Submitted by admin on Fri, 2005-11-25 09:00. ::
Mao Zedong may have declared that "he who does not reach the Great Wall is not a true man". But the Chairman must have been turning in his Tiananmen Square mausoleum this summer when 1,500 partygoers descended on a section of the wall near Beijing for an all-night rave.
Now, after complaints of "bawdy" behaviour from an outraged Chinese media, the authorities have banned any subsequent parties from taking place on China's most famous landmark.
Widely publicised pictures from the party in July of a Westerner urinating on one of the Seven Wonders of the World, and of scantily-dressed ravers dancing till dawn, led one Hong Kong magazine to thunder that the Great Wall had been taken over by "sex, drugs and rock'n'roll". Such was the outcry that this week the local tourism bureau was relieved by the local government of its responsibility for running the Jinshanling section of the wall in Hebei province, where the rave took place.
But complaints about the party, which was attended by both locals and expats, have highlighted the failure of the Chinese to maintain the Great Wall. It may be the only man-made structure visible from space - depending on whether you're an American or Chinese astronaut - but the lack of specific regulations to protect it means that much of the 4,500-mile structure has disappeared or lies in ruins.
Desertification, earthquakes and wars have all caused damage, but the most significant destruction is man-made and has occurred in the past 20 years. "New roads and towns and tourism have changed the wall a lot," said William Lindesay, a long-term British resident of Beijing who founded the International Friends of the Great Wall Society in 2001 to lobby the government for its protection.
Just over 2,700 miles of the wall still stand, only half of which is in reasonable condition. "One of the problems is that there's this belief that because the wall isn't jade or porcelain it can look after itself," said Mr Lindesay. "But China has modernised so much in the past 10 years that unless something much more effective is done to protect it, a lot more will be lost. The best example of man-made damage is when you go to a particular site and there's nothing there and you have to look at an old photo to see where the wall was."
Built to keep out the Mongol hordes, the Great Wall dates back over 2,000 years to the Qin dynasty - although most of what is left now was built in the 14th century - and stretches through nine provinces, from Liaoning in the east to Gansu in the west. Its size means it is almost impossible to monitor what goes on along its length, but much of the damage has been caused by road construction. In 2003 in Shaanxi province, engineers blasted sections out of the wall to build slip roads for a new highway.
Problems are also caused by people living near the wall who have traditionally regarded it as a source of free building materials. "I think the pillaging of bricks is less than it was," said Mr Lindesay. "But I still see it occasionally. I've come across farmers using pick-axes to break the wall up because they want to build a pig sty or something." Increased domestic and foreign tourism has only exacerbated the wall's decline. Although it was designated a World Heritage Site by Unesco in 1989, the cost of maintaining the wall is too high for the Chinese government, which has delegated the responsibility to local authorities. But many have leased their sections of the wall to commercial companies to generate the revenue needed. This has turned the most-visited sections of the wall into litter-strewn, graffiti-covered markets that sell tourist trinkets.
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