There is something ineffably eternal about the “drum beating and bell chiming from sundown to daybreak” when it comes to the Bell Tower and the Drum Tower standing in the north end of ancient Beijing.
There can hardly be equal structures around the world when it comes to architecture as music. They are like two powerful, solemn notes being played over and over again for centuries – the sounds and echoes reverberating across the mega-metropolis.Both towers are part of the so-called Beijing Central Axis – and serious scholars make no bones about their essential role in reflecting people’s existence in History. In China after all, architecture is regarded as frozen music.Liang Sicheng, the father of modern Chinese architecture, regarded the Beijing Central Axis as the world’s greatest urban symphony – sorry Place de la Concorde or Piazza San Marco – with the Drum Tower and the Bell Tower as the grand finale.The same might apply to the Drum/Bell couple in Xian, former Chang’an, the imperial capital, which today is the privileged stage for scores of young Tang Barbies from all parts of China posing night after night.In Beijing of course it’s way more solemn. The Bell/Drum couple is regarded as the guardian buildings of the Forbidden City – announcing time after time the proper regulation of people’s lives.But it’s a stele built during the Qing dynasty, with an inscription written by Emperor Qianlong, that provides us with an intriguing parallel with our current geopolitical volatility.It reads: “The resonant sound of the Bell heralds good governance. The magnificent buildings of the Bell and Drum Towers symbolize the loftiness of imperial power. The bell chimes and drum beats tell time to regulate people’s lives. These solid towers stand forever to carry forward benevolent governance.”A Paradigm Shift From Hegemonic LogicCut to the concept of Global Governance, proposed for the first time by President Xi Jinping during the SCO annual summit in Tianjin in early September. Xi had already been fine-tuning the concept, step by step, for years, as revealed by his latest book published in English in late 2023, Chinese Modernization, a compilation of reports, speeches, remarks, notes and directives.Global Governance propels the Global South, especially Asia, Africa and Latin America, to center stage. So far they have been woefully under-represented in the current system of international relations, or “rules-based international order”, now degraded to no-rules international disorder.Global Governance’s main points concern the necessary primacy of international law; true multilateralism; no double standards, and equal participation of all nations, based on sovereignty.
