Beijing Welcomes You

Six months before it could show off its new image, China’s existing image became a problem. On February 12, Steven Spielberg announced he was withdrawing as an artistic consultant to the opening and closing ceremonies, as a protest against Chinese policy.

Spielberg had signed on in 2006 to assist the film director Zhang Yimou, who was overseeing the ceremonies. At the time, it seemed to be a straightforward partnership between industry superstars: Zhang—the maker of Raise the Red Lantern and Not One Less—was a Spielbergian success in China’s movie industry, and he had won decades’ worth of artistic awards on the international film-festival circuit. To prepare for the Games, Zhang had announced that he was taking a two-year break from making movies, to ensure that Beijing would put on a world-class spectacle.

Zhang had also skipped two years of filmmaking in the 1990s, involuntarily, when the government suspended him from the industry as punishment for To Live, his bleak epic of Mao-era hardship. But those bad feelings were in the past; lately, Zhang had been making lush, heroic costume dramas, about the glories of a unified and strongly ruled China.

Now it was Hollywood that was rejecting Zhang’s project, and the rest of the Olympics. “Spielberg said, ‘No, I’m not going to go,’” a reporter said, thrusting a Fox News microphone at the British filmmaker Daryl Goodrich. So why, the Fox man demanded, was Goodrich cooperating with the Chinese?

Goodrich was one of five directors who had made short films about Beijing to mark the Olympic year, and who were now at a press conference to promote them. He managed to get something out about the necessary separation of sports from politics; then, as the Fox reporter pressed for follow-up, Goodrich’s producer backed him away from the stage, pleading another interview.

There were not many contexts in which Daryl Goodrich would have been compared to Spielberg. Goodrich, an adman by trade, was still working on his first feature film; his most widely acclaimed work was a short subject that London had used to promote its successful bid for the 2012 Olympics. That had been enough to convince the government-backed Beijing Foreign Cultural Exchanges Center to invite him to participate it its Vision Beijing short-film project.

And that was enough to bring a whiff of the stink bomb that Mia Farrow had set off in Hollywood wafting into the Olympic media center. Farrow’s target was Spielberg—or, from her point of view, the target was Darfur. The Sudanese government was causing slaughter and misery there. The Chinese government was trading with the Sudanese government. The Olympics would be in China. Spielberg had signed on as a creative advisor to the opening and closing ceremonies of the Olympics. Ergo, skipping over a few subcontractor-liability issues and the proceedings of the United Nations Security Council, E.T. was killing people in Darfur.

So, I supposed, was I. Because I had watched three of the Vision Beijing movies and interviewed the organizer, Shirley Zhang, back in December, the Foreign Cultural Exchanges Center had called me up two days before the press conference and asked if I would write about the films for one of its magazines. Somewhere not far up the org chart, this meant taking an assignment from the propaganda office of the Beijing municipal government.

Then again, I had just negotiated a kill fee on a service piece for an American men’s magazine, after they’d urged me to write something “more positive” about the fact that all the bookable hotel rooms in Beijing during the Olympics had already been block-reserved by travel companies. I told the Foreign Cultural Exchanges Center to send over a full set for me to preview.

While I waited for the disc to arrive, I wandered over to one of my neighborhood DVD shops. It was carrying copies of Lost in Beijing—director Li Yu’s tale of exploitation and squalor in the modern metropolis, which had been first censored and then banned outright by the Chinese authorities in January. To demonstrate its commitment to Western intellectual-property-rights norms, Beijing was cracking down on the bootleg DVD trade as the Olympics got closer, leaving most stores with denuded shelves. But the old free-flourishing business survived in scattered shops. So there was Lost in Beijing—the unexpurgated version, according to the box. Nearby was something titled The Bloody History of Communism.

“Respect for human rights is important wherever you go in the world,” Goodrich said at the press conference, when the Spielberg question was raised for the first time. But, Goodrich said, he had been invited to make a movie about sports and children, so that was what he did.

Two of the other four directors were also there fielding the Darfur question. Andrew Lau, the director of Hong Kong’s blockbuster Infernal Affairs trilogy, said in mixed English and Mandarin that he was “hen surprised”—very surprised—at Spielberg’s decision. “It’s sports . . . it’s not political,” Lau said. His own short film had been about Chinese food.

“I believe that art should have nothing to do with politics,” said Majid Majidi, the Iranian director of Children of Heaven. Majidi’s Vision Beijing contribution, Colours Fly, showed schoolchildren in color-coordinated uniforms dispersing around the city to release balloons, which drifted up to form the Olympic rings in the sky. Owing to environmental regulations, Shirley Zhang had told me, the balloons actually were kept on long tethers, so they could be hauled back down once the camera had filmed them being set free.

The premiere of the films was the next night—Oscar day in America—far south of the city center, in a desolate complex beyond the Fifth Ring Road. The same drive in a different direction would have gotten you out to the imperial retreat of the Summer Palace, in view of the Fragrant Hills. This was southern flatland. Barren fields surrounded unmarked pavement. The red carpeting was thin and industrial; an untended counter in the lobby displayed underwear, the ubiquitous white liquor, cookies, and packaged sausages for sale. There was a buffet with breaded meat and fried rice and broccoli. The directors, now including Patrice Leconte of France, autographed a backdrop that faced the entrance.

The auditorium itself was a television studio with a live orchestra and seating for a few hundred spectators: the premiere was being packaged as a TV spectacular. Each film was preceded by a clip reel of the director’s work, then remarks by the directors themselves. Giuseppe Tornatore, the director of Cinema Paradiso, sent his regrets in a letter read by the Italian ambassador. Majidi’s speech was delivered in Farsi, with no translation into Chinese or English. Subtitles would be added for viewers later.

In the first break between films, a troupe of adolescent acrobats did tumbling routines while tossing and catching wooden spools around the stage, using lengths of cord. The next break brought black-clad dancers with red fans; the one after that brought a male pop singer in a velvet shirt and studded jeans, his backup dancers wearing T-shirts and white sneakers. “Jintiande Beijing bu yiyang,” he sang—today’s Beijing is not the same. “I love-a Bei-jing!” the chorus concluded.

The last film of the night was Goodrich’s. A stern voiceover described the growth of China’s Olympic ambitions—the hundred-year dream, again—while serious but winsome young athletes were shown in training. It was the most overtly nationalistic or propagandistic movie in the set, by a considerable margin, a cuddly yet resolute descendant of Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia. “We have never faltered in our dream,” the narrator declared.

Then came the entertainment finale. A chorus of singers in beaded headgear took the stage. In a language more unidentifiable than Scots, they began to sing “Auld Lang Syne.” They were, the announcer would later explain, villagers from a remote part of Yunnan Province, belonging to an obscure ethnic minority—all farmers and all Christians. They had been taught the song by a British missionary in the 1900s, according to the announcer.

The farmers’ voices were weathered-sounding, with a pleasant tautness, and the song went through verse after verse. Chinese people love “Auld Lang Syne,” all year round, in malls and public gatherings and karaoke parlors. People in the middle section of the audience, the VIP section, began clapping along, in rhythm.

The crooked top of the old Christmas tree had reappeared, through the window of the apartment guardhouse, in among the potted plants the guards kept there. In the lot across the street, two Hitachi excavators had begun digging a gaping square-sided hole, then started on a second pit nearby.

The laws barring trucks from city traffic by day meant that if you needed to move a large amount of dirt, you had to move it overnight. On the lot, they were moving a large amount of dirt. Drawn by the noise one night, I went to the window. An excavator was loading a truck in the darkness. The truck’s headlights shone off across the open space, and the rest was invisible but for the taillights. The power shovel swept its own light over the truck as it turned to release a load of dirt; there was a clunk as the weight dropped into the truck bed. Then the light swung over to illuminate the growing pit. The shovel worked swiftly, filling the truck bed from front to back, then scattering and raking the final load.

Another truck arrived and went to the far side of the yard, where the second shovel began scooping up dirt for it. Flaps lifted and retracted, opening the truck bed. The shovel delivered the first load of dirt, and pivoted for the next. It was 10:35 p.m. Clouds of dust floated through the headlight beams, and I could smell dust by the window. In the background, the other shovel was going at the same time, their arms momentarily swinging in synchrony. In six minutes—fourteen scoops—the new truck was full. The flaps came back up, and the truck drove off into the night, with the other truck following it. The nearer shovel raked up the stray dirt that had spilled and cut its lights. For a moment the lot was dark. Then a new empty truck drove through the gate. A minute later, another arrived, with two more behind it. The two diggers swung back into action—and then the lights of a third digger, unseen till now, came on. This time it took only five minutes to make a full truckload. All through the night, the machinery kept chewing away, ton after ton. There were 10,000 construction sites in Beijing—put together, their acreage was one and a half times the size of Manhattan—and this was an ordinary night’s work at a single one.

By the time the press saddled up for a tour of the Olympic Village, headcount and crowding and general complication of things had reached a new level: the raggedy outer edges of the actual Olympic storm were blowing ashore. Citizens were playing ping-pong on roadside tables as the motor coaches passed; behind a construction fence, an excavator was knocking over brick buildings.

The Village, the compound where the Olympic athletes would stay, consisted of some four dozen low towers, most of them either six or nine stories. Because the Villages were residential spaces, easier to reuse than 100,000-seat stadia, they traditionally served as a bridge between a city’s Olympic planning and its post-Olympic development: college dorms in Atlanta; a fully built suburb in Sydney. Beijing’s Village, once the athletes were gone, was to be converted to private luxury apartments. The reception hall had cartoon rat decorations and snowflakes in it, and a red paper-cut work covering a wall. “This paper-cuts is made by an 80-year old lady from a small village in north-west China,” a sign explained in English.

Only a few of the buildings were set up for inspection, so the press waited outside to enter in small groups. The Chinese TV crews roamed around, as usual, interviewing foreigners. The foreign reaction to Olympic projects was as important as the projects themselves—how else could China decide whether it was performing at an appropriate international standard? Underfoot, the soft dust of the Beijing soil felt like talcum powder. The guards were kitted out in special new Olympic Village uniforms: black-blue tunic jackets, peaked caps, and high boots, looking uncannily like a unit of Darth Vader’s Imperial officers. On the question of security or repression, China lacked even a rudimentary grasp of what American political types call “optics”; foreign photographers crouched down to shoot the looming, dark figures.

The hallways were lit with round fluorescents, the economy kind, and there was a similar fixture over the dining table in a unit opened for press tours. The ceiling cans held compact fluorescents, with an orange tint. The space seemed tight for the six athletes it was supposed to house, or for the apartment-buyers who would come after. The showers were nozzles in curtained-off corners of the bathrooms, with no tub or stall around them.

After seeing the rooms, I went back to the reception center to study the model of the Olympic grounds there. I couldn’t tell if it was the same one that had been in the Exhibition Center or not. I checked for the Niangniang Temple by the Water Cube, and saw nothing. I tried to ask a young man in a suit, who was talking to reporters in English, about where the model had come from. After three or four non sequiturs, it occurred to me that he was equipped with only enough English to answer a predetermined set of questions, like a voice-recognition phone tree. Official Beijing was not well prepared to answer questions it didn’t expect to be asked.

At the end of February, the organizing committee briefed a full house of domestic and foreign reporters on the city’s air-pollution-control measures for 2008. These would be the fourteenth phase of pollution restrictions, dating back to 1998. The goal was to have blue-sky days 70 percent of the time, meaning 256 days, eleven more than 2007’s target. Stricter standards for boilers, motor vehicles, and petroleum and chemical plants would take effect before summer; high-emission vehicles would be taken off the roads; 50,000 houses would convert from coal burners to electric heat.

Early March’s weather was warm and sunny; it seemed possible that Beijing might not descend into hellishness forevermore. Then all at once the murk came back, inexorably as high tide. We took the baby out to a baby-gear store to buy shoes, under a washed-out sun. When we got back out of the store, in the gathering dirty dark, there were no cabs. The mall was like a warehouse, facing a strip of auto-repair shops. No one was being dropped off there. It grew colder and colder, for fifteen or twenty minutes, with Mack coughing in his car-seat stroller, before we got a taxi home. The filth was like an act of vengeance, the sky over the Third Ring glowing softly with dirt-trapped light, behind the dark bulk of buildings. Carrying the car seat up the apartment stairs, I was short of breath. A cement mixer was working on the vacant lot, under floodlights and the flare of welding torches. The next day was full of harsh glare in a haze-gray sky, a beautiful day ruined by pollution. Ethiopia’s Haile Gebrselassie, the world record holder in the marathon, announced that he would not be running in the Olympics. The pollution measures were too late. He would not risk breathing the air.

The weather got better again; the news got worse. March 15, the first day of a Major League Baseball exhibition on the Olympic fields, was what people conventionally call a great day for a ballgame. A right-handed pull hitter might have disagreed, feeling the strong breeze coming in from the northwest. Along Chang’an Boulevard, by Tian’anmen Square and the Great Hall of the People, the national flags and accompanying plain red ones stood rippling off their flagpoles, aglow in clear sunlight against the blue sky.

From the other side of the country, in the Tibetan capital of Lhasa, came reports of flag burnings—and other things burning. It was unclear. The Internet was clogged. YouTube was blocked, and its Chinese counterpart, Tudou, had suddenly announced it was shutting down to work on its servers. A New York Times account of rioting and death in Lhasa loaded partway, then broke off in mid-sentence: “What actually set off the violence is unclear, as accounts differed between Chinese and Tibetan residents. Monks from the Ramoche Temple, a short”—

But whatever was happening was happening off in Idaho, geographically speaking, remote from the east and the capital. At the Wukesong ball fields, the San Diego Padres were playing the Los Angeles Dodgers—or spring-training travel-squad versions of those teams, anyway. Traffic seized up on the boulevard outside while the American ambassador was throwing out the first pitch: a black Honda and a red Buick had collided in the middle of an intersection. The custom of preserving the accident scene had been formally overturned a few months before by a new traffic regulation that required people to clear the roadway, but the drivers were sticking with their old habits.

Baseball was another idiom that hadn’t quite translated into Chinese. In Taiwan, a cousin of Christina’s had sneaked out of military duty to join the crowds watching telecasts of Chien-Ming Wang and the New York Yankees, but the mainland took no comparable interest in America’s pastime. Earlier in the week, at a promotional event for this China Series, the host was a model wearing a purple jersey with a glittery gold Yankees logo—color-coordinated with a purple Boston Red Sox trucker hat.

The Wukesong ballpark had been expanded since the Good Luck games, with new sections on the gravel beds, held up by a thicket of shiny tubular beams and crosspieces, like scaffolding. Sheet-metal stairways rose through the underside, with no ramps or escalators. As I climbed toward my seat, a man rolled up in a wheelchair to the next set of stairs, tipped himself out, and began pulling himself up the steps with his hands and feet.

The field itself was a lush emerald green—a spray-paint green, it turned out, up close. The Dodgers wore their changeless whites; the perpetually tinkering Padres wore road uniforms in a sort of sand color. It looked like a ballgame, mostly. The Dodgers’ jersey numbers—72, 76, 83—betrayed the fact that many of them would be flying home to join the Triple-A Las Vegas 51s. But at shortstop, wearing a big-league number 14, was Chin-Lung Hu of Taiwan, also known, for mainland-competition purposes, as Hu Jinlong of Chinese Taipei.

The Dodgers broke on top with a home run. The Padres tied it; the Dodgers pulled back ahead. Hu struck out, lined into a double play, struck out again. He booted and bobbled ground balls. “I thought that Hu seemed a little nervous,” his manager, Joe Torre, would say in his postgame interview.

The game was a sellout, mostly thanks to expats. On the patch of walkway behind the stands that served as a concourse, a vendor squatted on the paving blocks, selling sandwiches and canned drinks. For 240 yuan, the vendors were letting fans carry a whole case of Yanjing beer off to their seats. Try that in the Land of Liberty.

Major League Baseball had planned on additional entertainment, but it had been scuttled at the last minute by the Public Security Bureau. So the job of engaging the crowd between innings was divided between a local cheerleading squad—something the Chinese had apparently decided belonged at every Western-style sporting event—and a series of MLB games and quizzes on the center-field video screen.

The video portion was emceed from the field by a local entertainer named Zhu Zhu, a petite young woman with a surprisingly forceful voice and the ability to switch flawlessly from Mandarin to English. The quizzes included the “Pick the Play Game,” in which spectators were asked to identify a clip of a routine base hit as “(1) Single; (2) Walk; (3) Double.”

For next day’s game, the Public Security Bureau relented slightly, allowing an international-school choir and a youth baseball team onto the field to sing the American and Chinese anthems, respectively. Waiting for the second game to begin, Zhu Zhu said that she had just finished recording her first album, which would be called JUJU. She wore white-framed Ray-Bans, a Dodgers jersey, and black suede boots. She had played baseball a few times in middle school, she said, but she’d had no idea what the Pick the Play Game terminology had meant.

The questions were the same. Torre batted Hu Jinlong in the leadoff spot, and Hu opened the game with a single, moved to second on a bunt, stole third, and tagged up and sprinted home on a medium fly ball to left. “He was the guy I’ve gotten to know,” Torre said, with admiration, in his final press scrum. “He was very special.”

While reporters waited for Torre to reappear in the dugout, the cheerleaders posed on the infield for a group photo. They were being marshaled by a woman in her thirties wearing a loose, blousy minidress in a vivid print. Her name was Soojin Cho, and her business card identified the squad as the Soojin Dance Team. The American-style Chinese cheerleaders were the work of a South Korean immigrant.

Blocking the Internet was not enough to make the Lhasa problem go away. The next big publicity event was a news conference to announce the plans for the torch relay. Now there was a separate sign-in sheet for the overseas press. The presentation dwelt at length on the procedural integrity of the selection of torchbearers—they had “followed the master plan of the torchbearer selection,” they had included representatives of all ethnic groups, etc. The torpor lasted till the third question of the question-and-answer period, when Wang Hui, doing her duty to accommodate the foreign media, called on a Wall Street Journal reporter. What about Lhasa, and activists’ calls for protests against the relay?

The violence would not affect the torch relay, organizing committee vice president Jiang Xiaoyu said. “The situation in Lhasa and Tibet has basically been stabilized,” Jiang said. As for the would-be protesters, such behavior “goes totally against the spirit of the Twenty-ninth Olympic Games torch relay, which is ‘Journey of Harmony.’” Going against the harmonious slogan was perhaps exactly the point of the protests; Tibet and Darfur were growing into a campaign to shun China from the polite company of nations, to try to revoke the acceptance implied by Beijing’s having won its Olympic bid. But that went unsaid. “Those activities will not win the hearts and minds of people, and therefore are doomed to failure,” Jiang said.

What about the calls for a boycott, either of the Games or of the opening ceremony? “The theme of the opening ceremony is civilization and harmony. . . . I do believe that the majority of the people around the world will make the right decision.” What about security? How could the Tibet leg of the relay, including a planned trip up Mount Everest, be kept secure? “Please be assured that no matter what happens in Tibet or Xinjiang, those events will never affect the normal operation of the torch relay.”

And what about Tibet, anyway? I should note here that when I finally collected my freelance pay from the propaganda office, what had been presented as a flat fee turned out to be a per-word rate, and my payment was cut in half. People who care about Tibet may take that as they wish, because my own position on the Tibet issue is that, considered against the enormousness and enormity of all the other questions and concerns surrounding the People’s Republic of China, Tibet is not particularly important. Generally speaking, the more attention people pay China—and this includes people who are inclined to conclude the worst about it—the less interest they have in Tibet.

People who do care a lot about Tibet (and are not Tibetan) have something wrong with their priorities. This goes for the Chinese, for starters. The passions of ordinary Chinese people run frighteningly hot on the subject of Tibet. There is something wrong with the Chinese that they care so much about possessing Tibet. And there is something wrong with the activists who care so much about dispossessing China of Tibet.

Neither side’s passion has detectably much to do with the actual condition of Tibet. The Uighurs of Xinjiang are at least as unhappy with their role in the People’s Republic as the Tibetans are, but no one is holding rock concerts for the Uighurs. Nor are the Chinese flooding YouTube with nationalistic videos asserting their ancient and eternal right to hold Xinjiang.

Tibet is a symbol, and a dull one, a vessel for ideas that people have already settled on. It is a symbol of China’s proud history and territorial integrity, and it is a symbol of the universal struggle for human rights and self-determination. That is, it is a symbol of China’s totalitarian power and contempt for Western liberalism, and it is a symbol of the West’s contempt for China and its envy of Chinese power. Protesting for or against Tibetan independence simply demonstrates that your side is right and the other side is wrong, intractably and antagonistically wrong.

It is odd that the central cause of the world’s democracy activists would be the restoration of a god-king—a very nice god-king, an internationally respected god-king, but nevertheless a person whose claim to rulership over other people rests on the authority of invisible and unverifiable supernatural forces. This is probably not a place the authors of the American Revolution would have expected to see their ideology end up.

There is, to be sure, the plain American belief that Tibet should be free because the Communist dictatorship is inherently in the wrong. China’s grand, sweeping claims of continuous rulership over Tibet through centuries of history are shaky, at best. But in Taipei, at the Chiang Kai-shek memorial, the displays include the Generalissimo’s maps of his own Republic of China—the China that the United States spent hundreds of millions of dollars trying to help Chiang realize. That China, our Free China, stretched across the Taiwan Strait and all the way up to Siberia, enveloping not only the Tibetans and the Uighurs but the present-day country of Mongolia and an untold number of Central Asian republics.

So neither side has a particularly impressive pedigree. The Chinese do, however, have a point when they compare their absorption of Tibet to the absorption of American Indians. Native Americans make up 1.5 percent of the population of the United States; the 5 million ethnic Tibetans are less than one-half of one percent of China’s population.

This is sort of sweet on the part of the Chinese, their overestimation of America’s ability to be embarrassed by hypocrisy. Someday, if China blossoms into a mature and secure superpower, it may pay as much attention to the Tibetans as we pay to the Cherokee.