Bei Ping

Historically, Beijing had another name for a much longer period of time – Bei Ping (Peking). Ping is a double entendre, on the one hand meant “flat” in the physical sense, but more importantly symbolised “equality” in access to information. The Beijing in the future hopefully will be both “flat” and “equal” in these two senses. 1. FLAT: For more than 20 years, Beijing’s Underground City, a nuclear attack bomb shelter just beneath the ancient capital’s downtown area, has been virtually forgotten by local citizens. This city, built after the Sino-Soviet split of 1960, by more than 300,000 local citizens and even school children, wind for over 30 kilometers and cover an area of 85 square kilometers eight to eighteen meters under the surface. This underground parallel universe has also been called the Underground Great Wall, since they had the same purpose: military defense. But this time, the object against which to defend is no longer hypothetical military nuclear attack, but a realistic thick apocalyptic smog which many scientists likened to a nuclear winter. The exacerbation of Airpocalypse has forced Beijing to initiate its urban renewal master plan – “the rebirth of Bei Ping”. Till 2012, Beijing had at least 8 million migrant workers living in basements or underground defense fortifications, authorities have also discovered families who had been living in utility wells for two decades. Because the nature of their living situations, these people are called “termites”. And following the “termite queen” – the offices of centre government moved into underground nuclear bunkers beneath ZhongNanHa, Bei Ping is legitimised. More than 250 million rural migrants will pour into Beijing, and spontaneously become the new “termites” in the age of Bei Ping. The bottom up social relation structure of the city of Bei Ping consisted of an internal chaos inherently different from the old city’s bureaucratic pattern. Administration, office, residential, commercial swiftly blend together in self-organisation, forming self-sufficient small communities. The flat North China Plain is like a boundless thermal mass, dumping continental climate’s dramatic temperature difference between seasons. This expectantly reversed the energy-consumptive structure once led by coal and electricity, and let the city functions under staggeringly low carbon-emission. For the next decades, resource superiority and subsequent financial strength led to the broadening of Beijing’s scale along the earth’s surface. The flat city surface splattered with vactrain or maglev train tracks. Since 2014, Chinese officials have outlined a massive – that is still an understatement; make that mind-bogglingly Brobdingnagian – vision of a globe-girdling high-speed rail network covering the entire Eurasian Plate, called the “New Silk Roads”, which, furthermore, would have as one of its legs a line that would run from Beijing up through Russia, under the North Pacific, through Alaska, then Canada, and finally into the contiguous United States. The materials, energy, and information network which covers the globe endless magnified Bei Ping’s production and organisational flexibility and adaptability, becoming a “flat” but boundless “global city”. 2. EQUALITY: In 2013, the official media of China proclaimed that the exacerbation of “Airpocalypse” let people become “more equal, united, and humorous”. It’s hard to define unity and humour, but in reality, the “flat” Bei Ping cause by Airpocalypse inadvertently led to “equality” in information access. Till 2023, soil are the electrolyte naturally surrounding all spaces, becoming transmitting medium with higher efficiency than artificial cables. Because of this, the ground which contains Bei Ping becomes a various of information networks. These networks cannot be filtered, isolated, erased or destroyed, as the “ground” can not. Base on the trust to the “ground”, many members of the “termites” no longer satisfied with wearable intelligence device, but possess implant alternatives to interface their biological brain with the various networks. The level of cyberisation varies from simple minimal interfaces to almost complete replacement of the brain with cybernetic parts, in cases of severe trauma. This can also be combined with various levels of prostheses, with a fully prosthetic body enabling a person to become a cyborg. The shared high speed evolution of both human and technology becomes possible through the return to ancient “ground”. The latest evolution of human happened 2750 years ago when Ethic Tibetan of East Asia split with Han in order to make adjustment to oxygen-deficient environment. To memorise the “equality” bought by Bei Ping and to bless its long lives, “termites” mounted in soil monumental “termite mound” wind towers at multiple historical Tibetan Buddhism temples around Bei Ping. A hierarchical vascular ventilation system set within the mound acts like a turbulence damper, enhancing the stability of the air flow supplies.