China’s Olympic Warmup

Beijing is boiling. A year before China’s capital hosts the 2008 Summer Olympic Games, its economy is swelling at an annual rate of 12%. Skyscrapers and vast shopping malls are springing up alongside the 28 million new trees that have been planted in an attempt to counteract the 3 million vehicles that clog the city’s streets and whose fumes contribute to pollution so bad that new arrivals invariably develop a racking cough that can plague them for months. More than anything else, perhaps, it is the human tide sweeping Beijing that is remaking the city, with migrant workers from tiny villages in every corner of China standing wide-eyed on the streets, lured by the hundreds of thousands of jobs the boom has created. Then there are those from even farther afield–venture capitalists from San Francisco, artists from Brussels, chefs from Rome, legions of gimlet-eyed businessmen from Taipei, Berlin and Tel Aviv–all drawn to make fortune or fame or maybe just to say “I was there the year that Beijing welcomed the world.”

The Olympics have been used before to solemnize a nation’s vision of itself. The 1964 Games in Tokyo announced that a new powerhouse had been rebuilt from the ashes of war; the ones in Seoul, 24 years later, that a country of the developing world had achieved modernity. But the weight of expectation and symbolism carried by the 2008 Olympics is something else. For the billions watching around the world, the Olympics will be a time when a resurgent China shows its most confident face–and a moment that offers a unique opportunity to pressure the Chinese authorities on everything from environmental protection to the country’s policy toward Sudan.

For many ordinary Chinese, the Games mark the ability of their nation to shrug off two centuries of humiliation by foreigners. “In the 19th century, China used to be called the sick man of Asia,” says Li Weiling, 51, a checkout clerk at a Beijing supermarket. “The Olympics will totally change that. Hundreds of thousands of athletes, reporters and visitors will see China with their own eyes and realize China is not a backward country anymore.” Among China’s dissidents and democrats, meanwhile, there has been hope that the attention paid to their nation as the Games approach would lead to a relaxation of tight controls on political and social expression. As for those who live in Beijing, the Olympics will signify the transformation of their city–until recently one whose sinews and shape had been constant for hundreds of years–into a place that aims to rival New York or London as an iconic world city of the new century. The 2008 Olympic Games, in short, are changing the way in which all of us, in China or thousands of miles from it, think about a city, a country and–because that country has nearly 23% of the planet’s population–the world.

It is in Beijing, of course, that the impact of the Games is felt most intensely. Zhong Hongwu of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences calculates that total Olympics-related expenditures by Beijing will hit $38 billion, some four times as much as was spent preparing Athens for the 2004 Games. As you might expect in an authoritarian state, it is all but certain that the venues and facilities being built for the Olympics will be ready in time. Eleven of the 12 sporting venues are on track to be finished by the end of the year. A fifth subway line to the airport will start a month before the opening ceremony, and a brand-new airport terminal designed by Norman Foster is scheduled to open in early 2008. Half a million volunteers are being trained to answer visitors’ questions–about one for every foreign tourist expected to show up. Government officials say some 4 million Beijing residents have received English-language lessons. Famous for aloofness and droll irony, the city’s people have been getting training in other areas too in the hope that they will curb their spitting, erratic driving, incessant littering and inability to form an orderly line.

Physically, the city has undergone a breathtaking destruction and reconstruction. “I went away for three months, and when I came back, I couldn’t even recognize a neighborhood near my home. I hardly knew it was my city,” says film director Xu Jinglei, 33, born and bred in Beijing. Astonishing buildings are starting to appear: the iconic Bird’s Nest Olympic stadium; Rem Koolhaas’ cantilevered towers for broadcaster CCTV; the National Theater, a doorless silver dome perched on the corner of Tiananmen Square like a newly landed UFO. Numberless dilapidated eyesores thrown up by central planners in the 1950s and ’60s have been swept away.

Few will mourn them. But in the race to make Beijing one of the world’s great modern cities, much of it has been turned into cold canyons of glass and steel, alienated spaces that feel as though they will never evolve into something human. And whole neighborhoods of Beijing–communities, some of which were hundreds of years old–have been bulldozed in the name of progress. “As Beijingers pursue the comfort and efficiency of modernization,” says a notice on the website of the Beijing Organizing Committee for the Olympic Games, “tradition and history are carefully preserved.” For many of the 1.5 million who have been forcibly removed from their homes–to say nothing of the historians and preservationists who, appalled, have watched the destruction–that is a hollow claim.

Admittedly, life in the hutongs–the narrow alleyways lined with single-story courtyard houses that are the heart of old Beijing and have suffered the greatest destruction–is no picnic. Most of the courtyard houses that held one family before Beijing fell to the Communists in 1949 are now packed with five or six. Toilets and showers are communal and sometimes hundreds of meters away. Heating comes from smoky coal fires, and deaths from asphyxiation are common. Xu Xiaotang, who has lived in the same central-Beijing alley for nearly a half- century, would move out tomorrow if he could afford to. “This is not a place for humans to live,” Xu says.

But human-rights activists and preservationists say the problems of the hutongs could have been solved if the political will had been there. Instead, they argue, priorities were driven by real estate developers’ huge profits and by the widespread corruption that has made stories of collusion between developers and venal officials commonplace even in China’s strictly controlled media. Details may never come to light, but the scope of the corruption problem was underscored last year when Beijing’s deputy mayor Liu Zhihua was arrested for what the official media described as “corruption and degeneracy.” As a consequence of the rebuilding, a medieval city largely unchanged since it was formally laid out by Mongol conquerors as the capital of the new Yuan dynasty in 1267 has all but disappeared. Until the 1990s, the hutongs had been virtually untouched. Now only about 1,000 of some 6,000 remain.

“By allowing Beijing to host the games, you will help the development of human rights,” Liu Jingmin, vice president of the Beijing Olympic-bid committee, told reporters in April 2001. Other officials have made similar promises. Liu even expanded his to include references to greater democracy and media freedom. Some optimistic observers abroad thought the government would be so careful to show its best side to the world in the run-up to the Games that it would ease its authoritarian habits. The Olympics could then be imagined as a journey to a destination where human rights, democracy and free media were well established.

There’s not much sign of that so far. It is true that under regulations adopted at the beginning of this year, most restrictions on reporting in China by foreign journalists were lifted. Rather than apply for official interviews and trips outside Beijing through the Foreign Ministry, reporters can now interview anyone, anywhere, as long as they have prior consent. But that has been just about the single concrete advance the advent of the Olympics has brought to the cause of a free press in China, and it applies only to foreign journalists. For local reporters, conditions have actually worsened. An Amnesty International report last month described a new crackdown on domestic media, including continued imprisonment of journalists and writers, forced dismissals and the closure of publications that offend the authorities. In July, for example, authorities summarily shut down the China Development Brief, a decade-old English-language monthly.

Hu Jia, 32, a political activist who has been in and out of detention and house arrest for his views on topics such as the government’s AIDS policy and Tibet, gives a quiet smile when reminded of the promises that the Olympics would advance the cause of human rights. Hu still gets a police escort when he goes outside, though the only visible guard on his fourth-story walk-up apartment in Beijing’s eastern suburbs asks politely for accreditation, laboriously records the details, then waves visitors in with a smile. That smiling face, Hu says, is the one that Beijing is presenting to the outside world. But within China, he says, conditions are worse than ever. “It’s a policy of ‘soft to the outside, strict within,'” says Hu. He recently hosted the wife of blind lawyer Chen Guangcheng, who is serving a four-year sentence ostensibly for disrupting traffic but almost certainly because of the embarrassment he caused the government of Shandong province by publicizing cases of forced sterilizations and abortions by family-planning officials. After escaping from house arrest in Shandong, Yuan Weijing spent nearly a month holed up in Hu’s apartment, fearful of being kidnapped and forcibly returned home by the carloads of policemen who stationed themselves outside. Last month Yuan attempted to fly to Manila to receive an honor given to her husband by the Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation. She was allowed to check in at the airport but was then detained, forced into a van and driven back to Shandong, where she is again confined to her home.

Despite their earlier promises, Chinese officials now repeatedly complain that the Olympics are a sporting event and should not be linked to politics. If you look at the history of the Olympics–from the demonstrators gunned down in Mexico’s Tlatelolco Square in 1968 to the boycotts of the 1980s and ’90s–that would seem a pretty forlorn hope. Chinese activists, like others before them, have wanted to use the world’s attention on their nation to reduce the iron grip that politics and ideology have held over their lives for so long. “The Olympics are about human nature,” says Bao Tong, a former adviser to Zhao Ziyang, the reformist Communist Party General Secretary at the time of the Tiananmen massacre in 1989. “You cannot separate the Olympics from human rights.” But this is not yet a view that has commended itself to the authorities. “You are very active these days, aren’t you?” a senior policeman told Hu recently. “Just you wait,” the officer continued. “There’ll be a settling of accounts come next fall.”

While ordinary Chinese are certainly proud to be hosting the Games, there’s little doubt about who has the most to gain if the Olympics pass without a hitch. China’s Communist Party “only has two sources of legitimacy,” says Michael Duke, a professor emeritus of Chinese studies at the University of Vancouver, “nationalism and economics, and the Olympics encapsulate both of them.” China’s leadership has built up the Olympics as a celebration of the party’s administrative competence. Now it wishes to use the Games to confirm China’s new international stature and expunge the last vestiges of the isolation into which the country was plunged after the bloody suppression of the 1989 Tiananmen protests. “A successful Games would mean that China is accepted by the international community and has become a major world power,” says Yan Xuetong, who heads the Institute of International Studies at Beijing’s Tsinghua University.

Major world powers, however, are subject to major world campaigns. With China’s growing clout and visibility has come an increased sense that it should adhere to the highest standards of international conduct. And activists have been able to use the Games as a way of holding China to account. That has been done most obviously in the case of Darfur. Critics say Beijing’s support for the government of Sudan–where China is the biggest investor in the growing oil industry as well as its biggest customer, importing about two-thirds of the country’s crude production last year–amounts to support for genocide in Darfur. For years, Eric Reeves, a professor of English at Smith College, has been writing articles and giving speeches on Darfur and China’s role there. Then in March, actress Mia Farrow wrote a column for the Wall Street Journal calling for a boycott of what she labeled the “Genocide Olympics.” The campaign may have had some effect on Chinese behavior. After using its vote on the Security Council to block U.N. intervention in Darfur for four years, Beijing reversed course in July, endorsing the creation of a force of 26,000 soldiers and police officers to uphold a peace agreement between the Sudanese government and rebel forces.

Reeves and his colleagues in the groups seeking action on Darfur say Sudan has reneged on similar promises before and already shows signs of doing so again. So they intend to continue goading Beijing to keep pushing Khartoum. “We say to the Chinese, ‘We know you think this is your moment to step onto the world stage, but we are going to rain on your parade,'” Reeves says. “They know more pressure is coming and are afraid.” In the case of Darfur, says Tsinghua’s Yan, “yes, the pressure worked.” But he is quick to add that just because Western NGOs have had one success, they should not assume they will have another. China remains wedded to the belief that outside forces should not be allowed to dictate what a nation thinks is its own business. “China will never change its fundamental policy of nonintervention in internal affairs,” says Yan. “If it did, it could legitimize intervention by the U.N. in matters such as Taiwan.”

And there, in a nutshell, is perhaps the best view of China and the Olympics. The Games have brought China’s behavior into the global range of vision, encouraging people the world over, including many in China, to think of the new giant in a new way. Has such scrutiny changed China? At the margin, perhaps. But in its essentials–in the deeply held belief among China’s leaders that China must be allowed to develop its society, its cities, its human rights and its politics in its own way and at its own speed–not yet.