Tiny Brussels – seen from China

Tiny Brussels – seen from China
Guangzhou's Central Business District seen from Sun Yat-sen University. Credit: Philippe Van Parijs

Since my first visit thirty years ago, China has visibly become more capitalist. Many things, therefore, are now more like here, for better and for worse. Yet, for a Brusseler to travel through China and talk to the locals remains a dépaysant experience.

Philosopher Philippe Van Parijs reflects on current debates in Brussels, Belgium and Europe

When I discovered Beijing in 1993, I was impressed by the massive waves of cyclists, often pulling heavy burdens and occupying the larger share of public space. I borrowed a bike and joined the moving crowd. I loved it. What exhilarating contrast that was with our car-dominated Brussels.

Today, there is hardly a bike in sight in the same neighbourhoods. Wide highways lined with high-rise buildings are cluttered with intense car traffic, much of it electrified. It is now in Brussels that I can join waves of cyclists. But for waves as massive as in Beijing in the early 1990s, the time is not yet ripe.

WeChat everywhere

What visitors to China can evade even less than cars is WeChat. It is the local WhatsApp, but it is so much more. In markets and shops, each item has a QR code, and you pay by scanning it with WeChat. Even beggars benefit from it. They do not face the hopeless situation they experience in (still) card-dominated Europe. Instead of stretching out a hand for cash, they display the QR code of their WeChat account and a swift scan suffices to transfer your gift.

What you also need WeChat for, much to the displeasure of clumsy users like me, is to enter and leave the country. Otherwise, apparently, you have no access to the QR code that opens the indispensable health status declaration form.

That is where you have to confess not only the symptoms from which you may suffer, but also the name, phone number and address of your contact person in China, which foreign countries and which districts in which Chinese cities you have visited in the last two weeks, and more.

What a fantastic multi-purpose app, regarded as very convenient, indeed something to be proud of, by most of the people with whom I talked about it. WeChat is owned by the Chinese multinational Tencent, based in Shenzhen. For some of its services, it forms a duopoly with rival Alibaba (owner of Alipay). But its net reaches far more widely. It knows a lot about most Chinese citizens. In comparison, what is on offer in Brussels suddenly looks rather modest. Should we regret it?

Vertical villages

The most hallucinating sight on my high-speed train trip from Beijing to Wuhan was a small forest of residential high-rise buildings in the middle of nowhere. As far as I could judge, two parallel rows of ten buildings each, each building about 20 floors high.

With four appartements on each floor and an average of three residents per apartment, this makes for a population of nearly 5000 people in this vertical village. The quarter of the population of a small Brussels municipality. I wondered what village life they manage to enjoy.

These rows of identical residential buildings are of course not the preserve of the countryside. They are ubiquitous in Chinese cities, not least in those my interlocutors regard as forming the select club of the big four (Shanghai, Beijing, Guangzhou and the newcomer Shenzhen). Compared to Brussels, where it is less than 40%, the proportion of households owning their own home is very high in China, including in its mega-cities.

However, the millions of internal migrants these cities attract, while owning a home in their home town or village, cannot afford — and sometimes are not allowed — to buy a city apartment. The value of an apartment varies greatly according to its location, not least, in educational-achievement-obsessed China, depending on the school catchment area in which it is situated. Owning an apartment in a good area in one of the big four amounts to being wealthy.

It follows that even in the big four you can find slum-like rented accommodation. Next door to the prestigious Sun Yat-sen University (where President Macron gave a lecture on his recent visit to China) and within walking distance of Guangzhou’s Central Business District, there is a long row of decrepit residential buildings: they are so close to each other that you can shake hands from window to window across the narrow alley.

Up to eight floors high, with rooms and small apartments rented out mostly to immigrants from other provinces, without lift, sometimes without private toilet or air conditioning, and without sunlight. Like low quality dwellings in Brussels’ canal zone, they offer the advantage of being close to where there is hope of finding a job, rather than being stuck in a remote suburb — but in a country whose GDP per capita is still only one quarter of Belgium’s.

Rental accommodation for immigrants in Guangzhou. Credit: Philippe Van Parijs

Sobering

Yet, for a citizen of Brussels, visiting one of the Chinese big four is above all a sobering experience. Take Guangzhou (formerly Canton). First, you have the majestic Pearl River, within China second only to the Yangtze in terms of volume. The area of its estuary (that also includes Shenzhen, Hong Kong and Macao) boasts, I am told, a population equal to that of Germany and a GDP larger than that of Russia.

From the 600-metre high Canton Tower, you can see along its banks, in both directions, spectacular skyscrapers and architectural masterpieces. Brussels’ little canal and the Up-Site residential tower by its side are not exactly in the same league.

Consider next the site specially built for the 2010 Guangzhou Asian Games: a gigantic, often crowded, pedestrian zone, that extends into a spacious promenade on both banks of the river over a distance of several kilometres. Not so long ago, people in Brussels believed that with the (long overdue) pedestrianization of Boulevard Anspach, Brussels could pride itself on having created le plus grand piétonnier du monde. Not quite…

Laborious but irreplaceable

Much of what I learned — from the history of China’s surprisingly flexible one-child policy to the interpretation to be given to the government’s current “common prosperity” slogan —, I owe to my Chinese interlocutors having made the formidable effort of learning a language extremely distant from their own. Together with maths and Chinese, English is and, I am told, will remain notwithstanding some recent nationalist fever, one of the three compulsory subjects for admission to higher education all over China.

Yet direct communication remains laborious with many academics and virtually impossible with most non-academics. No wonder: between my arrival and my departure, I saw tens of thousands of faces, but only two that could pass as non-Chinese and might have provided the locals with an opportunity to practice their English.

This has not prevented my intense visit from leaving me with the strengthened conviction that there is no satisfactory substitute to spending some time in a country, far away from tourist traps, and talking directly, face to face, in confidence, with some of its inhabitants.

There is no better way of understanding — thanks to the countless questions they kindly answer — their hopes and fears and how these are shaped by their perceptions of the past, present and future, at home and abroad. There is no better way of creating bonds of cross-border mutual understanding, friendship, fraternity. True, it involves a handsome cost, financial and ecological and even, at my age, physical. But it is well worth it.


Latest News

Copyright © 2025 The Brussels Times. All Rights Reserved.