The Rise and Fall of the Nightclubs, and the People Who Drift Through Them | This Is Wudaokou, Where the Young People Are ①

The place is filled with a kind of fleeting, random happiness. "You get the feeling that just by sitting there motionless, clutching a drink, they've found a doorway into a world of hope."

Wudaokou wears several labels: college hub, startup hub, internet-finance hub, center of Beijing's underground rock scene, center of Beijing's nightlife, and a magnet for foreigners.

More than ten universities sit close together here, including Peking University — jokingly called the "Zhongguancun College of Applied Arts and Sciences" — and Tsinghua University, nicknamed the "Wudaokou Vocational and Technical School." There are also a handful of internet companies — Sina, NetEase, Sohu — which, though a bit past their prime in the internet world, still employ a fairly young workforce. And then there's Huaqing Jiayuan, the residential compound that has hatched one internet upstart after another — Kuaishou, Xiaonei, Baofeng, Fanfou, Meituan, Kuxun, Zhuaxia, Meilishuo, Kuwo and Yijian among them — with a combined market value said to reach 50 billion US dollars. For a while it was also one of the two main Korean enclaves in Beijing (the other being Wangjing).

The most common nickname, of course, is "the Center of the Universe" — said to come from U-Center, the mall built on the site of the old Wudaokou Department Store, which more than 30 years ago was the busiest spot in Wudaokou.

These labels all have something to do with young people.

We chose three angles for writing about Wudaokou. One is the rise and fall of the nightclubs and the people who drift through them. The second is 706, a small, busy space in Wudaokou that runs all kinds of excited, high-energy events, trying out every possibility. The third is the universities here — the kind of person you meet on every campus, who seems to want to know everyone (and maybe really does), and who turns up on every kind of occasion. They are ambitious, hungry to explore a world that has just opened in front of them.

We put all of it down to young hormones.

Vigorous, and unafraid.

This is the first installment.

The Beggar Zhang Rong and a Few Nepalis

Just past 11 p.m., Zhang Rong, who is from Henan, carries her white enamel bowl from one young person to the next, asking for money. Her main targets are the ones chatting each other up, the ones who are drunk, and the ones dressed "flashy." On a good night she can make a hundred yuan or so — better than a whole day standing outside the Zhongguancun Book Building.

In her five years in Beijing she has never changed her turf. There are a lot of students here, and a lot of people willing to hand over money on a whim; someone is always unwilling to lose face in front of the opposite sex.

Zhang Rong earned her first coin of the night from a dejected Nepali man.

He was standing outside Global with two buddies. After some discussion, he had been picked as the one in charge of "finding girls" tonight. Two girls from Beijing University of Chemical Technology were sitting on the edge of a flowerbed less than ten meters away, already half drunk. "I want to find a foreign boyfriend," one said loudly. "A foreigner suits you better anyway — aren't you Muslim?" the other answered.

The Nepali man pulled a cigarette from his pocket and walked up to the Muslim girl: "Do you have a lighter?"

The two girls did not seem to understand his accented English, but that didn't matter. He switched to accented Chinese, asking which school they went to, how many of them had come out, how long they'd been there, complimenting their looks, then laying out his own details one at a time: Nepali, Peking University, international student in the medical department, Hindu. On "Peking University" he paused for a few seconds on purpose, leaving the girls room to be impressed.

"Want to have a few drinks together? My friends and I are buying." He pointed at his buddies watching from a short distance away, finally getting to the point. Zhang Rong seized the moment and moved in close; the Nepali man pulled a coin from his wallet.

The girls hesitated. Two tall guys walked over and cut in: "What awkward small talk are you making here? Come dance already." They stood a head taller than the Nepali man, and he stepped back without meaning to. "Do you have a lighter?" he tried again on the spur of the moment, this time aimed at the guys.

They ignored him. They seemed to have just met the girls themselves. "I'm from Peking University too, believe it or not," one of them said to the Muslim girl, and she giggled. The four of them walked off together toward Propaganda at the other end of the street.

The Nepali man could only shake his head at his buddies.

Hormones

The name Wudaokou — "Fifth Crossing" — comes from the railway: heading north out of Beijing North Station, it was the fifth level crossing on the Beijing–Zhangjiakou line. It took more than 60 years for a patch of farmland with barely a hundred residents to become the "Center of the Universe." Young people have been its main source of vitality.

Academia and entrepreneurship, Chinese and foreigners, bars and bookstores, CEOs and graduates. A count by Beijing Business Today at the end of 2016 found close to 400 food-and-drink businesses around Wudaokou, priced anywhere from tens to hundreds of yuan, and more than 300 entertainment venues, priced from a few yuan to nearly a thousand. "A billionaire and a jianbing seller walk down the same street — on the left a restaurant where the average check is 200 yuan, on the right a row of stalls selling T-shirts for 20 yuan each, or three for 50." That is how product architect Liu Chan explained on Zhihu why she likes Wudaokou.

The turnover between old and new has sped up too. In 20 years, the U-Center mall replaced the Wudaokou Department Store; the Sohu.com Media Tower rose higher than Tsinghua University's main building; the Wudaokou clothing market became a tidy patch of lawn; the dessert chain Meet Fresh took over from the defunct bookstore chain Photosynthesis; and Wangzhuang Road went from a small dirt road to a strip of Korean restaurants and back to a green belt. On October 31, 2016, the last passenger train passed through Wudaokou, and Qinghuayuan Station on the Beijing–Zhangjiakou line closed, 106 years after it was built. The level crossing was torn down soon after; in its place will come the Beijing–Zhangjiakou high-speed line built for the 2022 Winter Olympics.

The bars where young people gather are a blunt expression of that contradiction and change. The place is filled with a kind of fleeting, random happiness. "You get the feeling that just by sitting there motionless, clutching a drink, they've found a doorway into a world of hope." That is how Qiaqia, who comes to Wudaokou once a week, describes it.

Wudaokou's bars stay lively from 11 p.m. until 5 a.m., longer hours than Sanlitun or Gongti. Running a few hundred meters south from the intersection of Chengfu Road and Heqing Road, nearly ten bars line up in a row. There are quiet bars like Steps and La Bamba, and there is Mojito, which is only a small window selling mojitos in plastic cups for 15 yuan. The most popular are the club-like Global Warehouse (known as "the Warehouse"), Sensation ("S"), Propaganda ("PPG") and Dopamine. The earliest of them, "PPG," was founded in 2006 by a member of a Tsinghua University campus band, though the crowds later moved to "S."

The only constants are the young people in hip-hop clothes out front, the empty beer cans, the cigarette butts and the vomit. And the owners: Sensation and Wu Club share one, Propaganda and Steps another. Dopamine is the work of a well-known Gongti party guy. Between them, these few hundred meters of street monopolize the nightlife of nearly 1,500 young people every night.

Drinks here are relatively cheap, twenty or thirty yuan a glass. Apart from Global, which costs more and has private rooms, the bars are laid out much the same way: a bar counter, booths, a dance floor. Young people like to drink on the first floor, then go down to the basement dance floor. When they are too out of breath to keep going, they head out to the street to crouch or lean against something, smoke a cigarette, talk for a bit, then go back in to drink and dance again. The cycle repeats, and a night goes by fast.

Across the subway station, the clock on the roof of the U-Center mall tells them the exact time, though they pay it no mind. "Wudaokou is just fun. So many students — pretty, young, uncomplicated. Over at Gongti it's all about money," said Wang Xie, who has been going out on Caijing East Road for 12 years.

Me, Li Hai and the Deputy Branch Manager

"Are you here alone? Want to drink with us?" Li Hai tapped me on the shoulder, politely, while I was wandering around the dance floor.

For the ten days before that, I had been a reporter carrying out an assignment on "hormones" and feeling like I could fail at any moment. As everyone knows, there aren't many places left in Beijing where young people can really let loose, and all of us had settled on Wudaokou as maybe still being one of them.

Elsewhere, this city has been through a great deal of this-isn't-allowed and that-isn't-allowed, and it is dispiriting. There are already fewer and fewer young people, and a rigid life seems ready to close in around us.

One thing is certain: young people's way of life does not belong to the capital's "core functions," and often doesn't sit well with "core values" either.

But how do you get close to these happy people? That part was hard. My failures came down to nobody wanting to talk to me — you say you're doing an interview, and, hey, why bother?

After at least 30 refusals, I decided to take a risk.

My new persona: a lonely girl drinking by herself in a Wudaokou bar, looking for some fun.

That was when Li Hai tapped me on the shoulder on the dance floor.

"Are you here alone? Want to drink with us?"

By his own account, Li Hai is 25, works at a bank as a corporate-business manager, and comes to Wudaokou twice a month.

That night his white dress shirt and gold-rimmed glasses looked out of place in a bar. He had brought along a married male coworker and a superior said to be a "deputy branch manager."

Beijing does not have many concentrated nightlife districts. Sanlitun–Gongti is one: being near the embassy district got it developing early, and being near the business districts has made it steadily more gentrified, which of course also makes it look less young.

Li Hai said he prefers Wudaokou — the drinks are cheap enough, the music loud enough, the pretty students plentiful enough. You can drink and dance until dawn, and afterward you can still get a cheap egg-stuffed flatbread.

Over the next hour or so I lost countless rounds of the bluffing game "chuiniu," drank four shots and a mixed drink, and started feeling dizzy. Two girls from Beijing Language and Culture University turned up at the booth, along with two more drawn by the "deputy branch manager's" reputation — one of them claimed to be a headhunter, and her opening line was interesting enough: "I hear there's a bank manager here?" I made one failed escape during that hour, trying to slip away on the pretext of the bathroom, only to be politely retrieved by Li Hai right outside the restroom door. I also watched a man with a touch of midlife crisis lose his nerve in a nightclub: "I was born in '82. Divorced for over a year now. Would you mind that I'm old?"

At 1:30 a.m., Li Hai and the girls went back to the dance floor. His superior, it turned out, couldn't outrun his age — he was thoroughly drunk. I finally got out.

The Bartender, Master Fang the Cabbie, and a Few Nightlife Customers

Liu Feng sees plenty of customers like Li Hai. There are China Merchants Bank employees two years out of college, in plaid shirts and glasses, looking perfectly proper, and there are young men who wear the same Off-White hoodie every day and always come alone. They hunt the dance floor for half-drunk girls on their own, and the playbook barely varies: spot her, pull her in, ply her with drinks, add her on WeChat, use dancing as a pretext for touching. Some are blunter: "You've got a great body." "I've got my eye on you."

He figures none of it matters as long as the girl doesn't say no — if not for exchanging hormones, what is a bar for? Liu Feng tends bar, and his life is very regular: dinner at six in the evening, then stock-taking at the bar, breakfast at seven in the morning, then home to sleep. Every single day.

Wang Jiayu is the wariest of men like Li Hai. She calls them "greasy," though she can't say exactly what makes a man greasy.

Wang Jiayu is 22. She first came out to a Wudaokou bar as a freshman, after a breakup, needing somewhere to vent. She only goes to Sensation, because it's the only place she knows. She only comes with the same few friends and rarely talks to strangers, unless they also go to Beijing Union University, or she just clicks with them.

At 2 a.m., Wang Jiayu had already been out for three hours with no plan to head back to school. She leaned against the black metal railing outside Sensation, smoking, in an oversized slogan T-shirt, big silver hoop earrings and dark mauve-red lipstick. The next day was a day off, and she and her friends planned to stay out until 5, then get breakfast and wait for the dorm to open. To liven things up, she called over a boy she'd met at Sensation before.

He goes to the same school, a different department, and had rushed over from a bar in Liudaokou. The two of them started needling each other the moment they met. The talk had no content and plenty of energy. "Liudaokou wasn't fun?" "It was — three girls were waiting for me." "I never asked you to come." "If your breakup hadn't hit you so hard, I wouldn't be here keeping you company." He took a drag on his cigarette, pulled out a small bag of betel nut and chewed a few pieces to sober up.

Not far off, Zhang Tingting was crying about her own breakup. She had met the two Beijing girls crouching by the flowerbed in a Wudaokou bar; her ex-boyfriend was their neighbor, a Beijinger too.

Zhang Tingting blamed the breakup on being from out of town. "I have an out-of-town hukou, so he was only ever playing around with me. I thought he was serious," she said, sobbing, the words jumping out between gasps. The syllables "out-of-town hukou" came out clearest.

One of the Beijing girls stood up, flicked away her cigarette butt and hugged her: "Nobody here cares whether your hukou is from out of town. If we get along, that's fate. Come on, one more round." The three of them disappeared into the crowd, shoulder to shoulder.

Master Fang is 33, from Yanqing, and has driven a taxi for four years, nights only. On shift at 6 p.m., off at 6 a.m. For the people he takes home in the second half of the night he has three words: "boozehounds, horndogs and drunks."

Master Fang hates the drunks most; if he sees someone weaving down the street trying to flag him down, he steps on the gas. He feels nothing much about the boozehounds, "as long as they don't get up to anything in the car." He likes the horndogs best, especially the ones after a one-night stand. Master Fang will take them to a club or to a small hotel down an alley — the first pays him a 200-yuan kickback per person, the second a few dozen.

In Wudaokou, Master Fang often picks up people who are dead drunk, or men and women who have just met in a bar. To him they are no different from the ones in Sanlitun's nightclubs, and they say the same things: how many girls or guys they added on WeChat tonight, how a few shots of the stuff they call "Baxi" can knock a person flat, don't forget to carry betel nut to sober up. He envies them a little and would like to try it once, but he hasn't — no time.

"Where are you all eating after your shift? Don't leave me on my own," Master Fang shouted into his phone.

Chen Mo, a Douban Observer of the Arts, and the Wudaokou He Understands

I found Chen Mo through a popular Douban post titled "I Picked Up a Girl at a Nightclub, and She's Been Living at My Place for Almost Half a Year Now." He wrote it. After I reached him through Douban messages, he quickly agreed to meet at a café in Wangjing, the same place where he regularly meets screenwriters.

Chen Mo's official job is sales director at a sensor company; on the side he is a "wild-growing" writer and screenwriter. That post was part invented, part based on what he had really seen at Sensation. "There's a mistake in it, too — the line about 'the skeleton in the back garden' isn't Wang Xiaobo, it's Wang Shuo."

Chen Mo is after a writing effect where "readers finish it believing it's true," so his pieces usually open as personal confessions, serialized on Baidu Tieba, Douban and Tianya, half real and half invented, with as little ornament as possible. Going to bars, besides chasing romance and the high that music and alcohol bring, is also a writer's curiosity — he wants material and inspiration. "What I care about is people's inner state, how the disguises come off one layer at a time."

The first time Chen Mo went to a Beijing nightclub he was still in college, having made a few tens of thousands of yuan running holiday tutoring classes back home, and he went with his girlfriend to a "party" at Gongti. The people who put these parties together are called "party heads," and they take a cut off a basic rule of Gongti nightclubs: without a booth (booking one is called "opening a card"), you can't summon any girls. The minimum spend to "open a card" is 2,000 to 3,000 yuan. The party head opens the booth himself first, then assembles the party, making sure there are enough girls in it. He usually makes no money off the girls, but they are what draws the men in. He charges 400 yuan a head, and one booth can bring in 4,000 to 6,000 yuan.

Two Beijing startups later grew out of exactly this business — Wanju Beijing and Yanhuo. The more official phrasing is "a vertical e-commerce platform for city parties and gatherings." In March 2015, Wanju Beijing raised a 5-million-yuan angel round from Hongtai Fund and Amiba Capital.

The year Wanju Beijing raised that round, Chen Mo had also just started a venture in Zhongguancun, and his nightlife moved from Gongti to Wudaokou. After graduating in nuclear power in 2011, he came to Beijing wanting to make something of himself. The nuclear power major came with a lot of constraints — graduates usually ended up at nuclear plants, in out-of-the-way places, earning 150,000 to 200,000 yuan a year. Chen Mo found that boring, and in 2015 he got in touch with a senior alumnus running a startup in Zhongguancun and went into sales. He likes the job for the same reason he likes bars: he meets a lot of people and gets many chances to watch them.

Wudaokou is not as snobbish as Gongti. There are "party heads" here too, but more people come out with friends, and paying for a booth is not a precondition for attracting girls. That is one reason many interviewees call it "uncomplicated."

But "uncomplicated" describes the rules of engagement more than the crowd. In Chen Mo's observation, the Wudaokou crowd may in fact be more varied than the grown-up crowd at Gongti: when Wu Club wasn't policed as tightly there were more people smoking marijuana, and now it's mostly "old hands" — the regulars who work as social hubs. Sensation is the hottest, with the best "quality" of both girls and boys, and boys from Beijing Sport University go often. Global is closer to a Gongti bar in style — a fancier fit-out, higher spending, and rich kids in clusters.

What is underneath, once the disguises come off layer by layer, is not always pleasant, which is also why Chen Mo doesn't want to get deep into that circle. Never lend money to an "old hand"; plenty of them spend like water and don't keep their word. Don't put much stock in what is said in a nightclub; 90% of the people showing off luxury watches or sports cars are "faking it." And don't believe in "corpse-picking" — taking a drunk girl home off the roadside — because almost no girl lets herself get that drunk alone, at least none Chen Mo has seen.

"The bars in Wudaokou are a place for fast socializing. Alcohol and music pull you in, and the talking, the deciding and the final move between a man and a woman all happen very fast. I've seen a guy chat up seven or eight people in one night — two drinks, a bit of interest, and they're all over each other in the booth." That is how Chen Mo sums up everything that happens there. "But to know what it's really like, you have to go experience it yourself."

Chris and Roland: Two Americans' Wudaokou

From April to June last year, Chris and Roland briefly ran a bar on Caijing East Road called "Level-up," right next to Propaganda. They shared the space in shifts with a flower shop and nail salon, paying 20,000 to 30,000 yuan a month in rent; by day it was a flower shop, and Level-up only opened after 5 p.m., staying open until 2 or 5 in the morning.

Chris first came to China ten years ago to study at Tianjin Foreign Studies University, then taught at an English training school in Beijing and lived in Wudaokou. He was also a member of "Smash Brothers," a Beijing video-game group, and liked to play at an arcade called "8-Bit" on North Luogu Lane. Because it was too far from where he lived, Chris got the idea of opening a video-game bar in Wudaokou.

Compared with Sanlitun or Gulou, Wudaokou may also have been the better place: Western young people aged 18 to 28 live here in numbers, and they were all looking for somewhere that, besides hookups, reminded them of home — a classic video-game bar, for instance. Chris never planned on Chinese young people as his main customers, figuring they were not as familiar as Americans with the sort of barcade that combines games, drinks and a music venue, like Dave & Buster's.

Roland comes from Monrovia, near Los Angeles, California. He came to Beijing in October 2015 to visit friends and settled in Wudaokou. He describes his hometown as so perfect it is almost boring: "It's a quiet little town in the hills. People walking their dogs on the street recognize you, smile and wave. Right nearby there's the beach, mountains, sand dunes, ski slopes, plus Disneyland and Universal Studios — whatever you want to do is at most a two-hour drive. But I'm not the kind of person who's satisfied eating the same good meal every day."

His résumé is indeed varied: he has worked at Starbucks, served as a paratrooper in Iraq, welded for BP and ConocoPhillips, studied history and business at California State University, and worked as a mercenary for Blackwater in Afghanistan. "2nd Battalion, 75th Regiment," he said, with some pride.

Roland is a regular along the Wudaokou bar strip. He is not satisfied with these bars, and thinks that apart from the names there is little difference between them. Empty glasses often go uncleared; the music barely changes and sounds like it's running at 120 decibels; the staff are underpaid and the service is poor; the drinks don't change either, and there is no way to tell whether they're real. Roland has tried raising these problems before, but nobody seemed to care.

After nearly six months of preparation, Level-up opened. The space was small, 80 square meters, holding only 30 to 35 people at peak, but it was decorated to feel warm. It had a small kitchen serving Western fast food, six TVs and every kind of gaming setup — Xbox 360, Xbox One, PS3, PS4, Wii, Wii U, Nintendo 64. To the founders' surprise, besides foreigners, Level-up also drew Chinese young people who liked games. Roland described the customers this way: "Every now and then you get a real oddball, but doesn't everyone have a quirk?"

The trouble they ran into during the brief three months they were open left Chris and Roland baffled. The landlord and the police kept asking them to suspend business or cut their hours. Chris remembered that during the Belt and Road Forum, bars and restaurants around Wudaokou were told to close after five or six in the afternoon. Business at Level-up was good for a while after that, especially on weekend nights, but security guards from bars like Propaganda and La Bamba started slipping into the crowd to take photos. A few weeks later the landlord refused to keep renting, and Level-up closed.

Chris had planned to find another spot in Wudaokou and reopen, but never found one that worked: either the rent was too high or the location too far out. Meanwhile, news of fire-safety inspections and crowd controls in Wudaokou, the closing of Sanlitun's "Dirty Street," and the Gulou crackdown on shopfronts "knocked through walls" also gave Chris the sense that Beijing was clamping down on nightlife.

After the bar closed, the partners scattered — one became a model, one moved into web design, one went to work at an infertility hospital.

Last December, Chris moved back to the United States, with no plan to live in China long-term again.

Roland no longer drinks in Wudaokou; he has switched to Sanlitun, Wangjing or Beixinqiao. He has also found a plot of land near Pinggu and opened an outdoor survival training center for teenagers. From running Level-up, Roland learned how much accumulating "guanxi" matters for doing business in China, though he still hasn't worked out why the "cookie-cutter bars" on Caijing East Road do such good business. For now he puts it down to "fat wallets," and to the sense that "Beijing doesn't really welcome foreigners doing business."

Still, he can't forget the sense of accomplishment Wudaokou gave him. Walking down the street, people still stop him: "Aren't you the guy who ran that video-game bar? Why'd you close?"

He still believes that with a different business he could survive in Beijing.

Me, Wang Xie, and 4 a.m. at Haidilao

A week later, I told Wang Xie I was a reporter. A week earlier, when he ran into me outside Dopamine, he had thought I might be his unexpected catch for the night. It was already 4 a.m.

By his own account, Wang Xie doesn't worry much about money. His main business is selling headphones on Tmall, as "Sony's second-largest distributor in China." Wang Xie is also quick-witted and ambitious; he worked as a "party head," a thousand yuan in kickbacks a time, and went out to Wudaokou more than 20 nights in a row for it. It is hard work — to get repeat customers you have to look after people, hold someone back before they drink too much, and pay for a car home once they're gone. He found it exhausting, so now he has switched hustles and says he's going to trade Bitcoin.

The reality is probably less rosy. His life doesn't look as comfortable as he describes it either. To win more favor with girls, he still has to borrow his cousin's Audi Q7. The reason he only goes to Dopamine is that he knows people there and can drink for free.

The 4 a.m. when we met was an ordinary one among the countless nights he has spent cadging drinks around Wudaokou. That night Wang Xie added only three girls on WeChat and took none of them home. His cousin and "Brother Hai," who had come along, had no luck either. Not that adding someone on WeChat means anything comes of it.

The second time we crossed paths that night was outside the bar. He thought for two or three seconds, then said: "We're going to eat. You coming?"

When I said yes, Wang Xie looked pleasantly surprised, and the group drove straight to Haidilao. His cousin made an excuse and went home early, taking the Q7 with him. Maybe to save face, Wang Xie and Brother Hai got a private room. They ordered five dishes, casually — beef, tofu skin, sliced potato, crown daisy, enoki mushrooms — then six bottles of Snow Beer. He seemed to think this might be an opportunity.

Wang Xie goes to Wudaokou for the drinking, and for the girls.

Wang Xie, from Inner Mongolia, graduated from China University of Geosciences almost six years ago. He and his mother now rent a place of a few dozen square meters in Yizhuang. His mother doesn't push him to marry and doesn't ask about the countless girls he brings home. "I can't even support myself. Think how expensive a wife would be now."

All of this came out a week later, when we met again in Yizhuang. I told Wang Xie who I really was and asked to talk more about his life. That morning, after we finished drinking at Haidilao, I insisted on going home and his hopes came to nothing. He then spent two more nights out in Wudaokou, and it took him quite a while to place me.

"Talking to you is the same as talking to anyone, right? A few drinks and I tell you more, don't I? Bang, the drinks arrive — what else is there to talk about? Girls." Wang Xie was not surprised that a reporter was interviewing him. He seemed pleased, and asked why I hadn't brought a cameraman, thinking he might get on television.

(*Names in this piece are pseudonyms.)

Cover and in-text photography: Wang Sui/QDaily