How Does a Rooftop Sign Go Up on a Street — and How Does It Come Down?

It once took layer after layer of approval to put up. Now it comes down overnight.

There are now two competing stories about what Beijing's skyline will look like.

On December 8, the Haidian District Urban Management Commission issued a notice suspending the "Special Campaign to Clean Up the Skyline of Buildings." The suspension, it said, was decided at a meeting of the Beijing Municipal Urban Management Commission, out of concern that cold, dry weather makes accidents more likely, and that with no replacement signs going up, people were having trouble finding their way. A report The Beijing News published on the 11th said several staff members had confirmed the document.

But when QDaily called the official listed on the notice again on the afternoon of the 11th to check the news, the official would not confirm or deny it. Around the same time, that Beijing News report disappeared from Chinese websites.

Across Beijing's districts, the work went on. China Business Journal reported that on December 10 — two days after the notice — a crew was still taking down a Tencent Video sign in Haidian District. As of December 13, signs were still coming down on Xidawang Road in Chaoyang District. In some places the work simply stopped halfway: the sign on Peking University People's Hospital had been cut back to "People's Hospital," and the China Southern Airlines Building had lost the character for "South," leaving a sign that read, roughly, "Airlines Building."

Nobody knows what happens next to the "Special Campaign to Clean Up the Skyline of Buildings," which has already been running for half a month. Starting on November 27, the signs on buildings along streets across Beijing began vanishing one by one — party and government offices, hotels, universities, the logos on Baidu's and Tencent's office towers — all torn down within two weeks. None of them lasted long enough to see the suspension notice.

Neither did the Oriental Garden Hotel on Beijing's East Second Ring Road. Before dawn on December 7, two cranes were already parked at the hotel's main entrance. Just after 8 a.m., workers in uniforms and hard hats climbed onto the lift platform and rose toward the giant sign on the hotel's outside wall.

The wall carried six red Chinese characters spelling out the hotel's name, plus a logo and a green English sign. Each character stood a little over 2 meters tall. The workers cut through the steel pins holding the characters in place one at a time, and the big characters dropped off the wall, leaving clear rust stains behind.

Three men on the ground collected the pieces as they came down and waved passersby away from the danger zone. One of them pointed at a building across the street, where the sign sat on a bracket on the roof. "This kind is very hard to take down. That kind is easy — you just cut the bracket, and you can do two in a day," he told QDaily. Today's job would take a full day. His crew had spent the past two weeks on jobs like it.

The Oriental Garden Hotel is a five-star hotel under Jin Jiang International. It opened in 1997 and sits 500 meters from Dongzhimen subway station.

By about 2:30 that afternoon, the sign on the podium building was gone, and half the hotel's name with it. In one day, Beijing's "skyline" had lost a few more characters.

That sign had not gone up in a day or two.

Every sign now hanging had to clear district-level urban management approval — two weeks at the fastest

Rooftop signs fall into roughly three kinds: plaques giving a building's name, as in "XX Building"; signs carrying the name of a company or an institution, such as hotel signs; and outdoor advertising panels fixed to an outside wall.

Whichever kind it is, the sign belongs to the building's owner — but the owner's rights over it come with limits. "Property rights over the 'skyline' are limited rights, bounded by laws, regulations, and urban management rules," Ju Qinyi, a lawyer at Beijing Weiheng (Shanghai) Law Firm, told QDaily.

Those limits show up in the approval a sign needs before it goes up. In Beijing, every outdoor sign must be approved by the district urban management department.

The approval costs nothing, but it takes a long time and a lot of paperwork, so filing it for other people has become a business. According to three such agencies that spoke to QDaily, the approval alone takes about two weeks.

Before applying, the business putting up the sign has to prepare detailed construction drawings and renderings — what the finished sign will look like, and how big it will be.

The location has to be filed too: a map printed on a sheet of A4 paper, with the exact spot where the sign will sit clearly marked.

Those materials, plus the company's business license and either a lease or proof of property ownership, go to the agent, who submits them to the district urban management commission to start the approval.

The standards come from the Beijing Municipal Standards for the Installation and Management of Building Nameplates and Signage, rules written in 2007 that run to four chapters and 22 articles and set out, in detail, the size, area, and placement of signs on buildings. No advertising signs on glass curtain walls. On buildings over 18 meters tall, characters must be between 2 and 3 meters high. A sign may not cover more than 20% of the wall it hangs on, or extend past the wall's edges.

If a business's design meets every requirement, it gets an administrative approval document two weeks later, usually valid for one year, after which it has to be renewed. Then the business can hire an advertising company to build and install the sign to the specifications in the application.

The process doesn't end there. Once a sign is up, more than one government department watches over it.

Signs on high-rise buildings involve wiring, which brings in fire safety; lit signs can affect traffic. According to the Beijing Municipal Standards for the Installation and Management of Building Nameplates and Signage, the departments with a hand in overseeing a single sign also include land and planning, industry and commerce, transport, tourism, landscaping, traffic police, and urban management law enforcement. If a sign is found not to comply, the urban management department can order it taken down.

From design through approval to fabrication, the whole thing can cost a company tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands, of yuan. "The [agency] fee varies a lot, case by case," said a sales representative at one agency. "Frankly, a change in leadership, or how tightly policy is being enforced, will both move the price."

A salesperson who makes outdoor signs told QDaily that they quote by the area of the final design: for a sign of five characters, each 2 meters tall and 2 meters wide, fabrication and installation alone would run at least 50,000 yuan.

That is the process for a rooftop or wall sign. Commercial advertising panels are more complicated still.

Advertising panels are harder to get approved — and Beijing already cleared more than 30,000 of them in 2007

For commercial signs, approval runs through the Beijing Municipal Measures for the Administration of Outdoor Advertising. In 2007, with the Beijing Olympics coming, the rules were revised — tightening control over advertising on vehicles, for instance: ads "may not be placed on the front of a vehicle, on the front or rear windshield, or on the side windows, and may not fully cover the vehicle's original paint color."

That same year, Beijing ran a cleanup campaign against outdoor advertising and signage. Every route tied to Olympic crowds was made a priority: the roads out to the airport, the areas around the Bird's Nest and the Water Cube. Bus advertising was cleaned up too — buses would no longer be allowed to carry spray-painted or posted medical advertising, inside or out. Ads on newspaper display boards, information kiosks, bus shelters, and street-name signs all came down as well. By the end of September that year, the city had removed 16,907 outdoor advertising panels and 15,878 nameplates and signs.

In other words, Beijing's outdoor advertising panels and signs, large and small, already went through one big cleanup a decade ago, and every sign legally hanging today has passed review under the 2007 standard.

Approving a location only makes the ad space itself legal. The advertising content goes through a review of its own.

A salesperson in the outdoor advertising business told QDaily that this takes another one to two weeks. Take a large ad on the wall of a building: an advertising company negotiates with the building's property managers for the right to sell that space. When a client wants to run an ad, the agency checks whether the space is free, signs a contract, collects the client's business credentials and the artwork, and runs an internal check of the content against advertising law and past experience.

The content materials then go to the district industry and commerce bureau, which rules within seven working days. Only after the bureau approves is the ad fully legal, and only then can the advertising company produce it and put it up.

The new cleanup began in September and accelerated at the end of November

But the 2007 Beijing Municipal Standards for the Installation and Management of Building Nameplates and Signage has been voided. This past September, the Beijing Municipal Urban Management Commission issued a new rule, 3,900 characters long.

Any sign already in place that does not meet the new rule counts as a violation and has to come down.

Under the new rule, most of the building signs approved and installed under the 2007 standard became illegal structures overnight. The landmark "W" on top of the W Hotel, for one, breaks at least two provisions: a sign "may not extend beyond the top edge of the building," and "above the third floor, only the name of the building may be displayed, not the name of a company."

"To be precise, this is only a local government rule, not a law — in the hierarchy set by the Legislation Law it sits at the lowest level," the lawyer Ju Qinyi told QDaily. Seen through the Legislation Law, she said, the new signage standard may conflict with higher-level law, or go beyond the urban management department's authority. Does the urban management department really have the power to settle a matter like this? Can an administrative body apply a single blanket rule retroactively to things already in place? These are all open questions.

"Personally, I think a matter this big, covering this many buildings across the whole city, is past what one administrative document from the government can handle. It should go through the local People's Congress, as a local regulation."

But the urban management department did not hesitate. The removal of signs began soon after the new rule came out.

Under the municipal commission's plan, all 16 of Beijing's districts were to "mobilize and deploy, and talk to property managers, businesses, and property owners" and issue notices by the end of October. Demolition would run from November 11 to December 22. Chang'an Avenue and its extensions and the Second, Third, and Fourth Ring Roads were the priority. District departments would carry out inspections at the end of December, and every non-compliant advertising panel was to be gone by January 2018.

Like a lot of what has happened in Beijing lately, the work sped up at the end of November.

On November 27, the Beijing Municipal Urban Management Commission, the Beijing Municipal Commission of Planning and Land Resources, and the Beijing Municipal Comprehensive Administrative Law Enforcement Bureau jointly issued the Notice on Launching the Special Campaign to Clean Up the Skyline of Buildings, ordering every district to clear away non-compliant signs starting the day the notice appeared. By the "interim results" the Beijing Municipal Urban Management Commission and the Beijing Urban Management Law Enforcement Bureau released on December 2, the city had already taken down 8,956 non-compliant advertising panels and signs, with more than 27,000 still to go.

Judging from the removal scenes turning up on social media, those 27,000 signs cover a wide range of industries — hotels, malls, hospitals, apartment buildings, internet companies, state-owned enterprises, public institutions — and many landmark buildings lost the signage over their entrances in a single day.

"Bald now… stay tuned for the Chinese National Geography logo to come back in a new form," the official Weibo account of Chinese National Geography wrote, with a photo of a crane pulling the sign off the top of the magazine's building. Signs on buildings along the Wangfujing pedestrian street and Liangguang Avenue and in Tiantan Subdistrict had been coming down since September.

The notice told "party and government agencies, public institutions, military units stationed in Beijing, agencies stationed in Beijing, and state-owned enterprises to take the lead and remove their own signs," and state media including Guangming Daily, China Radio International, and China Daily duly stripped theirs.

Rooftop signs are not the whole of it. The work also reaches storefronts along the street and freestanding pillar ads. Last week the signs over Qingfeng Baozi Shop and Huguosi Snacks came off, and the shops hung temporary banners — white lettering on red — in their place.

Clearing the small shops' signs had already started this summer, one street at a time, with new signs going up over the following weeks.

Security staff at the Oriental Garden Hotel told QDaily, on the day its sign came down, that they had received a rectification notice back in October, but it had never been posted anywhere in the building. At the China Southern Airlines Building by Guomao Bridge on the East Third Ring Road, staff in the ground-floor hotel lobby, from the front desk to reception, likewise said they had never seen a removal notice and did not know what it said — even as the sign above their heads was already coming apart.

On December 10, the Procuratorial Daily, a paper under the Supreme People's Procuratorate, ran an article calling the sign cleanup "a one-sided emphasis on efficiency that ignores due process and the protection of the interests of the parties affected."

The article asked questions: is there any compensation for the units and individuals affected? And why was there no public hearing before the revised standard was issued? Under the Administrative Licensing Law, when the withdrawal of an administrative license "causes property loss to a citizen, legal person, or other organization, the administrative authority shall compensate them in accordance with the law."

The signs end up as scrap, sold off by the crews

By the urban management notice, the cost of taking a sign down falls on the business itself, and a business that misses the deadline will, "where laws and regulations are violated, be entered into the corporate credit and personal credit systems."

A salesperson who makes outdoor signs confirmed to QDaily that he has lately been taking orders from building owners to remove them: once the urban management department sets a deadline for rectification, the business hires his crew, usually for a few thousand to a few tens of thousands of yuan a job. The company used to help people put signs up; for the past two weeks, he said, it has been "basically just taking characters down — putting them up, hardly at all."

There is another account, though. The man in charge of the removal at an office building next to the Oriental Garden Hotel said the money came from the subdistrict office, and that the workers were paid by the day, usually 100 to 200 yuan each.

This one sign took six workers two days. The demolition itself does not take long, but before starting, the crew has to apply to the subdistrict office for a "hot-work permit." Then there is the noise: "You have to do it while they" — the company whose sign is coming down — "are on a break. You can't disturb people, so you take a bit down, stop, take a bit more down… this is a job that makes people angry at you, after all," the supervisor said.

By his account, every non-compliant sign along the East Second Ring Road had to be gone by December 15 — a month and a half ahead of the end-of-January deadline the municipal urban management department had set.

By the time the Oriental Garden Hotel's sign was half down, the sign from an office building 50 meters away was already a pile of scrap in front of the building. Only one character was still legible, the one meaning "voucher"; the rest was a heap of red steel frame cut into pieces.

Past 3 p.m., the workers had gone, and a site supervisor in his twenties was haggling with a few middle-aged scrap buyers.

The seller named a price of 3,000 yuan. The buyers did not look satisfied. "This sign was worth more than 100,000 yuan," the supervisor said. "A company like that isn't short of money."

After a standoff, the crew took the 3,000 yuan anyway — money on top of what they were paid for the job.

Before 4 p.m., the sign and steel frame that had reportedly cost more than 100,000 yuan to put up were cut into smaller pieces and loaded, batch by batch, onto two pedal tricycles.

With Haidian District's notice, the "Special Campaign to Clean Up the Skyline of Buildings" is uncertain again. Some signs in mid-removal have been left where the work stopped.

On December 13, the rooftop sign on Peking University People's Hospital was down to the four characters reading "People's Hospital." The China Southern Airlines Building near Guomao was also half finished: after the character for "South" came off last Saturday, the three remaining characters — "Airlines Building" — had hung untouched for a week, the cut steel frame still standing against the rooftop skyline.

For now, they are part of Beijing's new skyline.

Graphics: Feng Xiuxia

Cover image shot on site