The postmodern nature of urban China is nowhere more striking than in Wangfujing shopping district, Beijing. This pedestrian area, only ten minutes walk from the western wall of the Imperial Palace, is the shopping equivalent of New York's 5th Ave.; the street is lined with Beijing's most prominent department stores and specialty boutiques.

In one corner of "Old Beijing," two young men dressed as laborers, wearing beanies with queues attached, labored over a millstone, grinding flour. Across from them, a young woman in modern dress pulled consumers over so she could demonstrate the convenience of a hand-held pasta maker. In another empty corner hung a small display of poor reproductions of black and white photographs of pre-revolutionary urban scenes. Those from foreign collections provided a description in English only; those from Chinese collections provided no information other than the name of the collector. In another setting, many of the pictures could easily have told of the evils of feudal China: an opium den, prostitutes, skeletal rickshaw pullers, beggars watching a street performance. Here, the pictures were just part of the attempt to recreate an historical ambiance.

Similarly, at the intersection of two "streets" was a display shelf featuring a random assortment of pre-1949 material objects. An opium pipe sat next to a telephone, an empty phonograph box from the 40s and a radio from the 20s. Elsewhere was a rice bucket, a spittoon, a Qing-era inkstone, bound foot shoes and an electric oscillating fan. Some items appeared to be actual artifacts from the past; others were clearly reproductions. Similar to the rest of the street scene, the logic of the display was one of pastiche, with neither meaningful form nor function. History, and any meanings one could draw from it, had been telescoped into an undifferentiated past and made into yet another form of, and incitement to, tasteful consumption.
Visitors to Wangfujing avoid the ever-shrinking architectural remains of imperial Beijing still standing only minutes from the pedestrian mall. These narrow, dirty and crowded hutong (the Manchu term for the alleys that connect traditional courtyard houses) have not yet been packaged for easy and comfortable consumption; the hutong have none of the conveniences nor prestige of the mall, such as modern plumbing, air conditioning, parking spaces or designer gifts. The hutong are too uncomfortable a reminder of the ever-widening class differences that mark the economic stratification of Post-Mao Beijing between the yuppies who live in a transnational present and the mass of the population who are trapped in the detritus of the past.