Central Beijing is gripped by a frenzy of destruction and construction, much of which seemed to be concentrated yesterday in my back yard.
A Samsung caterpillar vehicle with a steel bucket on a mechanical arm appeared at dawn and began demolishing a four-storey block of flats just 50 yards away. It sent choking clouds of grey dust into the air as it smashed through brown brick walls and concrete floors, shattering the silence of a still Sunday morning. To escape the noise and dirt I went for a long walk towards Tiananmen Square. But there was no respite from the banging, crashing, clanking, squealing and roaring of construction work. All along the avenue which bisects Beijing, building is going on at a frantic pace.
In the shadow of a row of giant cranes, hundreds of workers in orange safety helmets were busy working on a massive new shopping mall and what is destined to be Asia's biggest sports centre.
Further along, blue panels of glass were being hoisted into place on to the face of a 10-storey block of concrete floors. The famous Beijing Hotel beside the square has been shrouded in green canvas, behind which industrial cleaners and restorers were at work with high-powered sprays. Tiananmen Square itself has been turned into a vast construction site. The 880 by 500 metres space is littered with stacks of pink granite slabs, mostly piled up near the Mao Zedong Memorial Hall. The first of 120,000 granite paving stones, quarried from the finest stone 200 kilometres south of Beijing, were laid last Monday, and will cover the whole square by July.
The reason for all this frenzied activity is a government order that Beijing should be upgraded for the grand celebrations to mark the 50th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic on October 1st.
The city wants to show off a "21st-century-style square which will reflect China's modern, new capital which was once the centre of the world in ancient times", according to the official Xinhua news agency. The immense project includes improved lighting around the periphery of the square, new loudspeaker systems and several fountains.
This can only be an improvement, as Tiananmen Square, since its enlargement in 1959 to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the founding of the new China, has been little more than a vast emptiness designed to accommodate the masses on state occasions, and populated most days, in equal numbers, by tourists and plain-clothes security police posing as tourists. The square proved ideal as a symbolic gathering place for mass protest when it was occupied by pro-democracy student demonstrators in 1989, and its closure for restoration now means, conveniently, that it will not be accessible to anyone - especially those who might be tempted to mark the occasion - when the 10th anniversary of the bloody crackdown on the student movement occurs on June 4th. The authorities are evidently exceedingly nervous about stability in the capital during the period of that anniversary. Beijing's mayor and Communist Party secretary, Mr Jia Qinglin, advised security officials last week that "the situation of social order is still very grim and we must further strengthen our sense of responsibility and urgency" to ensure "safety and security during major celebrations".
They must, he warned, "persistently and sternly crack down on various criminal activities, strive to eradicate society's destabilising factors by correctly handling the people's internal conflicts in the new period, conscientiously implement various measures in the comprehensive management of social order with intensified grassroots work, and further strengthen and improve the party's leadership in judicial and public security work to ensure political and social stability in the capital".
The city bosses have also decreed that all capitalist-style billboards and neon lights in the wide avenue which runs past the square should be removed for the period of the state anniversary celebrations. The Mastercard sign will have to come off the roof of the Bright China Changan building, the Asahi beer bill board must come down from the International Hotel and the big Kodak Film advertisement will have to be lowered from the roof of the China Post building.
Dozens more advertisements will be affected, and the logos of McDonald's and Kentucky Fried Chicken fast-food restaurants within sight of the square are also likely to disappear temporarily "to preserve the solemnity of Tiananmen". And that's not all. According to a report in City Edition magazine, Beijing plans to widen traffic lanes, erect fountains and statues, add walkways for the blind and special facilities for handicapped people, and plant flowers and trees all the way from the Military Museum in the west to China World in the east, a distance of about six kilometres, along which only new buses will run. And by August, all scaffolding will be removed from buildings lining the avenue and railings and frontages cleaned. Having picked my way around countless hoardings and scaffolding and groups of workers in hard hats, I returned home to find the condemned building at the back of my apartment reduced to a 15 ft pile of rubble, with the mechanical digger parked triumphantly on top.
I now have a better view of my bit of east Beijing. But the way things are going here, I suspect that a new building will be going up in its place in record time, and that the dust won't really clear until China gets round to celebrating its half-century of communism in October.