For China, as leading Chinese Olympic expert Xu Guoqui argues, the Beijing Olympics represent a moment of crisis, ?in the Chinese sense of the word ? a moment of mixed danger and opportunity.? That his apprehension is reasonable is driven home when we note that the Chinese have spent a staggering $42 billion for the Games. The scale of expenditure is best understood in comparative terms. In 2004, the Greeks had spent $15 billion to stage the Games, only a third of what the Chinese are putting into the 29th Olympiad to be staged between August 8-24, 2008.
One feels the impact of the dramatic Beijing facelift as soon as one lands there. A swanky new Terminal 3 awaits Olympic visitors, a facility designed by the leading British architect Norman Foster. The terminal, covering an area of 14 million square feet and costing an approximate $3.5 billion, is a fair indication that the Chinese aren?t taking a chance.
On stepping out of the airport, one immediately comes across yet another new facility built for the Olympics ? the Beijing-Tianjin Expressway. This four lane expressway, which links Beijing with the other co-host city of the Olympics, Tianjin (venue for soccer), will facilitate very quick turnaround time between the two cities. Along with the expressway, a bullet train service has also been inaugurated, which has reduced the travel time to a paltry 30 minutes. This train, running at a speed of 380 kmph covers 135 kms, the distance between the cities, in a little more than 30 minutes.
Once in Beijing, there are new facilities all over the city ? 19 new venues to be exact. Of these, the two most talked about are certainly the National Stadium or the Birds Nest and The Aquatics Center, which is nothing short of a visual delight. The Birds Nest is the brainchild of the Swiss architect Jacques Herzog and it has cost Beijing a staggering $500 million. Herzog is right in commenting, ?Everyone is encouraged to do their most stupid and their most extravagant designs in Beijing. You couldn?t construct such an avant garde structure anywhere else.? While the world raves on about the design and the amazing facility, what impact the use of 42 million tonnes of steel in building the Birds Nest (when Wembley needed just 7 million) will have on China?s future is a question the organisers will have to contend with after the Games are over.
The aquatics facility, which borders the Birds Nest, is surely the best in the world. Shaped as a water cube, its blue appearance is a viewer?s delight. Built by a consortium of leading architects, Arup Associates based in London, PTW in Australia and CCDI in China, the Aquatics Center is being touted as a demonstration of ?a new openness and tolerance among common Chinese people,? accordingto The Guardian.
What is hardly being written about is the size of the Olympic village. Stretching for kilometres, it is by far the biggest Olympic village in history, a facility that has cost the organisers several millions of dollars. Expected to serve as housing in the aftermath of the Games, the village is well linked with the subway and other modes of public transportation, which too have been worked upon for the Games.
In fact, over $30 million has been spent on the subway system, which, the government hopes will encourage more and more people to leave their cars at home. This is one of the ways in which the organisers plan to combat the pollution that has been a serious thorn in Beijing?s flesh in the months leading up to the Games.
So much so that Beijing has spent more than a whopping $16 billion to ensure a ?green Olympics?; most of the sites have inbuilt clean-energy and water-conservation technologies, and for the past few years Beijing has made a determined effort to shut down many of the biggest polluters. Efforts are also on to move away from coal, replacing it with natural gas.
China, thus, despite pressing human rights and other concerns, is ready to take on the world. The spectacular progress already achieved, the kind of sporting infrastructure on the verge of completion, the exactitude in preparations to topple the US for the position of the number one sporting power in the world is impressive. Also, the facelift to the roads and the multiple experiments in transportation in trying to do away with pollution and traffic jams point to an energy, which is infectious and unmatched.
?(The writer teaches at La Trobe University)