Shichahai at 55 Decibels: What Is Ruining the "Atmosphere" of a Historic Beijing District?

A bar district that grew up with the government's tacit consent has been told, in the name of "comprehensive rectification," to stop using sound systems and microphones and to keep ambient noise under 55 decibels.

That night Ren Boru had not finished his first song, and the room was only starting to warm up, when the enforcement team from the Xicheng District Culture Committee walked in.

Ren Boru competed on the fourth season of The Voice of China in 2015. He did not advance, but after the show he became a star in the bars of Shichahai, the lakeside scenic area in Beijing. Before each of his sets, the bar would set a glowing sign out front: in five minutes, "Ren Boru of The Voice of China takes the stage."

That night the enforcement officers came in and spoke straight to the audience: "Stop drinking, all of you. Get up and go outside." Then the police asked the manager for the venue's performance qualification papers and the performers' certificates — the "singer's license" that would soon draw so much attention. After that, the singers and the servers were taken away.

At 9 p.m. on August 19, trouble reached Heaven and Earth, a bar on the north bank of Qianhai. The next night its lights stayed off. On the third day the storefront was walled off with blue sheet metal, and a red banner reading "Strictly Regulate Bar Operations" went up on the building across from its entrance.

1.

On August 20, the WeChat official account Flyer Music published a piece titled "Do You Have a Singer's License?" It carried a screenshot of a WeChat Moments post, the poster's name blurred out, which read: Houhai bars have started checking singer's licenses; the mixing console, the instruments and the speakers have all been carried off; it looks like several singers are about to be taken away. The screenshot came with three blurry photos from the scene and a string of angry comments.

By the morning of August 24, "Do You Have a Singer's License?" had more than 70,000 clicks.

On August 21, the singer Li Zhi wrote on Weibo: "Everyone's Moments feed is full of 'Do You Have a Singer's License' today. We ran into something similar. On the 334 tour, in one city, we prepared a whole stack of papers to get approval: the company's business license, the agent's certificate, the performance qualification document, the set list, the lyrics, the venue information, and so on. The district culture bureau official asked, do you have performers' certificates? And then they refused to let us play. We had to go try our luck in another district."

On August 23, another WeChat official account, Rocker, followed up with "I've Sung in Bars for Over a Decade, and Only Today Did I Learn It Was Illegal!" It traveled much further than the first piece, and people began to believe that from now on every singer would need a license to perform in public. Within a day, Rocker's article had passed "Do You Have a Singer's License?" in readership and crossed 100,000 views.

In Shichahai, many bar owners and workers had seen the argument online too. On August 18 and 19, three bars were inspected in all: besides Heaven and Earth, there were Yipin Chang and Attic.

On August 22, every bar on Qianhai and Houhai received "A Letter to Businesses Operating in the Shichahai Scenic Area," signed by the Shichahai Scenic Area Comprehensive Administrative Enforcement Center. It said that because of problems with environmental order and noise disturbance in Shichahai, and in connection with the review and rectification of the area's 4A tourist rating, a rectification campaign would be carried out there. The rules said nothing about a singer's license, but item two read: "The use of sound systems and microphones is prohibited; ambient noise may not exceed 55 decibels."

For the bar owners and the singers, that line did far more damage than the "singer's license."

According to an American noise-decibel self-test chart, two people whispering register about 30 decibels, and ordinary conversation about 60. The chart also carries a warning from the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association: long-term exposure to 50 decibels of noise at night can contribute to cardiovascular disease, and 55 decibels can hurt children's learning.

Except that the bars' noise is not measured in a residential area. It is measured at the bar's front door.

Workers at several Houhai bars said they were worried, and all refused to give their names for fear the campaign would come for them next. "Not letting the volume go over 55 decibels means not letting anyone sing," one of them said. "If you can't sing, the bar can't stay open. If the bars close, the singers have nowhere to sing either. This scenic area only has any life in it because of the bar street. Without the bar street, can this place stay lively at all?"

By the afternoon of August 24 the argument over the singer's license had grown louder. People outside the music business joined in the questioning. At 5 p.m. that day the Xicheng District Culture Committee posted a response on the official Beijing Xicheng Weibo account: its enforcement team supervised performance venues and performances according to the law, and there was no rule barring anyone from performing without a "singer's license." The response said only that the scenic area had many problems. It did not mention the 4A review behind the campaign.

Several people who knew Heaven and Earth well confirmed to QDaily that the singer's-license story was true — the officers who came in did ask for singer's licenses. The singer was taken away afterward, but "it was nothing, he went and signed something and came back a while later."

On August 25, a singer with a regular slot at a Houhai bar told QDaily that even though the culture committee had answered clearly about the singer's license, he still did not know whether he could keep singing there safely without one. "People have been talking about cleaning up the bars since last year. These past few days are different. This time they mean it." The campaign, he felt, was about him.

2.

Shichahai sits beside Prince Gong's Mansion, Nanluoguxiang, the Drum Tower, Beihai Park and Jingshan Park. It has the look of old Beijing, it costs nothing to enter, and it is the only open scenic area with a stretch of open water inside Beijing's inner city. That made it a favorite for tourists at night, and bars came to meet the demand.

Qianhai and Houhai adjoin each other; Xihai is connected to both but set slightly apart. So the bars all opened on Qianhai and Houhai, running along both sides of the water. Hutongs line the scenic area, and many have been rebuilt, one side facing the lake, the other backing onto a residential block.

Some of these houses are publicly owned, some private, and title is often unclear. Before Yipin Chang, Heaven and Earth and Attic were sealed, a bar on the north bank of Houhai had already been raided; the building was later demolished, leaving a fenced-off empty lot. A worker at a nearby bar who knew the story said: "That bar's building had no property deed, so they tore it down."

Many Shichahai bars have floor-to-ceiling windows, with the stage facing the street, so that people walking past can hear and see the singer. Several bars used to run pole-dancing shows as well, which often drew a crowd. In April and May of this year, all of it was stopped as part of the scenic area's rectification.

Besides pulling tourists in with performances, almost every bar also posts people on the street to solicit customers — one or two at the smaller places, six or seven at the larger ones. A singer with a regular slot at one bar told QDaily: "Once the tourists are inside, they drink and listen to music. A bottle of beer runs about 40 yuan, cheaper than the bars in Sanlitun. Apart from a few places that lay on hostess service, the so-called 'princesses,' most of these bars are really pretty simple businesses."

A server at a bar on Qianhai said: "Honestly, by midnight there's hardly anyone left in Shichahai and the street goes quiet. The latest we stay open now is 2 a.m.; once the customers go, we can close up. The people who come here are tourists. The real late-night bar scene is in Sanlitun and Wudaokou."

For bars living off tourists, the rent here is higher than around the Drum Tower, or even Nanluoguxiang, which serve the same trade. In Shichahai a bar's rent alone usually runs to several thousand yuan a day; add servers and singers, and daily costs top 10,000 yuan. Daily takings run 20,000 to 30,000 yuan, so even at those costs the bars still make money.

A security guard from a property management company who had just been posted to Shichahai told QDaily that, as he saw it, this scenic area is a troublesome place. Residents and businesses alike love to complain and report each other. Residents live too close and complain that it is too noisy and too chaotic. Businesses, wanting to earn more, complain about the peddlers who come in and take their customers.

A resident of the scenic area sat on a flower bed by the street and pointed at the phone in his hand, which was playing music. "See? Today's all right, I can actually hear this. Before, if I wanted to listen to a little tune out here, forget it, I couldn't hear a thing. Everyone with money has moved away. Those of us without money, what can we do? We still have to live here. One word: endure." The worst nights, he said, were Christmas. Before he retired, he got up at 5 a.m. one Christmas morning to go to work. "I'm telling you, they went all night, still singing at five. Think about it: everywhere else around here is housing, quiet everywhere, and just that one spot making noise. How could it not be loud?!"

3.

On the night of August 25, the first bar to be closed showed a sign of life: after a week dark, lights came on behind the blue barrier wall at Yipin Chang Teahouse.

The owner, sitting inside, would not be interviewed, but the lights gave workers at nearby bars some confidence. All three closed bars, they thought, would reopen soon.

A friend of Attic's owner said reopening still depended on passing an inspection. The standards he meant were the ten rectification requirements set out in the August 22 letter, among them "unlicensed commercial performances are prohibited, and stages may not be built without authorization" and "unauthorized installation or use of lighting is prohibited."

In its statement after the singer's-license episode, the Xicheng District Culture Committee said the three bars were closed because "they lacked qualification as commercial performance venues, and their resident performances had not been approved; they were carrying out performance activity without permission."

Bar owners doubted that answer too. Under the relevant rules, a bar applying for a Commercial Performance License must meet four requirements, including employing three people who hold performance-agent certificates and having registered capital and premises that match its scope of business.

A worker at a bar near Yipin Chang said that in Houhai "probably not one bar has that license. That's something only the big talent agencies need." The owner of another bar, across the water from Attic, said: "Nobody has it. But nobody said we needed it when we opened. Whether we need it or not, we need a straight answer now. Whatever it takes, we'll go get it."

The question was no longer the singer's license or the commercial performance license, but the blurry "ten standards." Besides permits, lighting and stages, there was noise, and there was food service. The standards issued by the Comprehensive Enforcement Center were too complicated to pin down, and they showed how the campaign around Shichahai had been tightening, layer by layer, over six months. A cigarette vendor near Yinding Bridge said the bars had first lost their third floors and their sunrooms, and that soon the second floors would go too.

In December 2016, the China National Tourism Administration began what it called the strictest scenic-area rectification in history, penalizing 367 areas rated 4A and below to varying degrees. Shichahai and six other 4A areas in Beijing were given warnings for "poor overall management, disorderly supporting facilities and services, mixed pedestrian and vehicle traffic, and safety hazards."

That left the scenic area's staff, who had been building a "vibrant, charming, harmonious Shichahai" since 2012, badly rattled. Under the threat of losing the rating, a comprehensive cleanup of Shichahai and Houhai followed.

In early 2017 the Beijing municipal government launched another campaign, "Relieve, Rectify, Improve: Building a Harmonious and Livable Capital." The Shichahai subdistrict, already deep in rectification work, joined that one too, and became a model for "demolishing illegal construction, fixing 'wall-breaking and hole-opening' — unauthorized storefront conversions — and clearing out unlicensed businesses."

Six months later there were no outdoor tables and chairs left outside the scenic area, and no unauthorized sunrooms or second-floor terraces. A Beijing Television report titled "Shichahai's Special Rectification Presses On, Restoring the Old Character" announced the latest result: from the start of 2017 to the end of June, Shichahai's 168 bars had torn down 4,000 square meters of illegal construction.

These measures ended a decade of easy living for the operators of Shichahai's bar street. In half a year the Comprehensive Enforcement Center had pulled down neon signs as light pollution, gone after illegal construction that spoiled the old capital's character, checked peddlers' food-service permits, and now confiscated speakers and microphones.

Nerves spread quickly along the bar street. The closing of three bars on August 19, 2017 convinced the rest that one wrong move could cost them their own shop. A bar owner who asked not to be named described the mood as "everyone frightened." That is how the singer's-license rumor began to travel.

An employee at a bar on the north bank of Houhai thought all of it could have been avoided by planning ahead. "The government let people open bars, and it let the second floors go up. Now they're tearing them down with all this fanfare..."

Shichahai has never had a settled history.

In the 1990s the government reopened the Shichahai Lotus Market, which had flourished in the late Qing and early Republican years. From May to July, when the lotuses bloomed, tourists filled it. Food stalls gathered there quickly and brought pollution with them. In 1996, to protect the surrounding environment, the government renamed the Lotus Market the Shichahai Antiques Market. In 2005, with a cultural development company involved, the Beijing Municipal Commerce Bureau renamed it again: the Shichahai Tea Art and Bar Specialty Commercial Street.

Today, in the Xicheng District Culture Committee's statements, the word "bar" comes wrapped in quotation marks.

4.

After August 19, workers at several bars near Yinding Bridge had a new job on top of standing outside to pull in tourists: keeping the bar's front door shut at all times.

Along the busiest stretches, where customers come and go constantly, the music inside slips out over Houhai's water with every swing of the door. Guitar and drums that used to carry now blur behind the glass.

Before August 19, the job had not mattered so much.

Every bar operator has met inspectors carrying decibel meters. In the past the inspectors would stand on the road in front of the bar and wave a hand toward the door, and the music would come down.

Residents have complained about the noise as well. Near the shuttered Heaven and Earth, more than one peddler and resident said that while it was open the music carried a hundred meters, all the way across the water. It sold itself on "new songs, new singers, new bands," and from inside, customers looked straight out at the widest stretch of water between Houhai's south bank and Yinding Bridge. Business there had always been good.

In the past, they only had to close the doors as a formality around 7 p.m. That was when the Comprehensive Enforcement Center's vehicles made their round of Houhai. For that half hour the noisy lake fell silent: sound engineers pulled the volume down, servers at the door shut the windows and doors tight, peddlers moved their boxes of goods onto nearby electric scooters, and the three-wheelers touting for passengers hurried off into the hutongs.

But the Shichahai Scenic Area Comprehensive Administrative Enforcement Center wants that silence to last.

In its August 22 "Letter to All Businesses Operating in the Scenic Area," the center cited the Urban Area Environmental Noise Standard of the People's Republic of China, which sets "the maximum ambient noise limit for business establishments at 55 decibels from 6:00 to 22:00, and 45 decibels from 22:00 to 6:00 the next morning."

A worker at a bar on the north bank of Houhai showed QDaily the decibel meter on his phone. "I downloaded a decibel meter myself. Mine may not be accurate, but you can download one and test it yourself. Look, nobody's singing inside right now, we're on a break. Measure it now. See? Seventy to 90 decibels."

5.

Houhai has gone quiet.

On the stone bridge that joins Houhai's north and south banks, an auxiliary police officer who has worked there for three years has noticed the music on both sides of the water fading since April. "I use a loudspeaker to tell tourists not to stop on the bridge. It used to be hard to get over them — the bars, I mean. I had to turn the loudspeaker up, and I'd change the batteries four times a night. It's much better now. I can keep it lower, and three changes are enough."

The clearest change is on the signs outside the bars. In late June, the giant neon sign outside Houhai No. 5 on the north bank came down, and a worker arriving the next day briefly thought he had walked into the wrong shop. Under the scenic area's "relieve, rectify, improve" campaign, more and more lit signs have been replaced with wooden plaques.

Today, on both sides of Yinding Bridge, fewer than five bars still have lights on the second floor. The operator of a nearby bar whose second floor has already been removed said those buildings survive because the additions were built so solidly that tearing them down would cost a great deal. "They reinforced the second floor with rebar and faced it in gray brick, so it looks as if the second floor was always there. It's illegal construction, same as ours was."

Not far from that bar — neon still flashing, second floor still standing — the sanitation worker responsible for the whole street has already made his plans. When that second floor comes down, he said, he will probably need other coworkers to help haul the debris away.

Foot traffic keeps dropping. A worker at a bar near Attic said the past six months have been especially obvious. "Down by... more than a third, I'd say." He thought about it and added: "Actually I think it's half."

The crowds on the stone bridge are thinning too. With no bars to hold them, tourists walk faster.

Houhai is still a stop that visitors to Beijing make. A sound engineer who has worked here for ten years said that, compared with what the campaign has done to the bar street, he cares more about how much clearer Houhai's water has become now that there are fewer tourists.

6.

The people who live in Shichahai got here in all sorts of ways. There is housing once allotted by factories and government offices, there are ministry-level compounds, and there are people renting rooms to run a business, or short-term tenants drawn by the easy transit and the novelty of living here.

There are also many valuable siheyuan courtyard houses. Talk to residents and they will casually point out one worth more than 100 million yuan. Because the sums are so large, sales like these have been news since 2007.

Shichahai faces the same problem as many of Beijing's hutong neighborhoods: resale housing goes for 110,000 to 150,000 yuan a square meter, but the title to many of these homes is not held by the people living in them, so the houses cannot be bought or sold. Residents are stuck in homes that are falling apart and expensive at the same time.

On August 24, after posting its response about the singer's license, the official Beijing Xicheng account put up another Weibo post, "Shichahai's Most Beautiful 'Lake-Viewing Point' Opens," tagged "Relieve, Rectify, Improve" — the official name of the campaign, whose stated purpose is to "relieve Beijing of functions not core to its role as the capital, and optimize the capital's development layout."

Five of the account's posts that day carried the tag.

After the bar street's illegal construction came down in late June 2017, a Beijing Morning Post report said the street might keep some of its bars while bringing in taverns with more Chinese character.

Duan Yunsong, head of the Shichahai Chamber of Commerce, said they were planning to turn the bar street into a "street of museums," using new-media displays on the walls of the businesses to play historical films about Shichahai, and putting symbols of Chinese drinking culture — large screens of classical poetry, for instance — inside each bar.

Cover image by Shan Chai