Fear and loathing in the Beijing suburbs…

14th May 2010

By Giles Wade

Your diligent China correspondent was hoping to report for you this week on China Auto 2010, the country’s big annual motor show, staged each spring here in Beijing.

This year it was being held in the China International Exhibition Centre.  Immediately on learning this, my heart sank.  Beijing, you see, as befits a modern city, has several exhibition centres.  And all of them are, of course, “international”.  And all of them routinely have Beijing and/or China attached to them, whether or not that is officially part of their name, because, after all, Beijing is where they are, and nothing could be more definitively representative of ‘China’ than the nation’s majestic capital. 

So, calling your new event venue in Beijing the “China International Exhibition Centre” is about the dumbest, most unhelpful thing you can do.  If you say a name like that to your cab driver, he’ll just stare at you blankly and ask, “Which one?”  You have to give an address: “the Xinwai one”, “the Dong Sanhuan one”.

I went online to check out the Auto Show’s website for more information.  Well, we see signs of progress.  In some previous years, there hasn’t been much if any English on it.  At least this time there’s a full English version – but it is one of the worst designed websites I’ve ever encountered.  Venue maps take ages to download, and then reveal themselves to be: a) at a scale which makes it impossible to recognise which area of Beijing they depict; b) have hardly any place names or street names marked on them; and c) the place names are all in Chinese only.

Ah, but it gets worse.  Two different addresses are given.  The old “China International Exhibition Centre” I’d been to once before: not terribly easy to find, but at least in a fairly central location.  Now, however, there is allegedly a second, much bigger one – in Shunyi.  Shunyi is the far ‘burbs, a ‘satellite town’ out next to the airport.  It seems odd to me that the exhibition would be using both venues, since they are not exactly conveniently adjacent.  Oh no.  In fact, they are fully 15 or 20 miles apart. 

I am inclined to suspect that references to the newer site are just a promotional puff for a facility that is perhaps not even built yet.  (Only much later did I discover that the exhibition was indeed split between the two sites, with the main event in Shunyi, and a smaller satellite show for parts at the city centre site.  This was only mentioned, extremely inconspicuously, in a font colour that was barely visible, on the sidebar to the homepage; it was not repeated on any of the pages actually giving information about the venues themselves or how to find them.)

However, references to Shunyi were so numerous on the website that I figured this had to be where the main event was going down.  And after squinting at the online map through a magnifying glass, I was reasonably confident that proximity to the airport (although the map did not, of course, specify which of the three disparate terminals was depicted) and to a bus route that I was familiar with would be sufficient to guide me there. 

Ha!  I spent the whole of Friday morning, a baking hot first day of summer, trudging forlornly around Shunyi (more specifically, around the Tianzhu district of Shunyi, which is not that big), trying to find the brand spanking new China International Exhibition Centre (CIEC) and the hundreds of gleaming, sexy new cars awaiting me within.  I consulted Chinese-speaking friends to try to get more information from the Chinese version of the Auto Show website, but apparently it was every bit as unhelpful as the English one. 

At least they were able to tell me how to say China International Exhibition Centre in Chinese, and I recorded the Chinese characters for it in a text message on my phone.  After three hours of shoe-leather-wearing research and several vox pop interviews, I can only tell you this much: the CIEC is not signposted on any of the road signs in the area; it is not visible from the main road adjacent to the airport (as the map suggested it should be); 8 out of 8 Tianzhu residents I spoke to hadn’t got a clue where it was. 5 out of 5 taxi drivers operating in the area insisted they had never heard of the place, or of the Auto Show either.

If the CIEC is built, it is impressively well-hidden.  One might almost suspect that, like the Apollo moon landings, the China Auto Show did not really take place at all, but was being faked on a small soundstage at Beijing Television HQ.

This kind of thing does happen in China rather a lot.  Not the faking of spaceshots (although I have my doubts about Shenzhou), I mean, but the creation of venues that are almost impossible to find, and the staging of major media events that almost nobody goes to.