BEIJING DIARY: A segmented city, ideal for pandemic Olympics

Beijing, which can still feel like a smaller town in places, has lived out a modular existence for a long, long time. “The whole interior of the city is laid out in squares like a chessboard with such masterly precision that no description can do justice to it,” wrote a 13th-century visitor from Italy, a man named Marco Polo.

And today, between the outsized architecture of commerce, ideology and Olympics, sits a city still in some ways a chessboard full of odd-sized squares.

Exhibit A, spotted from the in-the-bubble bus: Many of the hotels housing visitors during the Games are compact, fortified compounds, inside fences festooned with Olympic signage and guarded by both staff and a formidable police presence to keep occupants inside the closed-loop “bubble.”

Like many urban Chinese hotels, they are intended to function as islands once the gates are shut. In such an ecosystem, you can almost forget that the rest of the city exists — the ideal sensibility for encouraging and enforcing Winter Games COVID protocols.

Everywhere you look in Beijing, you can spy evidence of such compartmentalization. It’s an eclectic, economically and politically driven patchwork that tells the story of decades of overplanning and no planning, of chaos and control — of tight, fenced-in spaces that push in around the city’s renowned open avenues and squares.