The Soviets, the Chinese and the East Germans walk into an industrial relationship.

In the future, there is the Factory 798 or 798 Art District. It’s in an old factory area that was used to build crazy new electronic components and military weapons.
This huge complex, that now houses a whole load of art galleries, began as a piece of the “Socialist Unification Plan” of the military-industrial relationship between the Soviets and the brand spanking new People’s Republic of China.

China wanted to build and sell stuff. The Soviets wanted to help and so did the Germans of the East. The Soviets with the military business and the dissemination of said products, while the Germans would help with the components and the architectural plans.

The Germans chose a Bauhaus-influenced design over the more ornate Soviet-look and that was the first in a long line of fisticuff matches for these two highly tense countries.

The Kraut’s plans were to build large indoor spaces designed to let the maximum amount of natural light into the workplace to save on energy. They built huge ceilings with large arches and insanely big windows. The buildings were huge because everyone had delusions of grandeur and shit needed to be big.

So skip over a bunch of details, all these factories pumped out weapons and devices and trinkets and other hastily made things and the complex was under a lot of pressure during Deng Xiaoping’s reforms of the 1980’s. Not many state-owned enterprises got the money they needed and eventually the Dashanzi Factory Complex was rendered useless by the early 1990’s.

Well, the buildings in the complex were now empty and Beijing’s Avant Garde artists were looking for a home around the same time. So they packed up their scarves and headed on over.

In our future time, 798 gets in demand art exhibitions from all over the world (ranging from rad to slightly above a bag of shit), tons of stinky artists looking for a home and foreign hipster doofuses looking for the free booze.

Oh yeah, it almost got demolished to make room for the Olympic stadiums, I guess. But people from all over the world got all crazy about it and now they’ve redone the roads and started charging more for coffee! Three cheers for communist capitalism in the future!