Palliative Hotel
It's story time. But before the story comes a little perception problem that the story is about. The perception is about agency. Specifically, if you read western press, or look into western social media, it's about how the Chinese people lack any.
The prevailing wisdom, you see, is that Chinese people are tightly pressed under the thumb of the Party; that whatever the Party says goes and Chinese people will do it without question or grumbling or they'll get disappeared.
The technical term for this prevailing wisdom is “bullshit”. Let me illustrate why.
Orange Hotel
Depicted here is the front entrance of the Orange Hotel. It's a hotel that's about a 20 minute walk from my home. I used to go past it all the time while it was under construction, but a new way to get to work had me missing its completion.
And my utter amazement at seeing the finished product.
Look closer at that building. It's pretty weird architecture, isn't it? I mean it's like an architect known for making, I don't know, hospitals or such decided to use those skills to make a hotel. Look at that facing, look at the front entryway, look at the way the driveway relates to that entrance. It looks like the emergency entrance of a hospital!
“Orange Hospital”
It won't come as a surprise, now that I've pointed out the look of the place, that this was intended to be a hospital when it was under construction. One of my reasons for being amazed at the outcome is that while I was going past the construction site those years back, this was supposed to be a hospital, not a hotel. Specifically it was supposed to be a palliative hospital.
So why is it a hotel now? Therein lies our story that belies the conventional wisdom of how the poor Chinese people lack all agency and can only do what the government demands of them.
The residential compound
Depicted now is the side of the hospital, to the left of the original view above. Note the large, fairly upscale residences nearby. These residences are why the hospital is now a hotel. See the residents of these tower blocks fought tooth and nail to prevent that hospital from being commissioned. As I dug into the story, I found out there were protests. There were huge banner signs hung off the trees near the hospital construction site. There was even sabotage (!) of the construction equipment. The residents of that community wanted nothing to do with a palliative care facility in their back yard. (Or, rather, front yard.)
They put a patina of slightly-less-stupid reasons for it over their objections. They were afraid of X-Ray machine leakage. (Through solid stone and concrete walls.) They were afraid of diseases. But the real reason is purest superstition: the Chinese, even mainlanders, even under the officially atheist communist government, are in absolute dread of death and dead people. A facility that's explicitly there for people to die in is simply not going to happen without a fight. (It would literally cut all the property values of that compound by half or more overnight. This is how strong that superstition is.)
And in this case it didn't happen at all. The government blinked. The developer got its permits for opening a hospital revoked and the building was sold off to someone who decided instead to make it into a hotel, which is where we are now.
Agency
So here we have a facility that was cleared by government, then fully constructed, shut down in a sudden reversal because of protests from the people. Does this sound like people who are living under the thumb of whimsical, oppressive authority to you? Or does it sound like people who have far more of a say in a far more complex governmental system than you think?
(Hint: It's the latter.)