“We were at school and they took us by bus to Tian’anmen Square and we were given all these sprays of flowers.” The spectacle remains etched in his mind and was the beginning of a love affair with a country that, to this day, shows no sign of wavering. He met his Tunisian wife in Beijing and they now have two sons, both born in China.

 

Many Chinese reporters who have interviewed him say his Mandarin Chinese is flawless. They find him a warm and likeable person. I, too, found that out when he joined me for breakfast at the executive lounge of the hotel and filled me to the brim with stories about his life in Beijing as the city somersaulted to modernity.

 

The 46-year-old general manager of the Grand Hyatt Beijing has never outgrown the city’s innumerable charms, retaining pretty much the high sense of wonderment he felt when he first arrived in the city to study at the Beijing Language Institute and later at the city’s premier centre of learning, Tsinghua University.

 

He considers himself extremely lucky. “It is just fantastic to be in a city that has attracted so much fascination from the world outside,” he says, adding that the global attention during the Olympics completely invigorated the capital and has made it even a more fascinating place to visit. The attention is completely well-deserved, he says, given the city’s importance as China’s political and cultural centre and now as the focal centre of China’s economic renaissance. For many visitors, Beijing’s attraction not only comes from its glorious past but also from its promise as a city poised to reclaim all the glory invested in it by its past celestial rulers that once called the Forbidden City their home.

 

The pace at which the city has catapulted itself into the 21st century makes it a perfect example of a post-modern city, a Deleuzian wonderland constantly reinventing itself in a fluid and rhizomic fashion. Beside the communist façade, the city is a beehive of artistic and cultural efflorescence, and given the breath of talent that comes out of its universities, ateliers and hutong, it looks like there are no limits to its evolution. High and low cultures and values flourish throughout the city’s interstices, constantly interacting and fusing with one another to create a multiplicity of forms often familiar and strange at the same time. 

 

“Much of my sense of exhilaration comes from the fact that Beijing is a city in constant flux,” Mabrouk says. After all that Beijing has gone through during the years, it is a city prepared for anything.

 

Mabrouk is not fazed by the current glut of accommodations in Beijing with more hotels sprouting across the city, adding that it has not affected them as much as it has affected other landmark accommodations in the city. He views the softness in the market to be only temporary. “China is a large country and there will be strong demand for hotel accommodation in the foreseeable future.” He says there is still considerable opportunity for growth in the industry, considering that domestic travellers only account for 25% of the hotel’s business. That is in sharp contrast to the 90% ratio contributed by domestic constituents in other countries.

 

Mabrouk says that while hotel rates across China’s major cities may have gone up in recent years, they have remained very competitive vis-à-vis hotel rates charged in international cities. Overall rates, he adds, have actually gone soft in recent months on account of the rapid expansion of capacity right after the Beijing Olympics with more hotels coming on stream. The Hyatt group, for instance, has just launched its 237-room Park Hyatt Beijing, bringing to three the number of hotel properties operated by the chain in the city. The group, says Mabrouk, strives to deliver a quality of service that even the most discriminating traveller can appreciate.