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  A Small Victory for China: Beijing Is Ready for the Olympics

A Small Victory for China Beijing Is Ready for the Olympics

By Ullrich Fichtner in Beijing

Part 2: Bringing in Farmers to Build the Stadiums

To provide labor for all this construction work, huge numbers of China's farmers have had to become laborers. Hundreds of thousands have made the long journey to the capital city. On the western outskirts of Beijing, in front of the new velodrome designed by the architecture firm Schürman, men and women from the province of Hebei and from Sichuan add the finishing touches to paths and borders, shoveling stones seven days a week for the glory of the nation, and all for 800 yuan ($107) each month. The builders are constructing a new Olympia in the Far East.

Droves of them are building the square in front of the Laoshan cycle track, which also looks like a spaceship -- round, futuristic, while at the same time vaulted like a church dome.

In the shadow of the velodrome, just a few meters from the huge hall, oppressively close, two low apartment blocks have been left standing. Socialist accommodation with flaking stucco; they look as though the demolition balls left them behind by mistake.

Between the buildings two elderly women are walking a Pomeranian. They say that there are no vegetable markets left in the area. They can't think of anything else to say about Olympia. A girl in a sweat suit says that where the hall now stands there once were fields. But she can't remember exactly -- they might have been the training grounds for a driving school, she says. Work began on the cycle track three years ago. And three years is a very long time in today’s Beijing.

Growth is visible everywhere. The vehicle fleet of the capital city alone increases by 1,000 vehicles daily. No one counts the apartment blocks any more, hundreds are under construction with hundreds more planned. Foreigners who have lived here for a long time no longer talk of development, but of explosion. In 1994 the city laid its third highway ring road, in 2001 its fourth and in 2003 its fifth; now the sixth is underway. And all of that has always had a lot to do with sport, with sports policy in China.

A Storm of Progress

Beijing experienced its first major modernization push after the Mao era in the run-up to the Asian Games of 1990. At the time, one year after the Tiananmen Square massacre, the government presented new, magnificent buildings to gloss over the disgrace. New housing and business centers sprang up around the competition sites. The Asian Games were the prelude to the fugue that is the Olympics.

The storm of progress since 1990 has not come without a price. The average speed on the roads has dropped to 12 kilometers (7.4 miles) per hour thanks to perpetual jams. It will soon be possible to travel faster on foot, but that involves breathing in the notorious Beijing air, air that is pregnant with sulfur dioxide, with nitrogen oxide, with heavy metals, with fine particles, all at levels that regularly show contempt for national and World Health Organization guidelines.

On bad days, when it’s foggy, when the coal heating is lit, when dust storms hit the city and yet the air nevertheless stays still as though in a bell jar, the pollution makes itself felt, thick on the tongue, causing the throat to ache.

But the Games take place in summer and a travel ban will be slapped on car drivers in their millions. The government wants to impose temporary factory closures, will bring old power plants to a standstill and is already making large-scale shifts from coal to gas, a move which has been applauded by the United Nations Environment Program.

And if none of this helps or if it is too slow, then the government’s weather-makers will have it rain, or they will shoot missiles into the clouds to disperse them; they will do everything without a second thought to make sure that the air over the huge Beijing sports festival will at least not be as dirty as for Athens 2004 or Los Angeles 1984.

There are another 265 days before the Games open on Aug. 8, 2008. Twenty new sports grounds have been constructed, 11 have been fully renovated and anyone who finally manages to approach the Olympic Green on the fourth city ring road is suddenly and overwhelmingly confronted with the most emblematic building of the forthcoming Games, the National Stadium, also known as the "Bird's Nest."

Beside it, the Olympic Campus stretches two, maybe three kilometers to the north, with the spectacular swimming pool, the Olympic Hall and the Conference and Meditation Center strung out in a row, behind them the trifling Olympic Village, the tennis courts, another park with trees and ponds -- that's what Olympia will look like next year. Pictures will be supplied to sweep away old clichés. And each picture, even before the games, is a small victory for China.

But nothing has a more impressive or more moving effect than that of the huge stadium itself. The interwoven steel nest is a proud emblem, a monumental building with a human face, an ingenious design by the architect duo Herzog & de Meuron, together with the artist Ai Weiwei. It’s as though this stadium is the first of China’s great gifts to the world in the 21st century. Nothing material, nothing that is for sale, but rather an original piece of global culture, made in China.

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