Here’s a few things I know about Baotou (包头). Most of it is true, I think: It’s an industrial city of two million people in Inner Mongolia, a region of China. In the 1950s, the newly communist China’s central planning committee chose to turn it into a city, in order to produce steel; — factories that built tanks followed; more recently, two thirds of the world’s rare earth metals are refined here. Chemical complexes are used to separate ore into neodymium, cerium and other ingredients for smartphones and wind turbines, leaving behind a black sludge that’s drained into nearby lakes. Less than five percent of the residents are ethnically Mongolian while the rest are Han immigrants from further south. Its name means “place with deer” in Mongolian, whereas the phonetic Chinese translation is the somewhat less appealing “wrapped head”. It’s also where both my parents spent their childhood (though they only met later, further east in Shenyang).
I’ve been to Baotou a handful of times before, mostly as a child. For various reasons, this most recent visit felt like my first proper visit as an adult. I made an effort to research the city, in order to fight against the tendency to revert to a child when travelling in proximity to parents. This still didn’t yield much of an itinerary, as the few posts I could find focused on sights around the city, rather than the urban centre. The Lonely Planet describes it as “an industrialised smear”, and seems to have only included it as a night’s rest on the way to more worthwhile sites. The sole entry in the nightlife section lists the hotel bar of the Shangri-La.
Family responsibility meant I didn’t indulge in too many undirected wanders, but here are a few things I saw:
The 八一 (eight-one) park (1 August is the founding date of the People’s Liberation Army) is well forested with young trees surrounding a small lake and a tiny amusement park. It’s surrounded by a walking circuit. As far as I can gather, some sort of pedestrianism has gained popularity in China as a form of evening exercise. People of all ages walk, at faster-than-leisurely pace, around the paved circuit, in a clockwise direction. I and only two other joggers, disturbed the pace/peace by weaving in and out of the crowd. In an opening to the side of the circuit, a group of mostly middle aged women practised synchronised dance moves to some techno blasting from a portable sound system. As I left the park, I overhead a young woman selling fixed term investment policies to passing elderly.
Shopping centres line the main thoroughfare (Steel Boulevard), serving up the last of the summer lineup from H&M, Zara, North Face, Uniqlo and the like. Range Rovers and Porsches are dotted throughout the traffic and parking lot. I guess it will be a few more years before the Teslas, along with their charging stations spread here from the coastal cities, where they already make frequent appearances. A giant LED display advertised a dance club, promising “deejay and Rave”.
The central square is of the Soviet style: concrete, huge, rectangular, and lined by imposing government buildings. A good portion of it has been marked out with traffic cones, and turned into a kind of rink, with inline skates standing in for blades in the summer heat. I guess nearby lakes would be frozen over in winter. A girl practices her dance routine timed to music, on the other side a coach trains a group of children, no older than five or six, zooming around some cones in speed-skating form. At one point, they pause for the coach to examine their postures. One child, deemed inadequate, is hit with the lanyard of the coach’s his whistle. He straightens up, and I hope the coach doesn’t hit harder.
During my first evening there, I was out for a walk with my mom. My attention was caught by a round pavilion with a domed roof, covered in LEDs of shifting colours. Oddly, this wouldn’t look out of place at AfrikaBurn, especially as it’s surrounded by revellers at sundown. My mom mentioned that when she was a child during the Cultural Revolution, this was the site of “Struggle Sessions”. The unlucky counter-revolutionaries, found guilty of the most grave crimes of ideology, would have their last public appearance here before facing the firing squad out of public view. Apparently their jaws were often broken or dislocated to prevent final anguished cries.
A place like Baotou doesn’t fit any easy narrative of tourism. It’s both fascinating as a product of history (its own, but also forces beyond its control) but also almost devoid of anything for a tourist to actually do. There also seems to be little effort in developing it for the benefit for visitors. This is part of what’s so hard to explain about what urban development and prosperity looks like in modern China, where of the over 100 cities with a population of one million or more, all but a handful are distinguishable in the mind of a foreigner. I’m not even sure how much a Chinese person would know about most of these cities. Baotou was created for its industrial function, but it clearly exists much more now than it did before for its residents. It provides a material plenty whereas it provided so little before, and that’s maybe enough. It doesn’t need a modern art or cultural history museum any time soon, nor a more generous entry in travel guides. It will spawn many personal histories, like it did my parents’, and indirectly, mine.
