the fast development of the city brings many challenges to beijing, and one of them is city planning. some people complain that there is no city planning in beijing at all, and some regret that municipal government didn't follow a suggestion proposed by the late architect Liang Si-Cheng, who asked the government to build a "new beijing" besides the old town so the traditional buildings and cultural heritages could be preserved.
unlike the depressing shanghai, here in beijing you could hear different and sometimes sharp opinions and policy proposals. a guest speaker suggested that the lack of property right protection leads to a very short-sighted approach in planning the new buildings, another speaker argued that the protection of property rights in tokyo create a lot of huddles for the municipal government to make a systematic planning, sometimes an old house with a old tree makes a new metro line impossible to construct.
after the gathering, these opinions will appear in different media and are later channelled to pertinent government organizations. these elites must have a sense of superiority and good feeling of influencing the "state affairs".
a friend of mine, who is also an architect, highly respects Liang and his wife, and for that i checked the background of Liang and found he was associated with japan:
Before the US bombing of Japan in 1945, a famous architect residing in Sichuan, China named Sicheng Liang sent a message to the United States asking them not to bomb two historic towns in Japan, Kyoto and Nara, because of their rich cultural heritage. The US army accepted Mr. Liang’s proposal. Even though Japan was defeated, Kyoto and Nara remained intact with their original scenery unaffected by the war. To date, Mr. Sicheng Liang is still well respected by Japanese living in Kyoto and Nara.
