China Law Blog

Different sets of criteria depending on the official purposes at the moment. It would be curious to see how they would rank cities outside China. Even our own rankings are peculiar. Recently, "Money" magazine did rankings of most allegedly worthy towns in USA, and residents of one town in NJ which made the list wrote back that they were surprised their musty old town containing environmental waste sites was even considered (apparently they'd be pleased to evacuate the town if they could sell their homes). Ah, the magazine replied, but your lovely boardwalk makes it all so quaint and worthwhile. Wonderful for biking and strolling in the sunset as fragrant toxic fumes waft overhead.

Gotta admire China Daily for its ability to say something utterly ridiculous in dry prose.

Bezdomny has it right: There's much to like about Beijing, from history to nightlife, but it's not a beautiful city, no matter its GDP. Maybe if the smog and traffic disappeared, the hutongs weren't being bulldozed, and the whole place didn't look like one big construction site, it might qualify. Until then, let's stop entering Beijing in beauty pageants. It's the wrong thing to measure.

Admittedly, I'm biased on this. I really do like the city I live in. Part of that comes from being able to breathe without chest pains, but maybe that's just a personal thing.

Dalian aside, I'd put Kunming, Lijiang and maybe Xi'an ahead of Beijing. I've not been to the other cities he mentions in his post (no good excuse for that).

Maybe someone at China Daily decided Beijing wasn't getting enough attention these days.

I have visited several Qingdao Beaches this summer and have found them to be full of rubbish. Many travelers, including my self, are disappointed in Qingdao's current air quality compared to other "travel destinations" in China.

I must admit that some of the Qingdao Attractions are astonishing.

Qingdao restaurants still lack the international flare of big cities like Beijing or Shanghai.

I would rather believe this is a joke.

It sure it beatiful--after about 5 shots of baijiu at 2am in the morning. But then again, perhaps that's the life style of our fellow china daily journalists - who knows!

To me, this outrageous ranking is just another testimony to a mindset that I've observed since elementry school, or kindergarten maybe. At school, all sorts of extra curriculum opportunities are first offered to the best textbook test takers. It's as if a good learner of textbook knowledge is bound to excel in all other areas just as well.

Then, in movies, the characters used to be either good through and through or the stark opposite. A loyal communist fighter would have all the good traits and the traitor all the bad ones. Black or white.

The city ranking shows this mindset very clearly.

Dan, thanks for that link. I'm surprised my little rant warranted anybody's attention, but somehow attention it got.

Chris in Dalian: You like the city you live in because it is a great place, and truly beautiful, too.

I'm sick of all this dissing of Beijing. I know my opinion is in the minority and I know expat residents of the city love to complain about, well, just about every aspect of the city. It has a lot of very attractive areas, good parks, etc etc. Traffic is bad and the pollution is worse, but neither is THAT bad (and the traffic is avoidable). Perhaps things have gotten worse since my last time back in November, perhaps my viewpoint is jaded because I've always lived inside (or just barely outside) 2nd Ring Rd, but I just don't see it...Certainly I wouldn't call Beijing China's most beautiful city, that would go to Qingdao in my opinion (where the air must have suddenly gotten terrible because every time I've been previously, it's always beautiful), but it isn't as bad as expats love to make it out to be...Okay, perhaps I'm just a Beijing Ren and proud of it, but to dare and compare Beijing to Changsha and Taiyuan (and even Guilin, Xiamen, and Dalian) is too much for me...

As an aside to my rant, what makes the poll totally outrageous to me is not Beijing being named most beautiful, but HK being named 2nd most beautiful and Shanghai named 4th, without a city like Qingdao (or even Dalian) in the top 4. I wouldn't even place HK in the top 10...

In similar news, Shenzhen was ranked again as China's most livable city (I am guessing this is a different poll than the one you posted previously)...
http://paper.sznews.com/szdaily/20070913/ca2773082.htm

I couldn't agree better with the disappointment about the ranking.

HOWEVER, I understand when Chinese themselves claim it to be beautiful: there are sets of evaluation in a chinese mind that we do not consider. One must understand that cities like Beijing are not filled with only Beijingrens but also from Chinese from all over the Nation. And they mostly come from poor rural areas or really horrible and depressing industrial cities. So for them, coming or moving to THE capital, making a living there, being able to write back to their relatives saying "hi mom, business is great here and the kids have lots of friends already, I almost saw the Prime Minister yesterday at the parade", MAKES it beautiful.

They are fund of the city because of what it means on such a large country's scale. I hope I made myself clear.

b.cheng: "Traffic is bad and the pollution is worse, but neither is THAT bad (and the traffic is avoidable). Perhaps things have gotten worse since my last time back in November, perhaps my viewpoint is jaded because I've always lived inside (or just barely outside) 2nd Ring Rd.."

The traffic in Beijing is terrible and it is getting worse day by day. If you haven't been here in a year, and before that rarely went outside the second ring road, I'm afraid your input isn't really that valuable.

The traffic was already bad when I moved here two years ago, but it has gotten considerably worse since back then. Now I find myself completely stuck at lunch time, during late evenings and weekend mornings. It wasn't that bad before, not even compared to just six months ago.

The other week I went to Zhongguancun at about 11:00 and I resorted to walking the last couple of blocks, because the taxi didn't move for 15 minutes. Don't even get me started on Xueyuanlu and Xizhimen.

How would you guys rank Taipei? I think is pretty nice with those green mountains surrounding the city.

We ran an issue of our China Expat magazine a few months back on this subject. But then we polled our readers first and let them choose. The issue is available at www.chinaexpat.com, magazine section, "China's Top Ten Most Livable Cities". You can see which cities our readers voted for there...and it's totally different from the China Daily report.

While stuck in traffic this afternoon, my thoughts were: "How bad will traffic get before people stop buying cars?"

Still, Beijing's architecture seems pretty competitive, and at least, when compared to Shanghai, it has less organic garbage on the streets.

I see that I am not the only one to have talk about it. Everybody has different view which city is the best in China. I remember this English guy in Dubai who told me he didn't like the city because the beer was terribly expensive (5 sterlings) and preferred Mumbay where the pint was only 3 sterlings. So you see everybody has his own way to choose the city he prefers.
I don't like to make self-promotion but I did also a post on this "Beautiful Beijing" topic, please have a look: http://chinaandi.typepad.com/chinaandi/2007/09/beijing-the-mos.html

By western standards, large Chinese cities are inherently ugly. You can take historical ruins and amazing natural surroundings, but the process of squeezing a couple million in just destroys the place in the process.

When you get to the size of Lijiang or Dali or Guiling, there are actually lots of lovely places in China. The people don't overwhelm the place. Possibly my favorite would be Leshan. The natural environment beautiful, the city well laidout, good food and short drive to Chengdu.

Of the large cities, Shanghai and Hong Kong are probably the best off. They're so expensively urbanized that they at least have some nice architecture. In terms of natural surroundings, Nanjing is not too bad.

My vote would be for HK being the most beautiful and Hangzhou being number two based on where I've been. Xian has alot of nice parts but also alot of run down areas, with the north side being very, very bad (the old Tang dynasty castle has a moat with dead animals in it).

Beijing is just ugly, only because it is the capital does it get any praise.

b.cheng: I totally understand your point of view, and I would like to make it clear that I was not trying to diss Beijing in any way. I love this city, truly, madly, deeply. I just don't think Beijing could reasonably be called "beautiful". Sure, there are many beautiful places in Beijing, especially within the 2nd Ring Road (Longtanhu and Jingshan are two personal favourites) and there is much beauty to be experienced here- a few years ago I had reason to often be waiting at Jinsong Qiao in the evening, and I loved seeing two Yangge groups practicing under the bridge, one group at either end, as the traffic roared past, around and over them. Even so, much as I love Beijing, I have to say it is a pretty ugly city by any reasonable standard. Too much of it is flat, grey and coldly impersonal.

And I absolutely stand by my comparisons with Changsha and Taiyuan. I lived in both cities for a year each. Changsha is a beautiful city, and definitely more beautiful than Beijing. Go to Tianxin Park at about four in the afternoon, climb up to the top of the last remaining section of city wall, and look out across the Xiang River and Orange Island to Yuelushan with the sun falling low behind it. That is beauty. Or spend an afternoon walking through the campuses of Hunan Normal University and Hunan University, then linger in the Yuelu Academy. Or walk along the bank of the Xiang River, especially in the winter when the water is low. And Taiyuan would be in the same league if it weren't for it's overwhelming environmental problems.