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CHINA: Rehearsing the Coming Out Party Called Olympics

Antoaneta Bezlova

BEIJING, Aug 7 2007 (IPS) - When the capital of the Middle Kingdom hosts the summer Olympics next year, nothing will be left to chance or spontaneity. Image-conscious and averse to PR gaffes, Chinese leaders are staging a grand rehearsal to fine-tune a coming out party into the world.

While the auspicious moment would arrive at eight minutes past eight on Aug. 8, 2008 the date of Wednesday's rehearsal is short by only one digit against the "lucky" eight numbers on D-day. A televised gala, featuring speeches by Chinese leaders and International Olympic Committee officials, would mark the opening of a "mini-Olympics", consisting of ten international sporting events.

Beijing Olympics is reckoned as the costliest in the long history of the games – the city has already spent 10 times the four billion US dollars that Athens did on infrastructure for the 2004 games. Officials speak of a "once in a lifetime opportunity’’ for China to showcase its modernised capital and its cultural and economic advances.

In Beijing, the ascent of modern China is symbolically reflected in the seemingly overnight rise of brand-new and thoroughly futuristic buildings, like the "bird’s nest" national stadium and the "water cube" indoor swimming centre, that aim to place the city in the ranks of the world’s avant-garde architectural capitals.

When the big Olympics arrive in August next year, Beijing will boast a stunning new airport terminal and a high-speed airport rail, new subway system and 11 new world-class sporting venues. An ultramodern opera house and a new TV tower designed by the famous Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas are just a few of the architectural wonders the Chinese capital is adding to its new skyline.

But groundbreaking architecture and infrastructure are only part of the total image makeover that city officials have been anxiously putting in place in the run up to the Olympics. Beijing is also trying to transform its polluted environment and tackle its worsening traffic congestion. Having pledged to hold a "green Olympics", the city has spent 13 billion dollars on its environment, increasing "green" energy consumption and planting 28 million trees.

Worried about the capital’s infamous hazy skies, city officials have ordered one million cars off the roads this month, in a dry run dry next year’s even more rigorous traffic and smog control measures.

Nearly all power plants are banned from the downtown area and all coal-burning furnaces shut down. The city biggest polluter – Shougang Corp, China’s third-biggest steel maker, has been forced out of the capital to an offshore island in the neighbouring province of Hebei.

"Good air and blue skies are important not only for the opening ceremony of the Games but also for athletes and local residents," Wang Wei, executive vice-president of the Beijing Organising Committee for the Olympic Games, remarked at a press briefing this week. "What mattes more to us is not the image but the health of the athletes and the people, including visitors, during games time."

Beijing has declared the 2008 games to be the "People’s Olympics". But there are those who question the sincerity of the government’s professed concerns about the people’s well being.

The Geneva-based Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions says at least 10 percent of Beijing’s population of 15 million has been displaced to make way for the city redevelopment. Independent observers insist as many as three million people, many of them forcibly, have been evicted in the process of Beijing’s modernisation.

"The Olympics is just a cover-up for greedy developers," fumes Zeng Xiaoyan, whose home in the capital’s Dongcheng district was demolished last year. "Even if Beijing was not hosting the Olympic games, many of the old houses would be still razed. Once they (developers) realised how much money they could make from the land, there was no stopping them".

Expressions of dissent about Beijing’s giant project of social engineering have been glaringly absent in the media. The state-sanctioned press has preferred to focus instead on the capital’s efforts to reform its citizens’ ingrained habits of public spitting, cursing and littering.

Citywide campaigns are underway to stamp out queue jumping, smoking and using foul language in public – all described by the China Daily newspaper as "stubborn diseases that tarnish the image of the capital city". In addition, Beijing has announced fines of up to 50 yuan (6.5 dollars) for people caught spitting in public before the Olympics, and threatened to police its service industry for rude manners.

Even elderly Beijingers who had witnessed various patriotic and moral campaigns in the earlier years of Chinese Communist party’s rule are impressed by this seemingly relentless drive towards perfection.

"I wonder if they can make everything from buildings to people seem perfect," quipped retired university professor Dong Yaohui. "Does it have to be?"