798 Art Zone - Closure Averted

Closure Averted

In the days of Joint Factory 718, Dashanzi was chosen for its peripheral position well outside the city center. The artists who later moved there were attracted from the fringes of the city as well. However, the area today sits right on the strategic corridor between the Capital Airport and downtown Beijing along the Airport Expressway. In the context of China's current real estate bubble, the district is highly likely to be demolished in the near future. Hints of development are already appearing with the western entrances of the complex flanked by the Jiuxian and Hongyuan luxury apartment towers. There is all the current government projects which call for the expansion of the neighbouring industrial park to turn all of Dashanzi into a high-tech development zone similar to Zhongguancun. Landowner Seven-Star Group thus hopes to re-employ some of the 10,000 laid-off workers it is still responsible for.

Influential members of the artist community and architects are lobbying various government instances to persuade them to allow the old buildings to remain, as part of a cultural center which Beijing otherwise lacks and that can only grow organically. In 2003, International Architects Salon roped in architects from various international architectural associations and renowned architects like Bernard Tschumi and Coop Himmelblau's Wolfe Prix to hammer in the point how attractive spaces like Factory 798 can be to international design community. They point out that such communities are important if Beijing, and China, is to become a major source of creative design instead of mere low cost low value-added manufacturing. (This issue has far-reaching implications in the domain of intellectual property protection in China - some experts believe that the local IP laws will start to be enforced only when China becomes a source of its own intellectual property.)

Part of the lobbying effort is resident sculptor Li Xiangqun, professor at the Academy of Arts and Design of Tsinghua University, who was elected deputy of the 12th National People's Congress in 2004. Li presented the municipal government with a formal bill in February, requesting suspension of the destruction plans and preservation of the buildings as part of an Olympic-caliber cultural center.

Professors from architecture schools such as Beijing's Central Academy of Fine Arts and the Southern Californian Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc) have proposed various development plans for the area that involve preserving the buildings, although those do not appear especially profitable financially.

Meanwhile, attempts have been made to appeal to the developers' sense of economics by pointing out similarities with New York's Greenwich Village and SoHo, where the high profitability of real estate is due partly to the presence of former post-industrial artists' dwellings. Those arguments have so far been ignored.

In 2004, Seven-Star Group froze the rental of new spaces and prohibited all renewals. Tenants resorted to subdividing and subleasing their spaces, to which the Group responded by attempting to forbid subleasing to cultural organizations or to foreigners, hoping to drive out the artists. Tenants, despite some of them having leases still valid for several years, were given the ultimatum of December 31, 2005 to vacate the premises. (China Daily)

But by the end of 2007 it was decided that the area would continue in its current format of a special art zone. In 2009, the area has been refurbished and is thriving. The roads have been repaved, new galleries have opened, and a cafe culture is emerging.