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.