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Bright lights, big city

By Erik Nilsson (China Daily)
Updated: 2008-08-19 08:18

Beijinger Jack Zhu, who runs the country's biggest nightlife website, clubzone.cn, with a membership of more than 260,000, says that when he returned from Canada in 2003, there were two mega-clubs - defined as larger than 1,000 sq m - in Beijing and two in Shanghai. Today, there are 19 in the capital, in addition to several smaller e-clubs and about 400 bars.

"Now, it's an industry," Zhu says.

Increasingly, the outside world is taking notice. In the past few years, all of the World Top 10 DJs, including Tiesto, Paul Van Dyk and Carl Cox, have visited the country, and many have by now made several trips.

"China has been put on the club map of the world," says Zhang Youdai, the 21-year scene veteran hailed as the "Godfather of Chinese DJs" and the first Chinese DJ featured in Rolling Stone.

When Cox came in 2006, he told China Daily: "China is booming with fabrics, construction, cranes and new cars, and the music industry and club culture is growing with it, too.

"There is a group of Chinese people now with high disposable incomes who want to dress up and go to nightclubs that play this type of music China is a happening place, and that's why I'm here."

As its growing pains recede, China's maturing nightlife is diversifying.

Zhu points out as examples of this: ChinaDoll targets clientele from creative industries, while All Star, which opened last Friday, will features an NBA-oriented hip-hop theme.

ChinaDoll owner Ai Wan says that with this diversification, "Everybody uses their own ideas, so there's not so much copying" - a problem that once plagued the country's nightspot owners.

And with the scene's maturation, it has gone from something transplanted from the West to something cultivated in China.

"The biggest clubs that are always packed are the local clubs; they're more packed than the Western ones," Michael Xu, who opened Bed Bar in the capital's Dongcheng district in 2005, says.

Between swills of a cocktail imbibed in the street in front of Shooters in Beijing's Sanlitun bar district, Beijinger Yu Qiurui says: "Of course going to bars and clubs is a Chinese thing. I don't know why, but I can't think of it any other way."

Clad in baggy paints, a loose teal T-shirt and a black-and-white "truckers' cap", the 28-year-old Tom.com director says the appeal for her is meeting new people and dancing.

"I love hip-hop so much; I could sing along with it and dance to it every day of every year." But since discovering the capital's nightlife two years ago, she's indulged in its offerings about twice a week.

Alan Wong, who runs The Beach in the Block 8 complex near Chaoyang Park's West Gate, points out that China's nightlife is taking a path increasingly unique from that of the West.

Chinese clubs "are much larger than anywhere else in the world" - often exceeding 2,000 sq m - and Chinese people don't just party on weekends, he explains.

"You can name any city in the world, you won't have 4,000 people cramming into a club on a Tuesday night," Wong says.

However, while a growing number of Chinese are embracing nightlife, many still shun it as something "bad people" do.

"People still have stereotypes about nightclubs, especially the parents' generation; they've never been to nightclubs, so they don't know what's happening," Zhu says.

 

 

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