There was a restaurant? (Pic via Thats)

A swathe of this street that included 3 Rock was demolished last week and, while some mourned, others cheered the ongoing erosion of what grassroots Beijing nightlife. There’s nothing wrong with whisky bars, brewpubs and cocktail lounges, unless you count homogeneity and banal exclusivity. But as Tolstoy said, all whisky bars are alike; each dive bar is divey in its own way.

Beijing is already deep down its path to progress, where no night out is not the same. The orders still go out to “sweep the streets,” yet there’s nowhere left to crack the whip. While cops used to roll up at roadhouse dens like Dos Kolegas, these days they’re reduced to raiding modest French bistros like Café de la Poste, or drug-testing patrons at family pub Great Leap on a Monday afternoon.

Meanwhile, among such sites never again to be witnessed at 3 Rock – a Scotsman being served at the bar with his pants around his ankles; half-naked arm wrestling; a drinking game involving a pint of “everything”; two rock chicks playing strip dice; and one of the foulest unisex bathrooms in Beijing.

Here’s some of 3 Rock’s best/worst graffiti to remember it by

This is almost Bukowski-esque

Makes ya think…

Explanation here.

Here is what we all should do: Tomorrow, take a little time out of your day and go leave flowers and/or positive messages on the ground where it happened. We have to change the mentality here, enough with this “If I help, I’ll get in trouble” or “China doesn’t value people’s life” excuses. You can be black, white, yellow red or blue it doesn’t matter, bottom line is this, if you are in China YOU are CHINESE, you want to make China a better place then make it happen. 

 

We have two videos from the stabbing this morning, in which a man wielding a meter-long sword attacked — seemingly at random — two people outside Uniqlo in Sanlitun, Beijing. The first video, above, is graphic, and I wouldn’t recommend it if you’d rather not watch a woman bleeding from stab wounds.

We’d like to point out this guy, casually strolling by the scene of two bloody stabbings:

In the video below, the attacker, when approached by police, simply gives himself up by laying down his sword and getting on his stomach.

UPDATE, 8/14, 10:54 am: How this story unfolded on WeChat.

The man is said to be a 25-year-old named Mr. Gao. Via Guardian:

Police said the attacker was from Tonghua, a city in the north-eastern province of Jilin.

Friends of the woman, who is thought to work as a tattoo artist in Beijing, posted messages on social media expressing their shock. Addressing the female victim one wrote: “You have to wake up and make me a tattoo, bless, my thought is with you.”

@prchovanec @zhongnanhai Victim was friend’s friend’s fiancee. Motivation was apparently nationalist — “Chinese who sleep w/ 老外 should die.”

— Jordan Phillips (@jordanp) August 14, 2015

As heard on social media, there was a stabbing this morning outside the Uniqlo in Sanlitun, one of the busiest areas of foot traffic and commerce in Beijing. Police appear to have subdued the assailant and roped off the area.

Sina Weibo is still all about the Tianjin explosion last night, but more information to come on this stabbing as it becomes available.

For now, some pictures culled from Twitter:

UPDATE, 1:13 pm: Um, is that a katana?

Police seem to have the situation under control:

Some more pictures:

UPDATE, 2:10 pm: Here’s a video of the moment the man is arrested after stabbing two people. He appears to simply give himself in.

Here’s another video taken just moments before the one above. It’s graphic.

UPDATE, 8/14, 10:54 am: How this story unfolded on WeChat.

The man is said to be a 25-year-old named Mr. Gao. Via Guardian:

Police said the attacker was from Tonghua, a city in the north-eastern province of Jilin.

Friends of the woman, who is thought to work as a tattoo artist in Beijing, posted messages on social media expressing their shock. Addressing the female victim one wrote: “You have to wake up and make me a tattoo, bless, my thought is with you.”

@prchovanec @zhongnanhai Victim was friend’s friend’s fiancee. Motivation was apparently nationalist — “Chinese who sleep w/ 老外 should die.”

— Jordan Phillips (@jordanp) August 14, 2015

The case bears strong similarities to a series of racially tinged assaults alleged to have recently occurred in several foreign-centric districts, including Sanlitun, Houhai and Wudaokou, in which foreign witnesses reported being attacked without provocation by local men carrying weapons and traveling in a vehicle. The incidents were widely reported on WeChat and discussed on local forums, such as Reddit, where many expressed concern about possible hate crimes.

Michael (left) takes an image of his injuries shortly after the attack

An Australian student, who asked to be referred to just by his first name, Michael – for fear of possible retaliation – was returning to his BLCU quarters at “around 2am” on 21 December with his Korean girlfriend, Christine, when he says the pair noticed a grey BMW parked ahead.

“We were about 200 meters away [from the university] when [the men inside] yelled out something… they came around in their car and stopped us at the gate,” Michael recalled. Aware of the rumors that a group of men were targeting foreigners with Chinese females, he confronted the gang in an attempt to defuse the situation, explaining: “My girlfriend’s Korean, not Chinese…”

Three men  then attacked him with bats and rods. “Once they started hitting me, I grabbed one of the bats and hit one of the Chinese guys back in the head” – an act he was to later regret –  “and then approached the other two guys… yelling at them to leave and they backed off. I smashed the bat in half,” explained the former rugby winger.

Before he could check the third man, Michael said, he got up and, as the trio approached again, both students decided to run for help but “As we almost got in the dorm, my girlfriend fell down,” and the men renewed their assault. Michael claimed he remembers little of what happened next but CCTV footage shows him being battered on the head, then disarming another of his metal rod.

Inside, a large amount of students (including “a lot of Russian guys”) assisted the pair while others called the police. “One of the attackers who I’d hit tried to come in… the Chinese had gone to their car again and tried to escape” but fortunately a quick-thinking Russian had removed the keys, according to witnesses. At this point, police arrived. A member of the gang accused the Russian of attacking them, and all four were detained.

One of the alleged assailants at the police station is said to have been a US citizen with Chinese parents (his face has been obscured as he has not been charged)

In a similar December incident, detailed over at the World of Chinese, a foreign student who requested anonymity told a reporter he was approached by a group of six or seven men in a “wagon” and carrying “metal sticks,” who questioned his companion’s ethnicity. “They started asking if my friend was Chinese,” he told the magazine. After being assaulted several times, the man handed over a small amount of money and made his escape.

The magazine spoke also to an eyewitness to “a separate incident in Wudaokou, who said that he saw ‘four Chinese holding bats chasing a black guy, shouting at him,’ along Zhanchunyuan West Road, at around 3 am the same morning.” The location of the latter incident is close (1-2km) to where the attack on Michael and his partner took place. Although extreme violence is rare, attacks on foreigners do occur in the nightspots of Beijing for a variety of reasons – examples from Sanlitun being not infrequent, and not necessarily involving Chinese.

Back at the police station, a bloodied Michael says he was threatened by one of the men (to wit: “I know where you guys live, I’m gonna come get you and stab you”) and endured racial slurs, and both he and his friends were accused of instigating the fight. The Russian was detained and later released the next day, while Michael received five stitches; his passport is now with police as the case continues.

“All three are now in jail,” said Michael. “However, if we can get more witnesses, they’ll serve a longer time in jail.” In legal terms, the men have been detained pending investigation. They can be held for up to 28 days without charge and should police decide to press charges, a case will be sent to the “procurator” for consideration. If the case is accepted, a trial will be set and the assailants can look forward to tackling China’s 99.1% conviction rate, instead of unarmed foreigners.

An image taken at the hospital shows Michael’s head wound, which required five stitches

Michael praised both university authorities and Wudaokou police, who he described as “helpful [and] good” but added that the embassy was “useless.” The investigation is ongoing and “slow.” One potential difficulty might be “the injury suffered to the other man, he was in hospital for a while and looks like he is permanently a bit deformed.” The man is alleged to be an American citizen, though both his parents are Chinese.

Readers who have any information about the case, know of any other incidents, or were themselves victims of one of a similar spate of attacks involving a grey BMW in the last two months are urged to contact Wudaokou police, or email us at the usual address (and we’ll pass your details on). Said Michael: “All I want is this not to happen again.”

You can follow the author of this piece @MrRFH on Twitter

It’s Friday night just past midnight. You’re standing on a curb in Sanlitun after a pint/dinner/book talk/whatever looking for a cab. You see a green and yellow car driving your way, the little red light in the windshield beckoning. Already thinking of that book on your bedside, you raise your hand high and step forward in anticipation.

Then something weird happens. The cabby sees you and swerves. He’s gone out of his way to avoid you and then drives twenty meters down the street to pick up that Chinese couple so drunk their embrace may be the only thing keeping them upright. Are you the victim of a racist driver? Or are you a victim of the douchey laowai?

On Weibo recently, the Ministry of Public Security posted a series of pictures from early Sunday morning near Gongti West Gate showing a group of foreigners taking liberties with a drunk Chinese guy. As The Nanfang explains:

An eyewitness named Xu described the situation:

First they used their feet to step on the man’s body and head. Then, they took turns to hoist the man up by their shoulders, and then put him down. They took pictures throughout.

Xu said the foreign men “fiddled” with the drunk man for 20 minutes. The men also displayed poor manners by displaying their middle fingers to pedestrians and using coarse language.

A rickshaw driver present at the scene said he saw the foreigners “torment” the unconscious man.

Being discerning news recipients, you know the difficulty in extracting nuance from smart phone snaps, so will come to some reasonable conclusions: a) the Chinese guy is well and truly out of it (like, gone), b) the laowai don’t know him, and c) they are being loutish at best.

Now imagine you are China’s Internet mob and you might come to conclusion d): foreigners being foreigners.

This isn’t a good thing.

“Beat them,” says uncle_impearl; “Dogs,” says 个人化1994.  小红娃娃 believes that, “Beijing society’s public security has lots of hidden dangers, this is the foremost!” while为蚊子补水的狼 thinks, “It’s no different from the Japanese invasion of China, just a different style.”

You’ll notice that conclusion d) uses a broad brush; it doesn’t separate the businessman from the student from the tourist from the Beijing lifer. It takes Youku videos of red-in-the-face laowai and collates them with all their personal interactions and experiences.

Lacking a scientific study with a representative sample and well-constructed hypotheses, here is a thesis: The more laowai act like douches around Sanlitun, the more pervasive d) will become. The more pervasive d) becomes, the worse life becomes for all of us. Don’t be a douche.

Christian works freelance in Beijing and tweets at @cdcshepherd.

Because it’s politically expedient to do so — proven by Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, etc., to work — Beijing conducted a drug investigation that recently culminated in a bust of street-level slingers in Sanlitun. This news doesn’t affect the vast majority of Beijingers, foreign or local, which is to say, there’s little reason any of us should cheer. If anything, we should cringe, knowing these “crackdowns” almost always disproportionately affect those on society’s fringes who are most powerless to defend themselves. It’s not a coincidence that highly publicized drug/prostitution stings never seem to target princelings or the monied owners of hotel brothels.

That’s what makes this blog post from Michael Wester, CEO of the Beijinger’s parent company, True Run Media, so surprising. Near the bottom of what starts as a straightforward news blog post, there’s this (all emphasis his):

The bust comes as welcome news to the vast majority of foreign residents of the city who choose to live within the letter of the law. Foreign drug dealers who seem to operate with abandon in certain areas of Sanlitun have been both an embarrassment and a downright hassle to foreign residents, whom the dealers often strike up friendly conversations with as an intro to offering drugs for sale.

What happens, exactly, after dealers offer their ware? Do they — facing rejection from those poor study-abroad students who don’t have 700 RMB in their pockets, to say nothing of the desire to get high when they can obliterate their minds on 10-kuai shooters and 15-kuai street beverages laced with a poison called alcohol — snarl and physically intimidate? Do the smiles that prefaced those friendly conversations turn into glowers of fury and menace? Need I remind, this is an area that frequently reeks of piss, drunkenness, and buffoonery, an area in which foreigners (law-abiding, surely!) pass out till the next afternoon. And we think our African friends are the problem?

That excerpted paragraph comes directly after this one:

The dealers will face the same penalties as local citizens, the report notes. China’s drug laws are notoriously strict, and dealing over 50 grams of methamphetamines can earn a suspect the death penalty.

No pause via quote or ellipses, no further questions, nothing to help us process the utter insanity that dealing 50-some grams of meth can lead to execution.

The bust comes as welcome news to the vast majority of foreign residents of the city who choose to live within the letter of the law.

Look… we’re reasonably confident Wester’s an upstanding citizen, a nice enough guy, and that we’re reading too much into all this. But he’s also the head of Beijing’s largest expat media empire. Has he risen so above expattery (have you seen the Beijinger’s forum?) that he can parrot, apparently without self-awareness, an apparatchik’s cliche? Living within “the letter of the law” doesn’t make a person decent: you can still be a judgmental prick.

And since when do we celebrate China’s haphazard application of laws? How many laws do the Beijinger’s readers break, those with fake gas-scooter licenses (which you can buy on the Beijinger’s classifieds!) and visas obtained through questionable qualifications?

Do you use a VPN? Ever gotten into a black cab? Drank in an unregistered bar? We wonder, too, about the Beijinger’s ISBN — does it permit them to run advertisements alongside content?

What if Law didn’t criminalize certain service providers and institutionalize racial profiling? What if it made buyers equally responsible by tying them to the same risk of draconian penalties? What if laws weren’t made by those who insist on “social stability,” as if that weren’t another term for homogeny, conservatism, and control?

Bringing the conversation back home: who’s doing more harm in Sanlitun? The drug dealers who honestly don’t care about pushing their product on those who don’t want it? Or the army of fake-booze distributors, the pickpockets, the black-out-drunkards, the police officers in the station around the corner who will do absolutely nothing about fistfights and stolen property but who’ll strong-arm the hell out of roadside vendors to ensure they receive their cut?

It’s something for all of us to think about the next time we’re tempted to deem someone else’s choices illegitimate and say they should be punished “according to the law.”

More than 30 foreigners, most of “black complexion,” have been arrested on drug charges, and more than 790 grams of methamphetamine, ecstasy, and marijuana have been seized, according to an article on Tuesday in Legal China. Expect a few less head nods and “You good?”s around Taikoo Li. Also, you might need to find a new drug dealer.

A continuous, in-depth investigation began in early March following a citywide law to combat drug-related crimes, specifically those conducted by foreigners, according to China Daily. The investigation came to a head on May 15-25. The Beijing Public Sec Bureau Narcotics Corps, aided by reporters and “drug addicts” (see: rat), conducted a series of sting operations around Sanlitun Village, Dongba, and East Second Ring Road.

Legal China detailed the operation:

On the evening of May 22 at 10:22, drug addict N is persuaded by the police to voluntarily redeem himself by agreeing to go to a foreign drug traffickers apartment on East Second Ring Road in front of the transactions.

At night 10:48, two black-skin expatriate men appeared in front of the apartment, and defecated in the grass. N exchanged information with the drug traffickers, and the dealers said they reached the trading location. Then Liangmingshenfen investigators attempted to arrest the two. After the two men appeared to see someone, they dropped their possessions and attempted to escape. They were quickly caught.

Beijing Police announced that the purpose of this investigation is to ensure social stability and to avoid the adverse social impact of drug trafficking.

In other news, the Great Wall Music Festival is this Sunday! You’ll need to be a bit more diligent in preparing.

(Image via Legal China)

Poor guy. He had a rough night.

An anonymous tipster sent this picture from the entryway of Tongli Studio in Sanlitun at 12:30 pm. “He wasn’t dead — as he was breathing — and was most likely sleeping a rough night off,” the tipster reports. “Nobody was bothering him as people went about their business coming and going to lunch.”

Could’ve happened to anybody, really. Of course, it didn’t happen to “anybody.” It happened to this guy. At least he had the good sense to pass out underneath Biteapitta, where he can get some strong Arabian coffee to kick off the afternoon.

For those wondering, the sign right above him says vehicles are forbidden.

Which operating system do you think they use?

Hope they found it eventually!

Sanlitun, yesterday. Pictures by Katie.

The newly released trailer is above, by Robert Ingi Douglas. If there’s not at least one bloody beatdown between ravenous drunks in this film, dubbed with Benny Hill music, these guys are doing it wrong.

Here was the first trailer, from last month:

SCMP India’s First Post, of all places, linked to it. (H/T Alicia)

Hope you’re enjoying your Saturday afternoon. If not, be inspired by these kids, found a few weeks ago in Sanlitun. Youku video for those in China after the jump.

Does anyone have more information about this?

This email was sent by the US Embassy in Beijing 10 minutes ago, with the subject, “Message for U.S. Citizens: Precautions Advised in Beijing Nightclubs”:

In the early morning hours of Saturday, June 9, a group of local nationals assaulted an employee of the U.S. Embassy in Beijing inside the Element nightclub, located on the west side of Workers’ Stadium near Sanlitun. The employee, who was out with some colleagues, was hit in the head with a sharp object as he was dancing away from the group. According to witnesses, the employee fell to the floor and was repeatedly beaten and kicked in the head by individuals serving as bouncers for the nightclub.  By all accounts, the attack was unprovoked.

This is not the first report of violence directed at U.S. citizens in the nightclubs outside of Workers’ Stadium. In September 2010, another employee of the U.S. Embassy in Beijing was assaulted inside a different nightclub at the north end of Workers’ Stadium in another unprovoked incident. Private U.S. citizens have also reported being victims of crime in the nearby area.

U.S. citizens are reminded to use caution when enjoying the nightlife in Beijing. Maintaining an awareness of your surroundings and keeping a low profile are critical to avoiding potential problems.

These embassy advisories get sent every once in a while, and almost always, they involve some shady nightclub around Sanlitun that most people — foreign or local — should never find themselves going on. Add “Element” to that list, I guess.

Obviously, there are lots of unanswered questions. Stay tuned for updates as they become available.

The rest of the embassy’s email:

The U.S. Embassy can be reached 24 hours per day. During business hours, call 86-10-8531-4000 or email amcitbeijing@state.gov. For emergencies after hours or on weekends, call 86-10-8531-3000. The Embassy is located near the Line 10 LiangMaQiao subway stop at 55 An Jia Lou Road, Chaoyang District. The Embassy’s website is http://beijing.usembassy-china.org.cn.

If you are residing or traveling in China, we recommend that you enroll with the U.S. Embassy’s Smart Traveler Enrollment Program at: https://travelregistration.state.gov. You should also regularly monitor the Department’s Bureau of Consular Affairs Internet website at http://travel.state.gov while living or traveling abroad.

UDPATE, 6/13, 5:24 pm: Global Times and the Beijinger have both followed up with Elements regarding this incident. First, GT:

A male employee from Elements, who requested anonymity, denied the embassy’s version of events, despite admitting that he was not present, and was told of the incident afterward.

“Two foreigners suddenly started fighting. They severely affected our business that night, and they didn’t stop after we tried to calm them down,” the man said.

The employee claimed that when the club’s security staff intervened, they were the ones assaulted by the foreigners. The club is calculating losses incurred and checking on injuries to its security staff, he said.

Zi Xiangdong, spokesman for the Beijing Municipal Public Security Bureau (PSB), said he was unaware of the incident, and as of press time, was still looking into it.

And the Beijinger:

We spoke to the PR of Elements and they confirmed to us that there was indeed a melee on June 9. The fight got out of hand and the club security was called in to deal with it. In the process, some patrons were ejected from the club. Elements went on to add that their door staff are not trained to hit people with bottles so they’d be very surprised if the attackers were their staffers; it could have been any of the people involved in the original incident.

"If you call me, you're gon' have a bad time."

Thanks, China Daily. Thanks for embedding a reporter deep inside the septic tank that is the Sanlitun Police Bureau and telling us it’s a lustrous fishbowl with that most exotic of exotic creatures, the officer who cares.

This piece, in which reporter Cao Yin is allowed to tail “stocky” 44-year-old Zhang Tao, presumably to see how a scanner works and learn the best way to splash water on piss to defuse the stench, begins about the way you’d expect: with a portly officer citing numbers, because he’s memorized them and it’d be a damn shame if he let that memorization go to waste.

“My area has a residential precinct with more than 11,000 people, including 1,100 temporary residents, as well as a bar street and several foreign embassies,” he said as he led me to his office, which is 100 meters away under a large poplar tree.

And what does Officer Zhang do?

“I’m here from 9 am to 9 pm and on 24-hour call two days a week,” he said, adding with a smile: “My personal cell phone number is an open secret around here.”

No, what is it that you do?

At the entrance to Zhang’s office, which he shares with his 52-year-old assistant, Jin Guiqin, are piles of pamphlets in Chinese and English on visa applications, accommodation and general tips for foreign residents. There is a printer and passport scanner, which means expats can register there as soon as they arrive in Beijing.

No, no, you asshole. What do you do other than sit in the office you share with an assistant with a printer and passport scanner?

Posted on one wall is a large color-coded map of the community’s apartment buildings that Zhang made in 2008.

“The colors show me how many people live in an apartment and what nationality they are,” he explained.

You… racially profile?

One particular compound has more than 50 expats, including Norwegians and Italians, and most are managers or owners of bars and restaurants, Zhang said. Their apartments are marked in blue.

You… monitor residents?

“We update the map once a month and often call to confirm how long residents will stay,” he said.

You… color in maps like a four-year-old?

Jin, his assistant, added that he will regularly text foreign residents or post messages on doors to remind them if their visa or accommodation documents are about to expire.

Oh, yeah… that sounds about right. You harass people about their papers.

But working in such a foreigner-heavy area, you at least harass them in English, right?

“I’m not good at English, but I try explaining regulations to foreigners,” he said. “If someone doesn’t understand me, I’ll show them the service guide and turn to pages in English.”

Uh-huh.

To be fair to these chums, it’s not like they don’t get out every once in a while. Oh no. Sometimes, like four years ago, Officer Zhang had to actually chase someone…

He recalled an incident in 2008 when a drunk British man knocked over a rack of CDs in a store and tried to run away. “The owner was furious. I caught the offender and made him apologize, as well as clean up the mess he’d made,” Zhang said.

Great. Meanwhile, in 2012, this happened, a brutal fight, and we’re told you were notified of it. What did you do, other than nothing?

You continued to do nothing.

Surely this reporter, this Cao Yin, will call you out on your shit, right?

While passing through Nali Patio, I suggested we visit Mosto, an Italian restaurant on the third floor, where we met 48-year-old Luca Fidanza, the assistant manager, who said the owner was unavailable and that he did not speak Chinese.

Wait. Wait wait wait wait wait. Was Mosto offering buy-two-get-one on their entrees? Why in any holy or unholy deity’s name would you decide to get into an elevator up to Mosto while making the rounds in Sanlitun? Was there some huge brawl last week caused by a spilt caper-olive tapenade? Was some poor embassy official served ruined mascarpone? Don’t fuck with a man’s yellow fin tuna ceviche, that’s what I’ve always said.

With that, my first tour with the exit-entry administration was over. Zhang said goodbye and headed back toward the bright lights of Sanlitun Village North.

“See, my work is not just about managing foreign residents,” he said before leaving. “I’m also here to serve them.”

After the launch of Beijing’s campaign against the illegal entry and employment of foreigners on May 15, China Daily submitted a request to follow exit-entry officers carrying out their duties in areas with a large presence of expatriates. This is the first in a series of stories on the subject.

Oh FUCK YOU.

We’ve reached out to the guys who shot the video – Canadians from WorldstarHipHop, as they make abundantly clear in the video — to see if we can get more info. It’s a nasty fight, if one can call it that, with a clear survivor. There are no winners.

“Someone pull him off,” someone says while the guy who’s standing, bloody all over, continues connecting on kicks to the defenseless man on the ground.

“It’s done, it’s done, you’ve won, you’ve won,” someone else says, beginning to sound desperate.

“Someone pull him off, guys, seriously,” one of the people behind the camera implores.

“No, who’s going to pull him off, he’s going to fucking attack you.”

The very last thing we hear in the video is: “Let’s get the fuck out of here, man, honestly. This is enough, bro.”

~

In the spring of 2008, I was sitting on the balcony of the bar Nanjie with a friend when we watched as two factions converged from opposite sides for a brawl; later, walking out of the area at dawn, we passed people carrying studded mallets heading the opposite direction. This was my first Sanlitun experience that year.

A few weeks later, friends and I were drinking outside in an alley near the bar Smugglers when an Algerian and another foreigner went mano-a-mano. This would be Sanlitun Experience No. 2. The Algerian threw his opponent onto a table, which I remember collapsing under his weight. Bloodied and reeling — drunk, probably — the manhandled foreigner picked himself up, grabbed a big beer bottle, and tapped it against the wall. We were confused by his tapping; it defused the situation, actually, but afterwards we thought on it: had he tried harder, or had the bottle hit at just the right angle, the man would have suddenly found a sharp weapon in his hand, and lord knows what drunk combatants, already injured, can do with makeshift knives.

In the years since — beginning a year or two ago — Sanlitun’s gentrification, spurred by the commercial developments around the “Village,” an upscale network of bars, restaurants and shops, began encroaching on the dingier bar streets and alleys. Several bars — shady ones, if I may say so, with names like Kai, Butterfly, and Shooters — in the Smugglers alley shuttered their doors, as that side is slated for renovation and eventual incorporation into a nearby middle/high school’s campus. Yet no matter what the changes, no matter how many bars in the area are given the Beijinger’s Bar of the Year award (two in the last two years), Sanlitun remains, at heart, the Sanlitun I first encountered in 2008, a recidivist’s lair that continues to attract society’s residuum after the rest of us have grown up or gone clean. For an example, look no further than the embedded video, which first appeared on YouTube four days ago WorldstarHipHop’s website on May 23, taken about forty meters from the beginning of the Smugglers alley.

If we hear anything more about this, we’ll update you here.