'Building a New Beijing and Welcome the Olympics.'
Banner in Beijing
In March 2007, Beijingers began to learn a new word, mai. Some Beijing newspapers helpfully provided pronunciation guides just to make sure Beijingers knew how to say it. Mai means 'haze' and it was the word city officials wanted to use to describe the dirty grey fog that shrouds Beijing, one of the world's most polluted cities, for much of the year. In the past, officials had always referred to the phenomenon euphemistically as wu, which is a rather gentle word meaning 'mist', as if naming it kindly would somehow mitigate its effects and distract from its real cause – smoke belching from Beijing's factories, dust billowing up from its eight thousand construction sites and exhaust fumes blown out by its ever-increasing motor traffic. Admitting that wu was really mai was an indication of just how desperately China wants to make a good impression at the Beijing Olympics in 2008.
Being awarded the Olympics in 2001 was a red letter day for China. When the International Olympic Committee (IOC) announced that Beijing had beaten off the competition from Toronto, Paris, Istanbul and Osaka, the streets of Beijing erupted with Olympic fever. In some ways, for ordinary Beijingers, it was like emerging from the dark into the light. Finally, the grim days were behind them and China had been recognised as a vibrant, great country. Up and down the country, young people especially, swapped texts and blogs saying, 'I love China!!!'
The Party, too, was no doubt feeling in a party mood. Although the IOC does not base its choice on economic respectability, it clearly takes into account the host's ability to fund the event properly. When Tokyo was awarded the Olympics in 1964, it seemed to be in recognition of Japan's amazing economic boom and its final emergence from the dark postwar days. Similarly when Seoul was awarded the games in 1988, it seemed a fitting stamp on South Korea's extraordinary rise to prosperity. So when Beijing got the 2008 games, it was widely seen as China's economic coming-out party – the international seal of approval on China's economic boom.
Beijing dynamo
In some ways, the Beijing Olympics are the biggest (good) thing that has happened to China for a long, long time, and the Party, at least, has thrown itself into the event with astonishing enthusiasm and energy. Whether ordinary Chinese people feel the same way remains to be seen, but there is no doubting the commitment from the top. The direct budget for the games is US$40 billion – two-and-a-half times London's budget for 2012 – and this is probably just a tiny fraction of the massive amount being spent on the dramatic makeover of Beijing ahead of the games.
PROFILE: DENG YAPING
Deng Yaping is a legend in China. This tiny woman, just 1.49 metres (4 feet 11 inches) tall, was voted by Chinese people Chinese athlete of the twentieth century in 2003, and quite rightly, for she is one of the greatest table-tennis players of all time. She was born on 5 February 1973 in Zhengzhou in Henan. When she was nine years old she won a provincial junior championship but wasn't allowed to play on the team because she was too short. When she was thirteen, Deng won the national championship, but wasn't allowed to play on the national team because she was too short. But when she was sixteen, coaches finally relented and let her play, and she immediately won the world table-tennis doubles title with Qiao Hong. Two years later, in 1991, she beat North Korean star Li Bun-hui to win the world singles title. The following year at the Barcelona Olympics, she swept all before her to win both the singles and the doubles gold medals. She repeated the feat at the 1996 Olympics. Not surprisingly, she was world number one female table-tennis player from 1990 to 1997. When she retired that year at the age of just 24, she had won more titles than any other player in the history of table tennis. Since then she has played a key role in the Olympic movement, and led the team that won Beijing the 2008 Olympics. No wonder she is a bit of a star in Beijing.
Beijing is now going through a transformation that is more radical, if anything, than that which began in Shanghai in the early 1990s. Visitors who last travelled to the city in 1990 would simply not recognise it today. Indeed, even locals find it hard to find their way around, so much has changed and so many familiar landmarks have vanished as the mania of development proceeds. Beijing had none of the worries and problems with existing inhabitants that beset London in finding a suitable site for the Olympic village. To create Beijing's Olympic site, the city simply evicted the occupants of a slum district that was once home to tens of thousands of people, and bulldozed away their old homes. So determined are the planners to give the city a modern facelift that they seem to be moving heaven and earth, and most of Beijing, to do so.
On Tiananmen Square there is a placard that ticks off the days to Olympic opening day, and every day really counts. Beijing set itself the goal of building or renovating 72 sports stadiums and training arenas, carving out 59 new roads and building 3 new bridges – not to mention a new cross-city underground, a new airport, a host of offices for the press and media, new houses and new hotels, and much more besides. Yet Beijing seems to have taken the whole gargantuan task in its stride, bussing in huge armies of construction workers from the countryside to work six-month stints. Observers seeing forty thousand people working on the new airport and seven thousand on the National Stadium have commented that this is the closest you get to seeing what it must have been like when they built the Great Wall of China. A year before the event, the bulk of the work was done, and many of the workers have been shipped back to their villages – leaving the glamorous new Beijing they have built, it is said, for the foreigners and the Beijing elite to enjoy.
Design arena
Beijing is a huge, crowded, dirty city but there is no doubt that the Olympic planners are going all the way to put on a spectacular show. They have hired the West's most prestigious, most innovative architects and given them their head. Architectural journalist Deyan Sudjic sees China using the Olympics 'as the chance to make a defiant and unmistakable statement that the country has taken its place in the world'. World-renowned British architect Norman Foster has been brought in to design Beijing's new international airport – a stunning, super-slick building in the shape of a dragon. Controversial Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas has given Central China TV a new headquarters that has been described as 'a skyscraper tumbling into a somersault', 'a person kneeling' or even 'a doughnut'. Koolhaas was also on the design committee that awarded the design contract for the main stadium to the Swiss partnership of Herzog and de Meuron,who updated London's Tate Modern gallery. Herzog and de Meuron's National Stadium is certainly a startling creation, made from a web of steel columns and beams. It has already been nicknamed 'the bird's nest' by locals. This is an auspicious name, since a bird's nest is a harmonious natural object, and an expensive delicacy on the table. One project, however, has received the mocking nickname 'the egg' – Paul Andreu's generally disliked National Grand Theatre near Tiananmen Square.
INFO: BEIJING NATIONAL AQUATICS CENTRE
The new National Stadium built for the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, nicknamed 'the bird's nest', has already attracted a fair amount of attention for its highly original design. But right next door, the Beijing Olympics team have built another Olympics venue that will be, if anything, even more striking: the National Aquatics Centre, designed by Australian design partnership Arup/PTW, the China State Construction and Engineering Corporation and the Shenzhen Design Institute. Already nicknamed the Water Cube, this startlingly original building was inspired by water bubbles, and looks like nothing more than a slice chopped out of the foam on a bubble bath. The walls of the centre have a metal framework of shapes that are based on research about the random shapes of soap bubbles, plant cells, crystals and molecules. Filling in the spaces in between are pillows made of ultra-thin fluorocarbon ETFE(ethylene tetrafluoroethylene) membranes. The membranes are sewn into the structure and then inflated. The idea is that the Water Cube will be the cool, moist yang (female) to the National Stadium's fiery yin (male), but the ETFE pillow walls, normally azure blue, can change to startling red in moments with a simple lighting change.
Manchurian makeover
Beijing's facelift doesn't stop with the buildings. They are determined to clean up the city to present it in the best possible light to the world. Air pollution is indeed a key issue, as indicated by the adoption of the word mai. Beijing has no intention of athletes complaining that they can't perform properly because of the quality of the air. According to the People's Daily, Beijing is spending US$3 billion on pollution control ahead of the games in 2007 alone. Not only are they mounting tighter emissions controls on vehicles, but they have moved one of the city's dirtiest factories, a steel plant in the western suburbs, out to an offshore suburb. That so much of this might be about China's image rather than genuine concern with environmental health is indicated by some of the measures the authorities are thought to be taking for the Olympics. The Beijing authorities intend to shut down all polluting factories (but only for the duration of the games) and ban many of the city's cars (again only for the duration of the games). According to Beijing's vice-mayor Ji Lin, 'Car control,that is to temporarily ban some of the cars, is necessary for both traffic administration and air pollution control.'
It is widely believed they will clear the streets of all beggars and vagrants during the games, too, but the authorities have denied reports that they will expel three million migrant workers from the city, round up prostitutes and confine mentally ill people in hospitals. Yet to make sure the streets are clean, even foreigners are now being handed rubbish bags for their litter on arrival, and dozens of people have already been fined for spitting in the street, a common Beijing habit that the authorities are keen to see disappear before the games. Every month on the eleventh is now Queuing Day in Beijing, the day when Chinese people learn how to form orderly queues under the guidance of satin-sashed Queuing Day volunteers, with officials sometimes handing out a rose to the most orderly 'queuer'.
INFO: THE ENGLISH MENU
The Beijing authorities are determined not to be embarrassed in any way when the foreigners show up for the games in 2008. So it was with some horror that they realised that the English translations generously provided on signs and menus all over Beijing to help foreigners, as well as providing good advertising, could be hilarious to their targets. So, according to an article by Jim Yardley in the New York Times, academics have been enlisted to go around the city spotting mistranslations and providing the correct translation .They've noticed some real corkers. Tourists to Beijing, for instance, are invited to take a trip to 'Racist Park', a theme park about China's ethnic minorities. And they are tempted on restaurant menus to try the local delicacy crab, spelled with a 'p' not a 'b'. A favourite is pullet, a young hen, apparently translated as a 'sexually inexperienced chicken'. Fortunately, some have already been changed. The Dongda Anus Hospital is now known as the Dongda Proctology Hospital.
There is little doubt that economically the Olympic Games have been good for Beijing. China's economy as a whole is swelling pretty fast at the moment, but Beijing's is swelling faster still. While China's economy is growing by 10 per cent or more a year, Beijing's has grown even faster at over 12 per cent in the run-up to the Olympics. There are those who worry, though, that once the Olympics are gone, the plug on the city's prosperity could be pulled. Two Beijing academics, Liu Qiyun and Wang Junping, argue that because Beijing's spending on the games has been so heavy – half as much as all the previous eight games put together – the typical investment downturn afterwards could be unusually severe, landing the city in a major slump.
Game critics
There are people who criticise the Beijing games for different reasons. Beijing was always a controversial choice for the games because of its human-rights record. Some people even likened it to the awarding of the 1936 Olympics to Berlin under the Nazis. While most wouldn't go that far, there is no doubt that China will be under close scrutiny. Some observers have suggested that awarding the games might put pressure on China to make progress by putting it in the international spotlight. In an article in Business Week, Laura D'Andrea Tyson, a former adviser to Bill Clinton, wrote that, 'Paradoxically, hosting the games is likely to be a boon for China's citizenry and a headache for their leaders.' Yet others have said that their successful bid for the Olympics, along with China's growing prosperity, has simply given the country's leaders the confidence to ride roughshod over moral condemnation from abroad. Of particular concern is China's role in Darfur (see pages 126–7), provoking many to call the Beijing games the 'Genocide Olympics', but the fate of Tibet, political prisoners, conditions in China's factories (including child labour) and China's environmental record are all attracting critical attention.
Interestingly, this is creating something of a public relations nightmare for the global corporations sponsoring the Olympics such as Adidas, Coca-Cola, General Electric, McDonald's and Kodak. If these companies completely ignore activists' criticisms, they might turn off consumers at home. Yet if they criticise the Chinese, they could jeopardise their future in this hugely lucrative market. In the past, the Chinese authorities have been quick to drop licences or operating agreements with foreign corporations to which they take a dislike. But at home companies such as Coca-Cola and McDonald's are facing some high-profile critics. Actress Mia Farrow, chair of a group called Dream for Darfur, is reported to have written in an email, 'The OIympics will be forever tarnished unless China uses its influence to get Khartoum to act [on Darfur]; the brands of the sponsors will be tarnished by association.' PR for the corporations tries to steer a safe line by saying that they have no power to influence sovereign governments, and by emphasising their other humanitarian projects, but the issues are certain to be raised.
INFO: TORCH MARCH
To get the 2008 games started, Beijing is planning the longest ever Olympic torch relay. The flame will start as usual at Olympia in Greece, on 25 March 2008, and then will travel 137,000 kilometres (85,000 miles) across five continents before it finally arrives in the National Stadium in Beijing to commence the games. En route it will travel right along the old Silk Road through cities such as Samarkand and Tashkent in Uzbekistan to symbolise how far back the links go between China and the rest of the world. The relay is called the Journey of Harmony, but the planning has not been completely harmonious. One proposed stop en route is at Taipei in Taiwan, but the Taiwanese government is not happy with this, saying that since Taiwan is not part of China, the Chinese cannot simply decide unilaterally to take the route through Taiwan. Another contentious part of the plan is to carry the flame to the top of MountQomolangma (Everest). It is not so much the carrying of the torch up the mountain that upsets environmentalists and Tibetan rights campaigners but the 108-kilometre (67-mile) tarmacked highway the Chinese are building through the fragile Himalayan environment all the way to Everest Base Camp. During the torch relay, the Everest highway will carry all the support and media. Afterwards, though, the road will become a major way in for tourists and climbers who want to reach the mountain the easy way.
Whatever the outcome of the OIympics, there is no doubt whatsoever that it will put the new China on the map. Billions of people around the world will see for the first time the startling changes that China has gone through, they will see on their TV screens the amazing modern architecture of China's cities and they will see Chinese people out in the streets enjoying themselves wearing as wide a range of fashions as anyone in the West. No one will ever again be able to think of Chinese people as downtrodden and wearing the drab pajamas of the Mao era.