An air force built its hospital where nothing stood before

An air force hospital rises from open ground

Nothing stood on this ground before the People's Republic decided it needed one. In May 1950, the newly formed Air Force Medical Center of the Chinese People's Liberation Army ordered a hospital built here in Beijing. This was less than a year after the country's founding.

The air force had pilots but nowhere to treat them. Flying harmed the body in ways China had never studied before. Altitude put strain on pilots. Training accidents caused injuries. Young men on airbases got ordinary illnesses. The new hospital was built to handle all of it, from the ground up, on a patch of land that had been open until then.

By July 1954 the facility had a name: the General Hospital of the Air Force of the Chinese People's Liberation Army. Two years later, in October 1956, it folded in the army's 11th Army Hospital. It became something larger: the Air Force General Hospital proper. From then on it held one job. It looked after the health of air force pilots and the troops who kept them flying. It lent its own doctors to civilian clinics nearby when they were needed.

A neurologist trained here is arrested abroad

In July 2020, a neurologist from the Air Force Medical Center named Song Chen was arrested in California. Federal agents accused her of lying on a visa application to visit Stanford University. She said she was there as an ordinary researcher.

Prosecutors said she had hidden her rank in the People's Liberation Army. She entered the United States in 2018. The case tied a doctor working two blocks from where you stand to a courtroom on the other side of the world. The hospital that trained her was built from bare ground seventy years before.

A state broadcast tower becomes the city's tallest

State institutions kept rising on this ground long after the hospital's first walls went up. In 1992, workers finished the Central Radio & TV Tower, a 405-meter broadcast tower built to carry Chinese state television across the capital. It stood the tallest structure in Beijing until 2018.

The tower had no ancient site to replace and no old district to clear. Like the hospital, it rose on cleared ground. It was built for one purpose: to serve a state institution. That institution had not existed a few decades before. Its revolving restaurant and observation deck opened later to the public. But its bones were built for broadcasting, not sightseeing.

Troops open fire on a road blockade

At Gongzhufen, a junction in Haidian District, soldiers of the 38th Army were moving toward Tiananmen Square. On the night of June 3, 1989, they met a blockade of protesters. Demonstrators threw rocks and molotov cocktails. Around 10:30 p.m., troops opened fire with live ammunition.

The clash turned a military approach route into a battlefield, in the same district built for military hospitals and state towers. People died where crowds had gathered to stop tanks from reaching the square.

An unlicensed internet cafe fire kills twenty-five

Not everything that grew up on this ground was planned by the state. A two-story internet cafe called Lanjisu operated in Haidian District without a license. At 2:40 a.m. on June 16, 2002, it caught fire. Twenty-five people died, most of them university students. Thirteen more were hurt.

Investigators ruled it arson. Four young offenders were later punished for setting the blaze. The cafe had grown up fast and unregulated, in the shadow of institutions the government had built with far more care.

Police sweep a known gay gathering place

State authority returned to this district decades after the hospital and the tower went up. On September 26, 2010, Beijing police swept through Peony Garden, a known gathering place for gay men in Haidian. More than 200 men were taken away for questioning, part of a campaign the police described as targeting prostitution and crime.

The sweep fell on ground the state had shaped since 1950, still marking out who this land was meant to serve.