The May issue of That's Beijing is out now – paper-and-ink-form citywide, digital pdf form right here or in your browser here. Editor-in-Chief Oscar Holland introduces the magazine:
If you’d told me a decade ago that my third and fourth homes would be Tianjin and Hebei (after London and Beijing), I would have questioned your sanity. Then I would have asked: Where are Tianjin and Hebei?
But whether we realize it or not, both play a growing role in our lives. Their integration with the capital – forming the fabled 110-million-person megalopolis, Jing-Jin-Ji – is fully underway, meaning big changes at China’s usual (breakneck) speed.
My experience is probably atypical for a Beijinger. After all, at That’s we publish a bimonthly Tianjin supplement and report regularly on happenings in Hebei (you could say that we’re the magazine of choice for the modern Jing-Jin-Ji urbanite). Nonetheless, I’ve seen an increasing amount of crossover in the three years I’ve been working in the region.
Integration sounds great on paper: more connectivity, better infrastructure and less pressure on public services. But the process isn’t without its causalities. The seemingly indiscriminate bricking-up of your favorite hutongs in recent months can’t be viewed in isolation. The relocation of small businesses and markets – away from the city center and into surrounding areas – is a central pillar of the strategy.
Bad news for your hutong neighbors, perhaps. But there’s hope for small business elsewhere in the region. In this month’s cover story, we travel to the three rural counties set to be transformed into a Shenzhen-style Special Economic Zone, and learn that there’s a great deal of optimism in places set to benefit from change in the region. You can read our dispatch from the site of the Xiongan New Area (page 46), nestled alongside an introduction to Hebei, your most important neighbor.
Elsewhere in the magazine:
Karoline Kan delves into Beijing’s booming industry for live-in maternity nurses (page 10);
Dr. Jonathan Chatwin explores China’s 16th-century flirtations with globalization (page 14);
Dominique Wong finds out how to make a hostel from a micro-hutong (in our recently revived interiors section, page 24);
I chat 90s synthesizers with the poster boy of progressive techno, Nathan Fake (page 32);
And Noelle Mateer eats her way through the city’s best new brunches (page 58) while bringing you her characteristically perspicacious roundup of the latest food and drink openings (from page 52).
Oscar Holland
Editor-in-Chief
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