Have You Heard About the Beijing Wall?

This article is for the independent Magazine WALL

Six years ago, when I went to the Palestinian-Israeli area for research, I saw the “long wall” along the border between the two countries. The wall was two stories high, made of prefabricated concrete panels assembled together and topped with a barbed wire fence that resembled the eaves of a house. The wall is covered with Arabic graffiti and, of course, political slogans, so you don’t have to ask if it’s the Palestinians expressing their anger.

The conflict between the two peoples dates back to the late 1930s. At that time, a British investigation team concluded after some research that the two peoples hated each other and that the conflict was insoluble. From that time to the present, the nearly 90-year conflict has lasted for generations. From this perspective, it is not surprising that a wall has emerged between the two peoples.

I was more interested in the leather shoes, garbage bags, and broken soccer balls in the weathering on the wall’s barbed wire. It suggests that this wall is part of the lives of the local residents. If a child grows up playing soccer, living under the wall, and playing with his buddies, will he still feel a strong discomfort with the wall, and will he feel that the two peoples should be separated in this way, out of sight, out of mind.

When I was researching in Palestine, I heard that the price of apartments close to the wall, especially the closest to the checkpoints of the two countries, would be higher. This is because people there can cross the border more easily, go to work in Israel, and get a more favorable salary. In the housing market, the wall’s effect on prices is more like a presence in some geographical sense, like a hillside, a river.

Before the epidemic, a friend said that the relationship between Yanjiao and Beijing is a bit like the relationship between Palestine and Israel. People live in Palestine/Yanjiao and work in Israel/Beijing. Sometimes, because of some uncontrollable factors, the speed of crossing the checkpoints can turn from being measured in minutes to being measured in hours. Extraordinary times, segregation can also become measured in days, weeks, months.

I originally thought that the Palestinian-Israeli wall was enough to demonstrate the productiveness of human civilization with regard to “walls”. However, after three years of controlling the epidemic, I feel that it is not the walls in other people’s homes that are worth writing about, but the walls in our land.

The greatest wall in the world is in our place, The Great Wall. the Great Wall, or the great wall from the pre-Qin Dynasty to repair 500 years ago, has been the underlying design in the core genes of our culture.

If we randomly select street photos of foreign cities from the Internet, from film and television, or anywhere else, and then randomly select a few street photos from China’s major cities, you will find that the content of “wall” in our photos is much higher than that of other places. For example, the fences in the neighborhoods, the various kinds of isolation zones on the side of the road and in the middle of the road. Metal walls, concrete walls, green walls, all kinds of walls.

I sometimes wonder if North Korea has walls too, but it doesn’t. Their steel and cement production capacity is insufficient, even if the market demand exists, but the supply is seriously insufficient, so they can only build the wall in their heart, unlike us, we have plenty of walls, as many as we want. And there are so many different kinds of products that you can innovate at any time. From the wall of the product prototype design and development to the supply chain production, to the installation of after-sales service, very mature, but also very large.

Among the big cities in China, Beijing has the most walls. Especially in the city center, near the Forbidden City and the center of Chang’an Street. Shanghai is just the opposite, with the fewest walls. The French Concession in Shanghai probably has the fewest walls in the metropolis. The roads are not wide, with less segregation on both sides, so this side of the road and the opposite side can smell each other and greet each other. For those who have never been to Shanghai, you can watch the movie Love Myth played by Xu Zheng a while ago.

But recently, the density of the wall in Shanghai and the wall of the category of innovation suddenly burst. From the wall world of the small white all of a sudden into the realm of the master. Shanghai has achieved the realization that nothing can be walled, nothing can be walled. Doors can be walled, white can be walled. Shanghai let me realize that a small, thin, lightweight mask weighing grams can also be set into a wall. Shanghai can be anything but a wall. In the Japanese manga “Attack on Titan”, the enemy is kept outside the wall, and the people in the wall are trying to make a living. Shanghai is not. Shanghai is a wall wherever giants (viruses) appear. Later, it was realized that the wall could not run as fast as the virus, so it simply ignored the virus and walled up first.

The wall is essentially a continuous coercive control of the living space. Things like this happened every day during the epidemic. I even feel that in this area, we Chinese are world leaders in creativity and manufacturing. Starting from physical quarantine, masks and protective clothing, to quarantine in living space, all kinds of fences and prohibitions on entry. And of course, we have a uniquely human kind of wall, the health code.

So here we are, no less, the home of The Great Wall, and we continue to create new Great Walls. there is the Berlin Wall in Berlin, and there is the Beijing Wall in Beijing, which may be of even better and more advanced quality.

Of course, we can also get used to living within the wall, drinking beer and playing soccer, just like the residents on the Israeli-Palestinian border. Will the wall wipe out our lives? Not really.