Bare your soul in Beijing

Dancers, in Coyote fashion, shake up their stuff on stages. PHOTOS/CHINA DAILY

Han Li's cover is about to be blown! The 25yearold graphic designer from Fujian province says she would "never dare" tell her parents what she gets up to in Beijing after work.

"My parents were poor farmers; their lives were full of hardship," she says. "But I want a more glamorous life. I work hard and play hard, too."

Han's passion for the capital's bars and clubs might shock the folks back home, but she epitomises China's young adults at the dawn of the 21st century.

The daily grind of chasing dreams and money brings an equally intense desire to "chill out", and Beijing's spectacular nightlife is a seduction few can resist.

A dissonant rumbling of dance beats and the glare of neon lights emanate from the hive of nightclubs flanking Beijing's Gongti Ximen.

A honking line of taxis, punctuated by the occasional MercedesBenz, Audi and Ferrari, creeps along the street in front of the strip of night spots, while the sidewalk roils with crowds of clubbers.

It's just before midnight on a Tuesday, and 26-year-old Sichuan native Chen Ye and her friends are here to play.

"In China, we face so much pressure at work, pleasing our bosses, keeping good face and expanding client relationships, that we need to go out with friends and blow off steam," the project manager for an advertising firm says. "That's why I love nightlife; it's where I can escape and have fun."

Chen has joined the swelling ranks of mostly young and moneyed Chinese finding solace from the stress, and relishing in the glamour of the country's fastpaced modernisation and its emerging nightlife scene.

"I like it because it's loud, crowded and exciting," Chen says. "I can be fashionable but don't have to care what anyone thinks and can act a little crazy if I want."

China's burgeoning nightlife scene - largely confined to its major metropolises - is still relatively young. Many industry insiders attribute its rapid development in recent years to a growth spurt marking the end of its turbulent teens.

Beijing's scene was born 17 years ago near Gongti Dongmen, when American Frank Siegel poured the first drink at Frank's Place, the city's first nonhotel bar. The night spot was packed with an exclusively expatriate crowd who settled tabs with fistfuls of foreign exchange certificates, as nonnationals weren't allowed back then to use Chinese currency.

"When I opened Frank's Place, it was a slam dunk," says the 51yearold from Newcastle, Pennsylvania. "We got busy and stayed busy for about five years until there were other options."

The success of Frank's Place opened the capital's floodgates to a slew of new watering holes. Starting with Club Nightman's 1994 opening, nightclubs began popping up around the city.

Beijinger Jack Zhu, who runs the country's biggest nightlife website, www.ClubZone.cn, with a membership of more than 260,000, says that when he returned from Canada in 2003, there were two megaclubs - defined as larger than 1,000 square metres - in Beijing and two in Shanghai. Today, there are 19 in the capital, in addition to several smaller eclubs and about 400 bars.

"Now, it's an industry," Zhu says.

Increasingly, the outside world is taking notice. In the past few years, all of the World Top 10 DJs, including Tiesto, Paul Van Dyk and Carl Cox, have visited the country, and many have by now made several trips.

"China has been put on the club map of the world," says Zhang Youdai, the 21year scene veteran hailed as the "Godfather of Chinese DJs" and the first Chinese DJ featured in Rolling Stone.

When Cox came in 2006, he told China Daily: "China is booming with fabrics, construction, cranes and new cars, and the music industry and club culture is growing with it, too.

"There is a group of Chinese people now with high disposable incomes who want to dress up and go to nightclubs that play this type of music. China is a happening place, and that's why I'm here."

As its growing pains recede, China's maturing nightlife is diversifying.

Zhu points out as examples of this: ChinaDoll, which targets clientele from creative industries, and All Star, which opened last month with an NBAoriented hiphop theme.

ChinaDoll owner Ai Wan says that with this diversification, "everybody uses their own ideas, so there's not so much copying" - a problem that once plagued the country's night spot owners.

And with the scene's maturation, it has gone from something transplanted from the West to something cultivated in China.

"The biggest clubs that are always packed are the local clubs; they're more packed than the Western ones," says Michael Xu, who opened Bed Bar in the capital's Dongcheng district in 2005.

Between swills of a cocktail imbibed in the street in front of Shooters in Beijing's Sanlitun bar district, Beijinger Yu Qiurui says: "Of course going to bars and clubs is a Chinese thing. I don't know why, but I can't think of it any other way."

Clad in baggy pants, a loose teal Tshirt and a blackandwhite "trucker's cap", the 28yearold website director says the appeal for her is meeting new people and dancing.

Alan Wong, who runs The Beach in the Block 8 complex near Chaoyang Park's West Gate, points out that China's nightlife is taking a path increasingly unique from that of the West.

Chinese clubs are much larger than anywhere else in the world, he notes, and Chinese people don't just party on weekends.

"You can name any city in the world - you won't have 4,000 people cramming into a club on a Tuesday night," Wong says.

However, while a growing number of Chinese are embracing nightlife, many still shun it as something "bad people" do.

Zhu says: "People still have stereotypes about nightclubs, especially the parents' generation; they've never been to nightclubs, so they don't know what's happening."