Baidu, the Chinese tech giant, has been making waves in the AI industry for several years now. Known primarily for its search engine, Baidu has been investing heavily in AI research and development and has produced a number of cutting-edge technologies in the field. One such technology is the AI language model ChatGPT, developed by OpenAI.
These first lines you have just read were not written by a human editor. They were written by the artificial intelligence ChatGPT, which was fed the task “Write an editorial about Baidu and ChatGPT”. The chatbot currently experiences criticism because of its potential for writing homework or term papers for the lazy and resourceful.
For the tech giants like Google and Baidu, however, the bot poses completely different risks that even threaten the business model. With Baidu, the first Chinese company, now goes on the offensive: Its own software and ChatGPT competition will be released soon, our team from China reports. The development of new chatbot variants is likely to further fuel the race between the US and China for global AI supremacy.
In today’s second Feature, we look at the Chinese capital, where the end of an institution – known mainly among expats in the diplomatic quarter – is imminent: the bar street in Sanlitun is being demolished.
China’s first entertainment mile of the post-Mao era began sometime in the mid-1980s, with a few market stalls of young migrant workers selling jeans and T-shirts that were intended for export. Otherwise, young fashion did not exist in Beijing at that time. Then the first cafés and pubs opened in the streets between the embassies. That, too, was a novelty in Beijing.
However, the neighborhood had already lost its charm in the past decade after the bars were increasingly taken over by the pimp scene and the local drug mafia. The fact that the last bars are also closing down is, therefore, no loss. Still, it’s worth looking back at a street where many of us have ordered a cold beer in our stressful Beijing working lives.
For the last time, the flashy neon facades shine into the Beijing night. Countless onlookers wander through Sanlitun Bar Street on this Tuesday evening, amusedly snapping selfies before the backdrop of the iconic nightlife district disappears. With curious eyes, they peer through the dusty glass facades of the bars as if they were museum relics of a long-forgotten past.
In a way, that’s true: The last remaining bars, which have awkward names like “Red Moon Club”, “Power Station” or “Swings”, seem almost absurdly out of time: Instead of craft beer, they serve bottles in six-packs, and the loudspeakers have been blaring “Hotel California” on a continuous loop for years.
People have been partying and drinking in Beijing’s first “Western” bar mile since 1995. By the fast-paced standards of the Chinese capital, this is undoubtedly half an eternity. But at the beginning of February, the wrecking balls are scheduled to roll in to level the street. And with it will disappear the last remnant of the old Sanlitun district; an area that has shed its skin time and again – and has long since become synonymous in Chinese with glamour, consumption and internationality.
“When I first came to Beijing, it was practically the only street with anything going on,” recalls Jim Boyce, who blogs about bars and restaurants in the Chinese capital. The Canadian is very well connected with local wine merchants and pub owners. But he never warmed to “Sanlitun Bar Street”: “To me, the bars look something like they were made for people who had basically never been to a real bar,” he says.
And indeed, it is now difficult to imagine why this nightlife district, which is more reminiscent of a small town than a metropolis of 20 million people, once attracted diplomats, tourists and well-heeled locals alike.
To find an answer to this, one has to take a look back into the past. Once, Sanlitun was nothing more than a wasteland outside the old Beijing city walls. Along the dusty streets were rows of one-story huts, agricultural fields, and small auto repair shops. It was here, far from Tiananmen Square, that Mao Tse-tung established the new diplomatic quarter shortly after the founding of the People’s Republic.
At that time, foreigners celebrated mainly in the gardens of their embassies. The strict segregation between “waiguoren”, as the foreigners are called in Chinese, and the local population was above all politically desired – especially during the paranoid period of the Cultural Revolution (1966-76). Anyone who spoke to a “waiguoren” on the street at that time, for example, to give directions, could quickly become suspected of illegal espionage.
Writer Dai Ming, who grew up in Sanlitun in the 1960s, once recalled his childhood in a Beijing local medium: “Our teachers and parents told us to keep as much distance as possible from them.” At school, it was drilled into children’s heads that they should always walk with a serious look and straight posture in the embassy district. Because foreigners, they were told at the time, would throw candy on the ground and then take pictures of the bending children. The pictures of this would be published in their newspapers “to defame our country”.
At the latest with Mao’s death and the economic reforms of the 1980s, the old thought patterns disappeared. From then on, the mostly well-heeled expats were seen primarily as an economic opportunity. First came migrant workers offering jeans and T-shirts at market stalls, rejects from factories in the south of the country that were actually intended for export. In all other stores in Beijing, the standard clothing from Mao times still predominated.
Then the first cafés appeared – a novelty outside large hotels in China at the time. And so it wasn’t long before the demand for nighttime entertainment finally gave rise to an offer: “Sanlitun Bar Street” was born. And when the local soccer club “FC Guoan” settled in the neighboring workers’ stadium in 1996, the local fans also joined the expats on weekends after the matches.
Thorsten, a tall man with a blue down vest and slicked-back hair, still reminisces about that time. The German first came to Beijing in the late 1990s, when he worked for the embassy. When the diplomats and expats wanted to drink a few beers after work, they naturally went to Sanlitun – to the countless dart bars and Irish pubs. And afterwards, well after midnight, they would enjoy fried noodles or grilled lamb skewers in the cookshops and street barbecues. Sanlitun became a model for nightlife districts in other Chinese cities as well. However, many of the alternative cafés and bars of the early days were replaced by disreputable clubs with prostitution and drug dealing.
The Sanlitun district has already reinvented itself again and again since the turn of the millennium. The old pubs were released for redevelopment block by block. At night, representatives of the local government came and wrote the Chinese character “chai”, meaning “demolition”, on the facades of the buildings with white chalk. Opposition was useless because most of the buildings were erected without official permission, as was customary at the time. And so, just a few weeks later, the caterpillar excavators rolled in. This is what happened to many of the first nightlife districts – in Beijing and other cities in China.
The authorities are always concerned with “beautifying” the city and ridding it of its dirty spots. They didn’t want any more disreputable “lady bars”, cheap snack bars and DVD stores full of pirated copies. And at the same time, the niches of the subculture were always demolished: The rock clubs and independent bookstores disappeared as well.
International investors took its place: Adidas, Apple and Uniqlo set up huge flagship stores, followed by luxury boutiques, international café chains and random cocktail bars. Nowhere in all of China is a higher density of Ferraris and celebrities.
This is the only way to understand why Beijingers now mourn a place they have always avoided for years: “Sanlitun Bar Street” stood for a piece of the nostalgic past that, in retrospect, didn’t seem so bad. Or, as German restaurateur Thorsten says: “The street was the last spot with old flair. Now the story is coming full circle”. Fabian Kretschmer
Ruth Schimanowski is used to being at home in a foreign country. “From an early age, I experienced myself as a foreigner, as a guest.” The head of the DAAD Beijing office grew up in Tanzania as a missionary’s daughter. In terms of foreign languages, she speaks Kiswahili, Swedish, French, English and, of course, Chinese. She particularly enjoys finding commonalities in cultural and linguistic differences: “In Chinese, you don’t throw pearls before swine, but you play the zither to a cow,” she explains about idioms.
Despite all the obstacles posed by the pandemic in recent years, her work still involves the DAAD’s core tasks: promoting Germany as a location for study and research and supporting German DAAD scholarship holders abroad. However, there are only a handful of them in China at the moment. For Schimanowski, this is no reason to be displeased: “Obviously, academic exchange has become unbalanced, has collapsed in places – but that only makes our work more important.”
By constantly focusing on the crisis as a whole, however, there is a danger of not seeing the trees for the forest. The various German China centers, for example, are developing very promising initiatives, emphasizes Schimanowski. However, new problems are also emerging. In the well-rehearsed triad of “partner-competitor-rivalry,” rivalry is currently being overemphasized. The chances of success for visa applications by Chinese women scientists have become significantly lower in recent years due to stricter security checks, says Schimanowski.
Meanwhile, the party’s ambitious goals and successes are still underestimated: “The research infrastructure in Germany and Europe is still attractive. But that may look very different in a few years, and German research organizations already warn that access to Chinese facilities and research systems is important.”
For all that, Ruth Schimanowski does not hide the fact that the situation in China is grim at the moment. Even if the abolition of the zero-Covid policy at the beginning of December has completely changed everyday life in China: Many things remain difficult and full of imponderables. China has never been easy. Five years ago, you had to look at your smartphone every morning to see how unhealthy the air quality would be during the day. And until recently, people squinted at their phones early in the morning, fearing that the health code would shoot them into quarantine. But Schimanowski observes that the mood and financial resources in her professional environment have suffered considerably over the past two years.
Yet it is precisely the locality and presence that make the DAAD office located in the German Centre Beijing so important. “My office is like a pigeon coop,” says Schimanowski. “To my left, Helmholtz has its office, to my right is the economic department of the Berlin Senate, and down the hall are the ZfA and Fraunhofer.” For all these institutions, she says, the office is just as approachable as it is for Chinese partners and interested parties. Being on site in China and ready to talk at the same time has been the recipe for success so far. Julius Schwarzwälder
It is only a dress rehearsal for the dragon dance at the Lantern Festival, which will not be celebrated until Sunday. But these artists in the town of Jieyang in Guangdong province are already giving their all. And when it comes to fireworks, no holds are barred.
Baidu, the Chinese tech giant, has been making waves in the AI industry for several years now. Known primarily for its search engine, Baidu has been investing heavily in AI research and development and has produced a number of cutting-edge technologies in the field. One such technology is the AI language model ChatGPT, developed by OpenAI.
These first lines you have just read were not written by a human editor. They were written by the artificial intelligence ChatGPT, which was fed the task “Write an editorial about Baidu and ChatGPT”. The chatbot currently experiences criticism because of its potential for writing homework or term papers for the lazy and resourceful.
For the tech giants like Google and Baidu, however, the bot poses completely different risks that even threaten the business model. With Baidu, the first Chinese company, now goes on the offensive: Its own software and ChatGPT competition will be released soon, our team from China reports. The development of new chatbot variants is likely to further fuel the race between the US and China for global AI supremacy.
In today’s second Feature, we look at the Chinese capital, where the end of an institution – known mainly among expats in the diplomatic quarter – is imminent: the bar street in Sanlitun is being demolished.
China’s first entertainment mile of the post-Mao era began sometime in the mid-1980s, with a few market stalls of young migrant workers selling jeans and T-shirts that were intended for export. Otherwise, young fashion did not exist in Beijing at that time. Then the first cafés and pubs opened in the streets between the embassies. That, too, was a novelty in Beijing.
However, the neighborhood had already lost its charm in the past decade after the bars were increasingly taken over by the pimp scene and the local drug mafia. The fact that the last bars are also closing down is, therefore, no loss. Still, it’s worth looking back at a street where many of us have ordered a cold beer in our stressful Beijing working lives.
For the last time, the flashy neon facades shine into the Beijing night. Countless onlookers wander through Sanlitun Bar Street on this Tuesday evening, amusedly snapping selfies before the backdrop of the iconic nightlife district disappears. With curious eyes, they peer through the dusty glass facades of the bars as if they were museum relics of a long-forgotten past.
In a way, that’s true: The last remaining bars, which have awkward names like “Red Moon Club”, “Power Station” or “Swings”, seem almost absurdly out of time: Instead of craft beer, they serve bottles in six-packs, and the loudspeakers have been blaring “Hotel California” on a continuous loop for years.
People have been partying and drinking in Beijing’s first “Western” bar mile since 1995. By the fast-paced standards of the Chinese capital, this is undoubtedly half an eternity. But at the beginning of February, the wrecking balls are scheduled to roll in to level the street. And with it will disappear the last remnant of the old Sanlitun district; an area that has shed its skin time and again – and has long since become synonymous in Chinese with glamour, consumption and internationality.
“When I first came to Beijing, it was practically the only street with anything going on,” recalls Jim Boyce, who blogs about bars and restaurants in the Chinese capital. The Canadian is very well connected with local wine merchants and pub owners. But he never warmed to “Sanlitun Bar Street”: “To me, the bars look something like they were made for people who had basically never been to a real bar,” he says.
And indeed, it is now difficult to imagine why this nightlife district, which is more reminiscent of a small town than a metropolis of 20 million people, once attracted diplomats, tourists and well-heeled locals alike.
To find an answer to this, one has to take a look back into the past. Once, Sanlitun was nothing more than a wasteland outside the old Beijing city walls. Along the dusty streets were rows of one-story huts, agricultural fields, and small auto repair shops. It was here, far from Tiananmen Square, that Mao Tse-tung established the new diplomatic quarter shortly after the founding of the People’s Republic.
At that time, foreigners celebrated mainly in the gardens of their embassies. The strict segregation between “waiguoren”, as the foreigners are called in Chinese, and the local population was above all politically desired – especially during the paranoid period of the Cultural Revolution (1966-76). Anyone who spoke to a “waiguoren” on the street at that time, for example, to give directions, could quickly become suspected of illegal espionage.
Writer Dai Ming, who grew up in Sanlitun in the 1960s, once recalled his childhood in a Beijing local medium: “Our teachers and parents told us to keep as much distance as possible from them.” At school, it was drilled into children’s heads that they should always walk with a serious look and straight posture in the embassy district. Because foreigners, they were told at the time, would throw candy on the ground and then take pictures of the bending children. The pictures of this would be published in their newspapers “to defame our country”.
At the latest with Mao’s death and the economic reforms of the 1980s, the old thought patterns disappeared. From then on, the mostly well-heeled expats were seen primarily as an economic opportunity. First came migrant workers offering jeans and T-shirts at market stalls, rejects from factories in the south of the country that were actually intended for export. In all other stores in Beijing, the standard clothing from Mao times still predominated.
Then the first cafés appeared – a novelty outside large hotels in China at the time. And so it wasn’t long before the demand for nighttime entertainment finally gave rise to an offer: “Sanlitun Bar Street” was born. And when the local soccer club “FC Guoan” settled in the neighboring workers’ stadium in 1996, the local fans also joined the expats on weekends after the matches.
Thorsten, a tall man with a blue down vest and slicked-back hair, still reminisces about that time. The German first came to Beijing in the late 1990s, when he worked for the embassy. When the diplomats and expats wanted to drink a few beers after work, they naturally went to Sanlitun – to the countless dart bars and Irish pubs. And afterwards, well after midnight, they would enjoy fried noodles or grilled lamb skewers in the cookshops and street barbecues. Sanlitun became a model for nightlife districts in other Chinese cities as well. However, many of the alternative cafés and bars of the early days were replaced by disreputable clubs with prostitution and drug dealing.
The Sanlitun district has already reinvented itself again and again since the turn of the millennium. The old pubs were released for redevelopment block by block. At night, representatives of the local government came and wrote the Chinese character “chai”, meaning “demolition”, on the facades of the buildings with white chalk. Opposition was useless because most of the buildings were erected without official permission, as was customary at the time. And so, just a few weeks later, the caterpillar excavators rolled in. This is what happened to many of the first nightlife districts – in Beijing and other cities in China.
The authorities are always concerned with “beautifying” the city and ridding it of its dirty spots. They didn’t want any more disreputable “lady bars”, cheap snack bars and DVD stores full of pirated copies. And at the same time, the niches of the subculture were always demolished: The rock clubs and independent bookstores disappeared as well.
International investors took its place: Adidas, Apple and Uniqlo set up huge flagship stores, followed by luxury boutiques, international café chains and random cocktail bars. Nowhere in all of China is a higher density of Ferraris and celebrities.
This is the only way to understand why Beijingers now mourn a place they have always avoided for years: “Sanlitun Bar Street” stood for a piece of the nostalgic past that, in retrospect, didn’t seem so bad. Or, as German restaurateur Thorsten says: “The street was the last spot with old flair. Now the story is coming full circle”. Fabian Kretschmer
Ruth Schimanowski is used to being at home in a foreign country. “From an early age, I experienced myself as a foreigner, as a guest.” The head of the DAAD Beijing office grew up in Tanzania as a missionary’s daughter. In terms of foreign languages, she speaks Kiswahili, Swedish, French, English and, of course, Chinese. She particularly enjoys finding commonalities in cultural and linguistic differences: “In Chinese, you don’t throw pearls before swine, but you play the zither to a cow,” she explains about idioms.
Despite all the obstacles posed by the pandemic in recent years, her work still involves the DAAD’s core tasks: promoting Germany as a location for study and research and supporting German DAAD scholarship holders abroad. However, there are only a handful of them in China at the moment. For Schimanowski, this is no reason to be displeased: “Obviously, academic exchange has become unbalanced, has collapsed in places – but that only makes our work more important.”
By constantly focusing on the crisis as a whole, however, there is a danger of not seeing the trees for the forest. The various German China centers, for example, are developing very promising initiatives, emphasizes Schimanowski. However, new problems are also emerging. In the well-rehearsed triad of “partner-competitor-rivalry,” rivalry is currently being overemphasized. The chances of success for visa applications by Chinese women scientists have become significantly lower in recent years due to stricter security checks, says Schimanowski.
Meanwhile, the party’s ambitious goals and successes are still underestimated: “The research infrastructure in Germany and Europe is still attractive. But that may look very different in a few years, and German research organizations already warn that access to Chinese facilities and research systems is important.”
For all that, Ruth Schimanowski does not hide the fact that the situation in China is grim at the moment. Even if the abolition of the zero-Covid policy at the beginning of December has completely changed everyday life in China: Many things remain difficult and full of imponderables. China has never been easy. Five years ago, you had to look at your smartphone every morning to see how unhealthy the air quality would be during the day. And until recently, people squinted at their phones early in the morning, fearing that the health code would shoot them into quarantine. But Schimanowski observes that the mood and financial resources in her professional environment have suffered considerably over the past two years.
Yet it is precisely the locality and presence that make the DAAD office located in the German Centre Beijing so important. “My office is like a pigeon coop,” says Schimanowski. “To my left, Helmholtz has its office, to my right is the economic department of the Berlin Senate, and down the hall are the ZfA and Fraunhofer.” For all these institutions, she says, the office is just as approachable as it is for Chinese partners and interested parties. Being on site in China and ready to talk at the same time has been the recipe for success so far. Julius Schwarzwälder
It is only a dress rehearsal for the dragon dance at the Lantern Festival, which will not be celebrated until Sunday. But these artists in the town of Jieyang in Guangdong province are already giving their all. And when it comes to fireworks, no holds are barred.
