HEBEI Youth Daily reported last week that the local Zhengding County government is pledging 15 billion yuan (US$2.2 billion) to restore the city to its ancient glory.

No one disputes the county's rich legacy of the past.

Renowned architect Liang Sicheng (who struggled, and failed, to save Beijing's city walls) had visited the county many times studying its well-preserved ancient temples and pagodas.

The sum of money set aside is stunning - the county's annual fiscal income amounts to no more than 700 million yuan - but there is no lack of precedents.

Earlier Xi'an, the capital of Shaanxi Province, decided to spend 12 billion yuan to give its ancient city walls a glitzy face-lift. An investigative report revealed that of the sum 9 billion yuan will be used to eliminate old neighborhoods near the walls and replace them with bars, clubs, branded luxury shops, car showrooms, and a "Royal City Hotel."

At a time when chaiqian (tearing down and relocation) easily conjures up the image of thugs hired to force people to give up their homes, returning a city to its ancient brilliance sounds deceptively humane.

But Zhengding County has overdone it a little bit by reportedly turning to a US consulting firm as the source of wisdom in making the falsifications realistic.

The flock of Western visitors seeking a respite from their money mills are among the factors leading some officials to rediscover the (commercial) value of their past.

But apparently some of them know not how to gratify Western cravings for antiquity without discouraging their tastes for modern amenities.

So to engage them in the design stage would minimize the risks of letting them down.

At this stage I can already see a Xintiandi-style Zhengding on the horizon, pulsating with money.

A parable all Chinese know tells of a young man of the state of Yan, who went to learn the Handan (in Hebei) way of walking.

To his dismay, before learning the trick, he forgot his own way of walking, and had to crawl all the way back home.

By slavishly and eagerly refashioning its life in accordance with modern requirements, China is losing itself at an alarming rate.

The incessant pulverizing of our past finds its full expression in a national movement to reconfigure China's landscape and lifestyle in accordance with Western standards, variously known as development, prosperity, or a dream come true.

Underlying this movement is a determination, subconscious but powerful, to denigrate anything that remains of the past as backward, substandard, uncivilized, poor, and provincial.

Lackluster GDP figures would be a serious hindrance for officials seeking fast advancement, and one of the short cuts to a leap in GDP is a massive urban renovation project.

Judged in this light, the scramble to repackage China's past is just old wine in new bottles.

Lost home

When interviewed recently by the Southern Metropolis Weekly, poet Bei Dao said that when he returned to Beijing in 2001 after years of absence, he found himself a stranger in the land where he was born and brought up.

The poet was compelled to reconstruct the city he remembered with his pen, and that effort is his new book "The City Gate Opens."

He writes in its preface, "In this city of my own, the time has been turned back, spring revisits the withered trees, and the lost smells, cadence and sunlight is called back. The torn siheyuan, hutong and temples are being reconstructed ..."

When the poet was wandering overseas, he was haunted by Beijing's hutong, smells, and cabbage. The home trip cured his homesickness once and for all.

"The modern Beijing is a living specimen of modern metropolis, a fact that effectively insulates it from my childhood memories," he writes.

In our eagerness to compete for superlatives - the biggest, the tallest, the fastest, the latest, the most spacious, or the most international - is the consciousness to recreate our past.

In the South Weekend newspaper early this month, columnist Wang Pei commented on a photo of a small restaurant keeper in a park near Dianchi Lake in Kunming, Yunnan Province.

A young man, dressed immaculately and radiating health, satisfaction and confidence, stands besides a table covered with dishes and set with several beautiful flowers.

The picture was taken in 1945 by Allen Larsen, a member of the 14th Army Air Force, better known as the Flying Tigers.

The photo is included in Larsen's "China in the Eyes of Flying Tigers," which also contains photos of local residents in Kunming frolicking in Dianchi Lake, peasants planting rice in paddies, carpenters, and small vendors.

Lost past

Many of the pictured people of the time were at once vigorous and exquisite.

To be frank, I do not often find such expressions today on commuters rushing to their jobs, or migrants. As for peasants, vendors, and carpenters, where are they?

It must also be pointed out that the scholarship at the wartime Southwestern Union University remains unsurpassed to this day.

"The establishment is expert at creating artificial historical ruptures by making use of a certain time as the dividing line, so as to elicit desired collective memory," Wang mused.

Our past is meticulously edited, chiefly to flatter our sense of well-being, and to throw in relief the greatness being ushered in.

No one can fail to be impressed by Shanghai's obsession to break away from its past, but a photo of Shanghai in its heyday in 1940s struck Wang as more like an international metropolis, while today it is more like a national construction site.

The Chinese people have also lost much of their elegance and poise in their rush to keep up with the racket and rush.

During my three-month tenure in Washington, DC, I came across a copy of the National Geographic Society's "Journey Into China," a book printed in 1982 and heavy with pictures taken since 1976.

Many scenes are redolent with old world charm, and would never be encountered in this world again.

In a picture about Shanghai I saw about half a dozen buses on the Bund, which was lined with leafy trees but otherwise empty of motor vehicles.

There is a photo of Beijing's busy intersection that may carry 500 bicycles a minute, and of Suzhou, the Venice of China, where a winding lane is flanked with ancient, tiled houses, and a canal on which boats glide beneath sitting-room windows.

Suzhou retains a reputation for genteel living, but I read from Caijing's Website that last Sunday ten thousand local people tried to block a highway to show their discontent with compensation over their lands appropriated for development.