Developments

Danwei:

About 20 km outside Beijing, tourists sitting in tour buses from Beijing north-eastwards towards the Badaling section of the Great Wall can spot the remains of an eerie shell of a castle some distance from the expressway. With concrete spires sticking out above dusty corn fields, the castle remains as a relic of the grandiose ideas of men who’ve long since passed through the grinding mill of elite politics, corruption and prison in China. All around Beijing, architectural artefacts of previous decades remain, many decayed and going to ruin.

This article is a tour through some of the more spectacular wastelands of contemporary Beijing, places that will surely be developed into something entirely different at some point in the future, when the interest groups that control the land and construction finally make a deal they can live with.