Olympics

Visit Time Out Beijing for everything you could possibly want to know about this year’s Olympic Games.

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Week 5
The twenty-ninth Olympics have ended but the question remains:should the Games have been awarded to Beijing in the first place? Yes, it was a great spectacle and went off smoothly, but the promises of greater freedom of speech, rule of law and improved human rights were completely ignored.

All the elements of Beijing that the authorities deemed unsightly – old buildings, migrant workers, the poor and the opinionated – were brushed under the carpet, very successfully. Members of the British swimming team – like all of the athletes I’ve met – were full of praise for their hosts when I ran into them at a party. Excellent facilities and hundreds of cheery volunteers have ensured their trip is perfect. But the athletes, like the visiting delegations of VIPs who are bussed from hotel to Olympic Village to corporate party, only see one side of the city. Of the 500,000 Olympic volunteers, they saw the smiling students pointing people in the right direction or giving advice on navigating subway lines; but there
was also a team of red-shirted old ladies (lao taitai) whose job was to guard against drugs, bombs – and over-curious journalists. Feature continues

One journalist friend who was soliciting quotes from locals was followed and harassed by a bentover old lady, who demanded to know what he was asking and for whom. We’re not talking elite secret police here – a well-placed sneeze could probably topple most of these old dears – but the Cultural Revolution tactic of spying on your neighbour is clearly still in place. The students chosen to look after the media have also been told not to engage in conversation and to reply vaguely to questions. Residents who have embarrassed the state have been severely punished.

Two ladies, both in their late seventies, were sentenced to a year’s hard labour each for requesting permission to protest at the destruction of their homes and the compensation offered. The Games’ slogan – ‘One World, One Dream’ – seems a little ironic. This global event was never about world unity; rather, it was a chance for China to show off and to wave the banner of national pride. The authorities have gone to every
length to ensure that everything looks good and that China comes up trumps on medals – even when that has led to allegations of cheating.

Athletes and coaches have tried to get round the rules since the Games began but state-sponsored cheating is something new. Yet there are
accusations that gymnastics gold medal-winner He Kexin is under the minimum age of 16. Her passport says she was born in 1992, but a
hacker claims to have found a birth certificate that says she was born in 1994 – which would make her two years too young to compete.
During the past two weeks, there have been private parties packed with athletes and VIPs, but outside the secure Olympic green there is
little more than a few extra red flags and 40 million potted plants to indicate the Games are on. Most of the locals I have asked haven’t been
to see anything – they say it’s too much mafan (hassle). Tickets are too expensive, queues too long and there are too many people. It’s better just to watch it on TV – exactly what the authorities hoped.

Many sponsors also have cause to grumble. Adidas spent an estimated £50 million becoming an official sponsor yet the back page of The Olympian – the state-run Olympic newspaper – has been running Nike ads. Even better – in fact, probably the best piece of statesupported
guerrilla marketing of any Games – the ‘surprise’ guest who lit the Olympic torch was former gymnast Li Ning, who owns China’s largest sportswear brand, and is Adidas’s largest domestic rival. Li Ning’s shares rose 5 per cent the day following his spectacular slo-mo dash.

Now the torch has been handed over to London, and the global spotlight will move elsewhere. This, then, is the time for this country to focus on human rights, anticorruption and freedom of speech. If China gets its house in order, then the IOC will deserve its own gold medal for having accomplished something truly meaningful. If not, it will prove that despite all the rhetoric, the Olympics really are just a bunch of games.

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Week 4
China’s Moon Festival falls on September 14 this year. The festival celebrates abundance, but also involves waste: people send Moon Cakes to friends, colleagues and customers but the cakes are rarely eaten – mainly as they taste like rubber filled with dried bat droppings. This year, however, Olympic tickets are being used to curry favour, and, like the cakes, not all of them are going to get used.

Hundreds of thousands of tickets have been given to officials, media, sponsors and VIPs who have no intention of getting up at the crack of dawn to travel the 100 miles to Tianjin to watch Burkina Faso and Latvia play women’s football. So, empty stadiums have become a topic of discussion once again, but it’s no great conspiracy: some games are just boring.

The difference this year is that the Chinese authorities have claimed this is the first Olympics in which all events have sold out. So even if you did want to see Burkina Faso perform their magic you can’t. The tickets given away to officials should have gone either to young locals, who could at least say they had been to a game; to overseas visitors, who are notably absent from Beijing; or to friends and families of athletes understandably enraged to hear they can’t get tickets to events when empty stands are plainly visible on TV.

It’s not just Chinese officials who are to blame. I observed 29 British tourists leave their tickets unused because they were too tired from climbing the Great Wall to go out that night. In the national houses and pavilions of the major countries, tickets are just left on tables for the taking. Sponsors have bundles of tickets which will remain unused when VIPs fail to show up. The only way to combat this is ticket touts – the more the merrier. In fact, several of them come from London’s East End: they are international wide boys who follow the big games. We have one who comes into our local pub at 9pm every night with a bag full of tickets for the following day. Yet 110 touts were arrested in a crackdown over the weekend, meaning more empty seats and disappointed sports fans.

Still, despite the images of empty seats that the international media are enjoying so much, many events are packed to the rafters. Every event I have been to has started with all seats taken, although students had to be brought in towards the end to fill the spaces left by people who had become tired, hungry or bored – or had simply seen their heroes and then left. But the best events have a magic that’s hard to resist.

On Saturday night, the atmosphere at the packed beach volleyball stadium was fantastic. The weather was sunny, the commentators entertaining – and the troupes of bikini-clad cheerleaders did no harm either. But women’s beach volleyball is a game that people simply want to watch more than Latvian women’s football, so it was a great night – especially as someone had given me their spare tickets for free.


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Week 3
On Friday night, as the countdown to the Olympic Opening Ceremony ticked away, a gang of us piled into a van. We had no Opening Ceremony ticket, but that put us in company with 15 million other Beijing residents, so we figured there’d be parties galore. From a rooftop bar in the city centre, we watched the firework footprints leap across Tiananmen Square, the Forbidden City and north up to the Olympic Stadium.

Then we moved on. But apparently, the only place to be that night was inside the Bird’s Nest Stadium. Tiananmen Square, where a crowd of thousands – including then premier Zhang Zemin – spontaneously celebrated winning the Games in 2001, was silent; the huge screens at Beijing railway station were switched off minutes into the ceremony as the crowd grew too large; another site with big screens was not even half full. International TV crews tried to get stragglers, hot and sweaty in 35C heat and 90 per cent humidity, to look excited. And Asia’s biggest TV screen constantly streamed a sponsor’s advert, leaving nearby small screens to show China’s biggest ever global party to those with long enough necks to see.

The four-hour ceremony was extraordinary; half the world cooed. For many, it was a sign of how far the country has come in the past
30 years. For others, 14,000 performers choreographed in perfect unison signalled the full control China still maintains over its people.
How will London compete? I hope it won’t. London’s celebrations in 2012 should be about streets teeming with partying people, not VIPs enjoying a ceremony while everyone else obeys official advice and stays home.


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Week 2
In my old London flat, when I pulled back my curtains, I’d usually see miserable drizzle. Peeking out in Beijing gives a rather different view.
On a good day, I can see the Rem Koolhaas-designed CCTV tower among the skyscrapers of the Central Business District. Once, I even saw the mountains that encircle Beijing, but often pollution restricts visibility to just a few hundred yards. When that happens, I have to decide if I can cycle to work or whether it’s safer to catch a cab. In a city where carbon dioxide is usually double the recommended WHO level and where residents receive texts warning them to stay indoors due to high pollution levels, it’s not a decision to take lightly.

Last month, the authorities took action. Half of Beijing’s three million cars have been taken off the streets on alternate days. Cranes stand desolate in a sea of rubble: all building work has been halted and 150 high polluting factories have been shut down.

This year, Beijing has set a target of 256 ‘blue sky days’ – days where air quality is ‘fairly’ good and the sky can be seen. Although there were a reported 86 blue-sky days in the first four months of this year, only a handful were truly clear. Friends from an international news agency set up a TV camera to film a minute of the skyline per day last week. It was only after three days that the sky cleared enough for them to realise they had missed the horizon and needed to re-angle their camera.

Apart from the fact that the million or so car-less citizens are making it nearly impossible to get a cab, congestion has eased. There are 4,000 extra buses and three new subway lines.

‘Visitors may die of heart attack or stroke within 24 hours of landing in Beijing,’ screeched a recent international headline. With 16 of the world’s 20 most polluted cities, China is an easy target for environmental doom-mongers, although the average carbon footprint of a Chinese person is still a quarter that of a European. But the aim has been to make Beijing as green as possible fore the Games. Environmental campaigns by celebrities such as basketball hero Yao Ming and film star Zhou Xun have helped educate Beijing’s youth. A colleague at Time Out Beijing even carries her own chopsticks rather than use the disposable wooden ones restaurants provide.

The haze may have prompted headlines abroad about possible injury to top athletes, but spare a thought for the millions who put up with it all the time. It has taken the Games to highlight the problem; with luck, the preventive measures will outlast them.

But as the first athletes move into the Olympic Village on July 27, a thick layer of pollution obscures the National Stadium. An announcement warns the old and asthmatic not to go outside and I decide to take a cab home.


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Week 1
On a midsummer Friday, seven years ago, I handed my passport to a young woman at a border. ‘See you in 2008,’ she said, beaming with pride, as she handed it back. News had travelled fast: even in this far corner of Tibet – almost the furthest point of China from the capital – the excitement was palpable: China had been awarded the Olympics.

The last seven years have been well documented – economic boom, growing wealth, the destruction of the old and £20 billion worth of new buildings. Out with the old and in with new seems to have been the motto as hundreds of thousands of homes have been replaced with new ring roads, modern housing and Olympic venues in a bid to beautify the city. Yet many new arrivals still seem to have expectations mired in the ’70s – they’re surprised that, instead of workers in Mao suits eating in communal canteens, they find fashionistas dining in Michelin-standard restaurants. Towering high-rises dominate the skyline and 1,500 new cars appear on the streets daily. But it is the cultural transformation that has changed the very soul of the city.

Now Chinese art is a force in the global market, Beijing rock bands make European tours and Chinese actors, architects, novelists and designers are finally being taken seriously. Yet this is still a Communist country. As 2008 has neared and the international press coverage has increased, the cultural liberation has been stymied by a nervous government. Police raids on bars, random checks on homes and workplaces, as well as a virtual halt on all foreign visas, has created an atmosphere of intimidation and fear for many, and forced thousands to leave the country. The reason for the clampdown is security. This year has been a terrible one for China both domestically and internationally: first floods, then riots, protests and, of course, the devastating earthquake. The authorities are trying to ensure that nothing goes wrong, but the upshot may be that nothing goes terribly right, either. Uniformity is simply not much fun; clampdown on cultural diversity (not to mention keeping athletes far and protesters even further away from the media), and instead of showcasing dynamic modern Beijing, with clubs, restaurants, arts and music to match a Sydney or a Barcelona, the powers that be will simply reinforce those tired old stereotypes of a gagged and manacled population unable to peep, let alone party, without official permission.

Visit Time Out Beijing for everything you could possibly want to know about this year's Olympic Games.

Week 5 | Week 4 | Week 3 | Week 2 | Week 1