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For months, U.S. and Western media were full of stories of smog in Beijing. The Chinese did their best to cut down on this inconvenience but did not succeed. Smog persisted until the opening day of the Olympic Games. To highlight the issue, four American athletes put on face masks upon landing in Beijing. This act was in fact a political statement, and it received full media coverage in the West.
Pre-Olympic reporting from China exclusively concentrated on smog, civil protests and security measures. Few, if any, Western media examined Beijing’s US$40 billion-plus spanking new facelift. All they wished to report was anything that could go wrong. Truthfully, nothing went wrong.
For the Chinese, years of planning and flawless execution resulted in the proud moment of the Games’ opening ceremony. The West spent months of planning to report on everything unpleasant. It was true that the Chinese were masking aspects of everyday life, and Western media was hell-bent on uncovering them. While watching the opening ceremony, everybody agreed that the $40 billion spent was well worth it; it was only later that a few jokes began to emerge.
The voice-faking during the opening ceremony, the digitally enhanced fireworks for the TV telecast, and the unpaid volunteers occupying the stadium’s empty seats all tarnished the image of that proud moment. Now people are beginning to make fun of the architecture of the Olympic stadium. Although the inside is great, it is the outside that they are talking about; it looks like a tangled web of steel and concrete, which locals call the “Bird’s Nest.” For $40 billion, they could have gotten something better.
The Chinese wish to project themselves as an advanced country capable of beating everyone in the world. They imagine themselves as the Middle Kingdom – in between heaven and earth, with no equal. Thus, they are forced to hide a lot.
China is still a developing economy, with 1.3 billion people, producing US$2.2 trillion in goods and services – more than half of which are exported. That does not leave much to be proud of. The only thing they can be proud of is their internal organization, which worked like clockwork during the Games.
All the prosperity that China likes to talk about benefits less than 340 million people located on the eastern seaboard, while the country’s rural dwellers live on incomes of US$2 a day. The World Bank verified this fact last year when it corrected its earlier analysis and stated that China has about 300 million people living in poverty.
Back to the subject of smog: why worry about it? It is a curse of modernization, which the West is very familiar with. Before relocating its smokestack industries to China, the West had all this smog in its own cities. Los Angeles had smog when it hosted the Olympic Games in 1984. The presence of smog is less important; it was the Chinese efforts to eliminate the smog that drew attention. The weather gods were also not favoring the Chinese until the fourth day when it rained, clearing the skies.
What will be the lasting impression outsiders retain about China when they return home from the Olympics? They will carry great memories of the opening day and feel silly about the few faked aspects. Some visitors will take detours to tourist hot spots and will be carefully managed by Chinese interpreters.
But the Western media is another story. Their masters back home have sent them to uncover China. They are supposed to dig deeper and find the truth about a few things. Every nation – developed or developing – has poverty. Masking it draws attention, while openly admitting a few facts up front lessens the impact. The Chinese are not very good at admitting the few facts, which is why Western scrutiny of China is all the more thorough.
China is now offering limited tours of Tibet or the province of Xinjiang, two hot spots within China. Only trusted reporters will get passes to visit these regions. High on other tourists’ lists of places to visit is the Three Gorges Dam. Like the Olympics, it is a showcase achievement for the Chinese – but all queries about the safety of this dam will surely be rebuffed.
True to their nature, Western tourists will enjoy everything. They will return home and tell stories of the great Games they saw. They will also relate a few not-so-pleasant stories. If they visited the countryside, they will talk about polluted rivers or smoke belching from factories, sparsely cultivated land or dirt-poor people. But this is normal. When American tourists visit the Caribbean or Latin America, for example, they come back with similar stories.
Hence, what the Chinese achieved with their US$40 billion-plus expenditure on the Games is almost certainly not enough. Most other nations who hold the Olympic Games spend a lot less. The Atlanta Olympics in 1996 cost under $3 billion, a similar amount was spent in Sydney in 2000, and the Athens Olympics cost the host $12 billion in 2004. The latter amount was high because not only did the Olympic venues have to be built anew, but the city’s entire infrastructure was modernized to make the Games workable.
When all the costs are tallied and the final chapter of the 2008 Olympics is written, the costs will probably be much higher than $40 billion, which the Chinese admit. For a developing country like China, this is an unnecessary expenditure. The Chinese may pretend they can afford it, but it could not be true.
China wanted to create a spectacle that would allow them to emerge on the world stage in style. That part they achieved. Whether the entire city of Beijing, together with all the tourist hot spots, needed a facelift for the event is another question. Since the Chinese leaders are answerable to no one, this extravagance will never be questioned.
For another 30 years, China will still be a developing country. Even after that, its economy will be hostage to the nations that import its exported goods. There is nothing the Chinese make that cannot be made elsewhere at about the same cost. Therefore, the Chinese will have to learn that these importing nations will either continue to dictate the terms of their relationship or will threaten to open factories elsewhere. In addition, they will hold the import earnings hostage to their investments.
To avoid these problems, it would be wiser for the Chinese to start importing more from the United States, Canada and Europe. If that happens, and trade reaches a balance, then the importing nations would be hard-pressed to impose their terms on China.
In the end, China has achieved a spectacular entry on the world stage with the Olympics, but it has come at a high price and may not be worth it. Other developing nations who wish to hold this type of spectacle, take note. This level of pageantry is pricey.
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(Hari Sud is a retired vice president of C-I-L Inc., a former investment strategies analyst and international relations manager. A graduate of Punjab University and the University of Missouri, he has lived in Canada for the past 34 years. ©Copyright Hari Sud.)
