If your visions of Beijing are centred around pods of Maoist revolutionaries in buttoned-down tunics performing exercise in Tiananmen Square, put them to rest: this city has embarked on a new millennium rollercoaster and it's taking the rest of China with it.

Beijing's youth is more interested in MTV than Mao; rhetorical slogans from the Cultural Revolution have given way to butchered English splashed across designer-copy T-shirts, and expats, tourists, foreign investors and a mobile phone-toting hip-oisie are mixing it up with the bureaucrats.