ACQUAINTANCES

I met Professor Liang's son over the US Consular dinner presentation. He runs China's first native NGO, the Friends of Nature, founded in 1994, which campaigns on environmental issues - an uphill struggle, as he confirmed. He told me that two things were obvious when the Communists decided to make Beijing their capital: one, that the city was a unique cultural treasure, and two, that it could not accommodate the demands of a modern capital. His father, Professor Liang had suggested a solution: to build a new administrative and political capital outside the city walls.

I was told: in the 50s, Chairman Mao began to destroy Beijing, clearing away memorial arches, building the vast and at that time empty - Avenue of Heavenly Peace, and creating what was to be the world's largest and bleakest urban open space, Tiananmen Square. In the 60s, came the greatest cultural crime, the destruction of the 800-year-old wall. It took years to pull down and cart away the rubble. Now where the wall had been, the Chinese built a subway - a circle line, punctuated with stations that bear the names of the vanished gates and watchtowers, and above ground, a ring road. It was a poor exchange. In the 80s, money began to flood in from foreign investors eager to buy a piece of China's development. In the 90s, city was in the rash of urban motorways that have turned what was once the bicycle capital of the world into a place that can only be navigated by car. The few historic buildings that have been allowed to survive are simply relics, marooned as they are in a sea of skyscrapers, some with six-lane motorways only yards away.