings or beyond a city’s environs. 
• It was de rigueur for a yesteryear family to own the “big four” luxury items, a bicycle, sewing machine, transistor radio, and at least one wristwatch. These days, about 10 percent of Beijing’s 15.2 million residents own private cars, the majority of them bought during the past two years. Countless others are pursuing the same dream – in Western parlance their own “wheels.”
• The impossible dream of an ordinary Chinese (laobaixing) 25 years ago was to travel overseas. Now he or she has a choice of 61 countries and regions, including Europe and the United States, as tourist destinations. The list is constantly increasing in wake of China’s entry to the World Trade Organization three years ago.

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A duo from China's first professional fashion-modelling agency shyly strut their stuff at the Beijing Hotel in the late 1980s. The team, formed in Shanghai earlier in the decade, found it hard to handle audience members who scoffed at their efforts.

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Beijing International Fashion Week, staged twice a year since 1997, is now a full-fledged, prestigious show-case for the world 's stop designers. Many young Chinese men and women now strive to become models.

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More than two decades later, this impish, beautifully clothed boy was also pictured traversing mankind's largest structure.

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An elderly couple and their grandson, attired in standard dress of the time, tackle the Great Wall.

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Traditional food, tea soup (cha tang), is in big demand at a Chinese New Year Temple Fair.

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Tea soup remains a perennial favourite in modern Beijing. The difference now is that it is served by uniformed waiters trained to observe food hygiene and thus further boost the catering industry’s increasing attention to food preparation and presentation.

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Today's modern designer baby-carriages are portable and foldable enough to be taken onto a bus or subway train.

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Modern Beijing consumers now have wide choices on the food front, including foreign offerings from the likes of the French supermarket chain Carrefour, whose outlets are largely tailored to Chinese needs and tastes. People can also find their favorite groceries and vegetables at local convenience stores in their community. Locally run supermarkets include Jingkelong and Tiankelong. Hong Kong-based park "n" shop and Thailand's Yichu Lotus are also popular in the capital and other mainland cities.

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Yesteryear shoppers flocked to the famous but often poorly stocked Xidan Food Market, demolished some years ago.

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Twenty years ago it was a luxury for women to have their hair done in one of the city’s few salons, especially the famous Silian Hair Salon on Wangfujing Avenue. Today the avenue is Beijing’s “Golden Mile” of quality stores, shops, and beauty parlours.

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Salon hair-dos have long ceased to be a luxury. Individual styling is now all the rage among fashionable women, including at the new-look Silian.

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Two decades ago, it took people many hours to enjoy even a local outing, because they were usually dependent on bicycles and infrequent buses.

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Now on weekends, families and friends usually drive to Beijing’s suburban mountainous areas for fresh air and fun picnics with all the trimmings, including camping equipment.

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Bicycles and donkeys were two main forms of transportation in the early 1980s, as this picture from Jianguomen shows. This thoroughfare is today   one of the city’s major traffic arteries and a leading business and hotel strip.

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Modern rush-hour on Jianguomen, but a sophisticated traffic-light system ensures that vehicles move steadily to link with other highways and major ring roads.

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Modern young Beijingers love showing off their skills in extreme sports such as exhibition-level skateboarding, bungee jumping, paragliding and bicycle acrobatics, the latter on the concourse fronting the Dong Tang Cathedral at the quieter end of “golden shopping mile” Wangfujing Avenue. 

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Learning to ride a bike is as easy as falling off one, as the young guy below discovered. His model 28 steed was widely popular among both sexes at the start of the 1980s.

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Firecrackers, for hundreds of years, integral to Spring Festival (Chinese New Year) celebrations, were banned in Beijing in 1993 for safety reasons. Three years ago the ban was eased in several remote suburbs of the city, because they constituted no serious threat to the public.

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These days, central city streets resound to the bursting of countless toy balloons during Chinese New Year. Children as well as adults delight in jumping on them to create as loud bangs as possible.

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Tian’anmen Square has long been one of the best sites for photography enthusiasts, though cameras were a luxury item for ordinary people in the early 1980s. The Seagull model shown here is a twin-lens reflex version. Production of many such old models ceased in the 1990s, though some are now collectors’ items. One fetched 395,000 yuan (US$49,375) at a recent auction.

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“DV” is today two of the best-known sets of initials in China because everyone seems to want a DV (digital video) movie camera. Currently their lowest price averages 2,500 yuan (US$312.50), making them affordable for ordinary citizens.

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