U.S. photographer's experience in Beijing

Editor’s note: This year marks the 40th anniversary of China’s reform and opening-up, and huge changes have been made in Beijing, capital of China, over the past 40 years. We have invited 40 foreign experts to participate in a series of interviews named “New Era, New Insight” jointly hosted by GMW.cn（The official website of Guangming Daily） and the Information Office of Beijing Municipality and share their “Beijing Stories”. The following is a part of the interview with U.S. photographer Dan Sandoval.

U.S. photographer Dan Sandoval (Photo source: Guangming Online)

My name is Dan Sandoval, a photographer from the U.S.. I have been living in China for about 10 years now, and Beijing for 3 years. I have been working as a photographer since 2002 when I got my first job working on a newspaper. I went to the Brooks Institute of Photography to major in industrial, scientific photography.

I moved to China in 2008. It’s a long story. The first time I came to China was in 2006. And I was here to work on a small documentary. The documentary was a part of my college program.

And we were here for five weeks in Sichuan. So it was Chengdu just where I go, where I was mostly at. And I found China to be very interesting. It was a very different kind of place.

My parents are from Latin America. At that time, I only travelled to basically Spanish-speaking places and English-speaking places.  And coming to China made things so different. And when I was at here, I thought it was so challenging.

And I love that challenge, so one day I want to come back here. In 2008, two years after that, I came back thinking that I would be here for maybe one or two years. I ended up in Chengdu for six and a half years before I moved to Berlin for one year.

When I came back to China from Berlin, I moved to Beijing. And now I’m working here, because there are more opportunities in Beijing than in Chengdu. The first time I came to Beijing was in 2009.

When I moved here in 2015 or 2016, it changed quite a bit. Some of the scenes I really enjoyed before have become a little bit different. In terms of the lifestyle of people here, it’s more or less what I expected.

It has a lot of good and bad changes. Some of the good changes I have seen have been basically economic. People have a lot more flexibility of spending.

In the time I have been here, people live from buying basically almost all like Chinese brand things to starting now buying many more international products.

Now, actually, China is creating more and more strong products. In China, there is something to go back to buy basically luxury Chinese products at this point. But at the same time, through these changes, you see a lot focus on money.

A lot of people become much more focused on money and making money and spending money than they used be. One of the first major changes that happened in Beijing from the first time I have come here was the music thing.

That changes a lot. There used to be a lot of very cool live music rock bars. They were eventually shut down. Even they were out of business. On top of that, you see a lot less live music being played in general that covers.

No more independent musicians doing their things as much as they used to be. I think that the focus has gone away from that independent music scene to more commercial thing which follows the wanting-more-money trend as well.

More recently, you see a lot of this trend continuing where some of the neighborhood, old hutongs, old kind of foreigner hanging outs are being shut down and renovated. You can see these all over Beijing.

There are hutong areas, there are places like Sanlitun where a lot changes happening. It’s making the city more beautiful, it’s making it more modern.But at the same time, I feel like that it’s taking away a lot of character.

In order to progress, you have to lose something,but you have to see some of those things that were kind of almost stamps of foreign communities disappearing here. I also think that some of these were actually very important to the kind of new age Chinese communities as well.

[ Editor: Zhang Zhou ]