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Bookmark & shareWhere the mojo of MTV and mobile phones has eclipsed the magic of Mao.
If your visions of Beijing are centred around pods of Maoist revolutionaries in buttoned-down tunics performing exercise in Tiananmen Square, put them to rest: this city has embarked on a new millennium rollercoaster and it's taking the rest of China with it.
Beijing's youth is more interested in MTV than Mao; rhetorical slogans from the Cultural Revolution have given way to butchered English splashed across designer-copy T-shirts, and expats, tourists, foreign investors and a mobile phone-toting hip-oisie are mixing it up with the bureaucrats.
Fast Facts
Population
13,000,000
Currency
Name: Yuan Renminbi
Code: CNY
Symbol: Y
Electrical Plugs
220V 50Hz
Languages Spoken
Official: Cantonese, Mandarin
Time Zones
GMT/UTC +8 (Standard Time)
Country Dialing Code
+86
Weights & Measures
Metric
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