BEIJING -- The irony was probably lost on Beijing's city fathers: While they spent last week celebrating the most famous Peking Opera star of this century, workers were hauling away the remains of the theater where he gave his greatest performances.
In the century-old theater's place? A faceless shopping arcade to cater to Beijing's nouveau riche.
Unfortunately for China's cultural heritage -- and its future as a tourist destination -- the recent demise of the Jixiang Theater is being repeated across the country. In Suzhou, for example, unplanned urban growth has badly polluted the city's famous maze of canals, spoiling a city that once drew comparisons with Venice.
This onslaught of thoughtless development is one of the downsides to China's double-digit economic growth. While China's cities are gaining wide new roads, shopping centers and luxury apartment blocks, they have been losing many of the landmarks that somehow survived revolution, war and the anti-cultural destruction of earlier Communist rule.
The latest assault against the old has all but overwhelmed the best efforts of the country's nascent urban planning offices.
The situation is especially acute in Beijing, where fast economic growth is clashing with a city that brims with artifacts stemming from the 700 years when it was home to China's emperors and the center of the country's universe.
"There's terrific pressure between economic growth and urban protection. We hope to win, but we don't always win," said Dong Guangqi, deputy director of the Beijing Municipal Institute of Urban Planning and Design.
One loss was the decision to tear down the Jixiang Theater off Beijing's biggest shopping street, Wangfujing. The theater, the only remaining one in Beijing devoted solely to Peking Opera, was where Mei Lanfang performed many of the female roles that made him so famous.
Although the theater was originally on the city's list of protected buildings, it lost this protection when a foreign investor proposed a 17-story shopping and office complex.
Loss after loss
The old theater's loss was another shock for many Beijing residents, who have seen how postwar politicians sacrificed the city's mighty walls, most of its huge gates and scores of temples, restaurants, bridges and ceremonial archways. In a rare critique of authorities in Beijing and Shanghai, where old movie theaters have also been knocked down, the China Daily pleaded for a broader view of development.
