Xidan, in central Beijing, has long been a commercial center of the capital. Lying just West of Tiananmen Square, it is today a major shopping and entertainment district, bringing people from across the city. It is also a transportation hub, with a subway station at the junction of two major lines as well as an airport shuttle. Bus routes radiate from Xidan across the city.
Its relatively central location has made Xidan a gathering place not just for people in search of goods or services, but for those with a political message to send. In the late 1970s, Xidan was the site of Democracy Wall, where Beijing residents issued calls for political reform in the wake of the Cultural Revolution. Fifty years earlier, though, Xidan’s central symbolic location and its logistical significance came together to make the neighborhood a battleground in the struggle surrounding the city’s modernization. On October 22, 1929, thousands of rioters exited through Xidan gate and turned east onto Chang’an Boulevard, marching toward and then past the government buildings, and then south and east through the city, leaving a trail of destruction.
The target of the rioters was the streetcar system that had, both literally and symbolically, been at the center of change in the city. Beijing in 1929 was, like much of China but in a more concentrated fashion, caught between a future, represented by a half-formed Republic, and an imperial past that–to paraphrase Faulkner–wasn’t even past. It was, as described by the title of a pathbreaking volume edited by William Skinner and Mark Elvin in the 1970s, The Chinese City Between Two Worlds, but neither of them seemed to be doing particularly well. “As Old Beijing crumbled, new Beijing rusted,” wrote David Strand in his book Rickshaw Beijing, “...two forms of decay.”
(Beijing in 1929 was many things, but one thing it was not was, oddly, “Beijing.” When the Republican government moved to Nanjing in 1927, it was decided that the former capital could not retain its name as “northern capital,” so it was renamed “Beiping” (Northern Peace), a label the city had received in earlier periods when it was not the capital. I’m anachronistically continuing to call the city “Beijing” in this column for simplicity.)
Strand’s book, subtitled “city people and politics in the 1920s,” takes as its central metaphor for understanding the city the rickshaw and the men who pulled them. Even today, as a tourist attraction in various cities, the rickshaw is presented and commonly assumed to be a relic of China’s ancient past…but it is neither ancient nor Chinese, at least in its origin. The rickshaw was invented in the mid 19th century, in Japan, and although it relies on human labor for power, it embodies cutting edge technology of the time: inflatable rubber tires and ball bearings are essential to its success.
Agile and inexpensive to maintain, rickshaws came to Beijing in the 1880s and immediately provoked controversy. The rickshaws’ soft tires and light weight made
