The Olympic 2008 hosts won't discuss reports of human rights abuses or pollution. They prefer to focus on the €18 billion budget, taking the Olympic torch to the top of Mount Everest and hiring Steven Spielberg for the opening ceremony. Ian O'Riordanreports
After enduring a 10-hour flight in the cramped economy of Lufthansa, surrounded by hungry journalists cranked up on a 747's supply of German beer, the sight of Jackie Chan advertising Olympic VISA cards shouldn't be at all welcoming, but it is. They say China is one great contradiction after another, and straight away that rings true.
We arrive around nine in the morning, and when you sign up for a five-day preview of the Beijing Olympics there's only one way to hit the ground, and that's running - so first stop is an ATM machine for a thick wad of tidy red notes, each bearing a glowing portrait of Emperor Mao Zedong. Renminbi - "People's Currency" is the official currency in mainland China, whose principal unit is the yuan, about 10 to the Euro. With that much worked out it's down to business.
There's a choice of four-lane highways out of the airport, one of which is purposely built for the Olympics, and all linking up with the five ring roads that circle the various districts of Beijing. In a city of 16 million people with an area the size of Munster, roads are like human arteries, and just as vital. It's busy, practically bumper-to-bumper, but always moving.
The first impression of Beijing is the lasting one - a frighteningly vast city beyond all familiarity, and not even the thick smog can conceal its scale. There is a conspicuous Olympic presence, mainly on billboards and in shop windows, but it's not overwhelming. It doesn't take long to realise that Beijing, like all of China, is transforming itself at breakneck speed, and they've really just taken the Olympics along for the ride.
Everyone appears capable of driving with a mobile phone in one hand and a cigarette in the other.
Over the coming days we hustle several foreign correspondents for their impressions, to be repeatedly told the Chinese are "very clever". They'll drain you for information and leave, certain to make something of it, cunning and inventive.
Our hotel, fittingly, is having a make-over, the lobby area now gleaming white marble. Unlike every previous Olympics, there is no accommodation crisis surrounding Beijing. The city already boasts 4,700 hotels and around 640,000 beds - while they're expecting 500,000 foreign visitors next August. There'll be plenty of room at the inn.
Someone warned me you're being poisoned every time you draw a breath, touch something, shower, or eat in China - yet our hotel was spotless, and left us suitably refreshed for our first appointment at the residence of the Irish ambassador, Declan Kelleher. He comes across fairly passionate about all things Chinese, and yet, somewhat worryingly, most of what he tells us is "off the record".
The next day we head for the offices of the Beijing Organising Committee for the Olympic Games - or BOCOG, a word we'll soon be familiar with. Sun Weide of the BOCOG media department has offered an open Q&A, apparently with nothing off the record on the basis that he has nothing to hide. We come with some hard questions, knowing we'll get few answers.
The questions have been mounting since Beijing won the right to host these Olympics back on July 13th, 2001 - blowing away rival bids from Toronto, Paris, Istanbul and Osaka. They'd lost the 2000 Olympics to Sydney by just two votes, but the International Olympic Committee (IOC), the self-proclaimed statesmen of the world, weren't about to turn their backs on them twice - especially with China now offering an unprecedented Olympic budget and market.
What the IOC did instead was turn their backs on the heavy political implications (just like Hitler's Games of 1936, and the Moscow boycotts of 1980) with the worn excuse that sport and politics should never mix. Assuming Amnesty International don't make up stories about human rights abuses and Reporters Without Borders don't exaggerate violations of press and personal freedom, China was never going to be able to separate the two.
As practically every issue of Newsweekor Time Magazinewill tell you, these accusations haven't gone away - and if anything are surpassed by tales of China's steady arms and diplomatic support for Sudan, prompting references to the "Genocide Olympics", as if is were that simple.
Then there were the forced evictions that made way for Olympic construction - and no one has forgotten about Tibet either.
"This is a century-old dream for China," Sun Weide starts out. "We want the Olympic Games to be a window into China, and also the platform for the further redevelopment of China . . . of course China is still a developing country, but we see the Olympics as a challenge and opportunity, a celebration of sports and different cultures."
Weide repeats "challenge" and "opportunity" on several occasions, especially when pressed on anything resembling a political issue, which he likes to think "have nothing to do with the Beijing Olympics".
Yet everything he claims the Olympics mean to Beijing - in terms of economy, infrastructure, and improving the environment - is stated in exclusively political language. At no point does he mention anything as mundane as the sporting events or any of China's many medal hopes.
There was never going to be any sort of expose from Weide. The ruling Communist party has been running a massive propaganda campaign around the Olympics, partly to prove their abandonment of Marxism has simply allowed nationalism become an alternative source of political legitimacy.
Central to that campaign is the concept that all coverage of Olympic preparations is positive, at least locally.
But they can't control coverage this side of the world. Hence, actress Mia Farrow, scholar Eric Reeves or anyone else who doesn't like what they're seeing is more likely to be quoted on the Beijing preparations than Jacques Rogge, the IOC president.
Inevitably, Channel 4 chipped in with their recent documentary The Olympic Lie, which produced some damning evidence of forced evictions (as many as 1.5 million people) and random false imprisonment, little of which, though, was actually related to the Olympics.
It was shocking television and impossible to ignore, but no more than similar documentaries recently on Guantánamo Bay and Abu Ghraib. There's no doubt that Michael Moore let loose in Beijing for just 24 hours would unearth Oscar-winning material.
Part of the issue with Beijing is that the many of promises it made on being granted the Olympics, such as improving human rights and media freedom, remain largely undelivered.
Still, they're going to incredible lengths to impress - investing 18 billion and stopping at nothing, whether it's taking the Olympic torch to the top of Mount Everest or hiring Steven Spielberg to orchestrate the opening ceremony.
To cap the great contradiction, most of Beijing loves it, with the Olympics still boasting a 90 per cent local approval rate, and 700,000 applying for the 70,000 positions of Olympic volunteers.
With all this in mind we leave the BOCOG offices for our grand tour of the Olympic Green, a massive redevelopment to the northeast of Beijing. Right now it's hard to distinguish where this "green" begins and ends, but when the National Stadium appears somewhat menacingly through the smog we're no longer thinking about sport and politics, but rather sport and art. The scale and design of the stadium is awesome, and it's beautiful, a masterpiece of modern architecture.
It's about 90 per cent completed, and the "Bird's Nest" inspiration is immediately apparent. The interlaced design of its great steel exterior (42,000 tons of the stuff) is like no other, and literally nests the 91,000-seat interior. With a span of 343 metres it is easily the biggest stadium in the world, and anyone who wins an athletics gold medal in there won't ever forget it.
Like the rest of the Olympics venues, cost clearly wasn't an issue, even if that's not entirely true. The Bird's Nest was built under a public-private partnership, with the consortium of investors taking over the running of the stadium for 30 years after the Olympics, to make as much money out of it as they can, after which it is handed back to the government.
After circling that stadium we're confronted with an equally impressive structure, the National Aquatics Centre, this one inspired by a soap bubble. Again, it's effectively complete, a simple cube with an indescribable exterior, made up of 3,000 transparent bubble-like pillows. It seats 17,000 with enough room for swimming, diving, water polo and synchronised swimming.
We spend much of the afternoon taking in the sights and scale of Olympic Green, which includes four more massive structures - the 20,000-seater indoor stadium (for gymnastics and handball), the fencing hall, the national exhibition centre, and the all-important main press centre. Just west of these is the Olympic Village, which will house practically all the 10,500 competitors.
Just north of all this is the six-hectare Olympic Forest Park, a completely revamped green area and includes the newly built tennis, archery and field hockey centres. In another BOCOG office we view a large model of the entire Olympic Green, and even if it only resembles that next August it will be the most spectacular setting ever for any sporting event.
Back outside and we're reminded about the human rights issue again. As we leave Olympic Green we spot rows of blue prefabricated buildings, piled three or four storeys high, which house the vast armies of Olympic construction workers. It's a sad and depressing sight, made worse by the thought that they're working 12 hours a day, seven days a week, for pathetic money.
Yet here's where the contradiction thing kicks in again. They're clearly taking immense pride in their work, laying each slab of pavement and pouring every ounce of concrete as if it were their own backyard, with an almost artistic touch. They're unhurried and unstressed, and even on the call for lunch they move leisurely with their metal bowls for what is hardly a worker's feed.
They have no welfare, no unions, and effectively no safety standards, and they're not alone. Almost all workers throughout China are in the same boat, yet this is exactly why China isn't overly bothered by what the outside world thinks of their human rights - because they consider "economic rights" to matter more: the economics that has lifted 400 million people out of poverty, brought a quantum leap in educational standards and the construction of a first-class infrastructure, and arguably the greatest ever surge in general prosperity.
To understand this you could spend months reading historical analysis of Mao and other Chinese dynasties, or you could read China Shakes the World: The Rise of a Hungry Nation, by James Kynge, a former Beijing bureau chief for the Financial Times.
The title comes from a quote loosely attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte: "Let China sleep; for when she wakes, she will shake the world." It doesn't matter who actually said it, because now that China has awoken, it is undoubtedly shaking the world, even if it owes its emergence as a global superpower to the free market system adopted by the US and most developed counties. The problem is China, compared to those countries, still has very different values, many of which are unfair and corrupt, and that probably includes the way it's preparing for the Olympics.
But as Kynge points out, a nation as large as China can't simply turn on a sixpence. The reality is it was never going to turn quick enough to satisfy the campaigns to improve human rights that have blossomed since Beijing was awarded the Olympics, nor indeed many of the promises Beijing made to the IOC. The crucial question is whether Beijing being awarded the Olympics will ultimately speed up that process, and the answer won't be known until well after whole carnival has moved west again to London.
In the meantime, Beijing has delivered on one promise, and built the most spectacular venues in Olympic history.
If the athletes from the 202 competing nations are still central to the Olympic ideal, and if, like me, you can handle the contradiction of being enraged at China at the same as being in awe of it, then these Olympics are worth applauding as much any other.
Marx out of 10: the good and the bad of Olympics 2008
Beijing's Olympic Highs
The Olympic venues: Beijing's 26 Olympic venues, all at or near completion, are unfailingly impressive. The Bird's Nest may be the centrepiece, but it's impossible to find fault with any one of the 26. The Shunyi Rowing-Canoeing Park was completed over a year in advance and could stage an Olympic regatta tomorrow.
Transport: Despite its overwhelming size, Beijing is entirely navigable by taxi, bus or metro. Taxi fares are embarrassingly cheap, and while the driver's English may be limited, it will always be better than your Chinese. The five metro lines will be expanded to eight come the Olympics, and for the more daring, bicycle lanes are everywhere.
Olympic ticket prices: It was no great surprise that the latest release of tickets resulted in the crashing of the computer system. With 58 per cent of tickets priced at 10, a 14 per cent reduction for students, and some tickets as low as €1, the Olympics are a guaranteed sell-out. On average they are 43 per cent cheaper than the Athens Olympics in 2004.
Food and drink: Even if Peking duck is not your thing there is no reason to go hungry in Beijing. Six of us found a popular North Korean restaurant and ordered so much food that they needed the table next to us to lay it all out. The total bill, including 12 litre-bottles of beer, came to €53.
Shopping and nightlife: Beijing, for better or for worse, is famous for its counterfeit goods, and the Silk Market is the place to start hunting. And just like New York, the city never sleeps, with the old hutong neighbourhood around Houhai park and lakes now a world of old-time and trendy new bars.
Beijing's Olympic Lows
Pollution: Beijing has had a long-running problem with smog, but plans to improve the air quality come next August, including temporary closure of its 20 steel factories and temporary grounding of 1.3 million cars, will only go so far. The biggest problem is the Gobi desert, a mere 200 miles to the north, which constantly blows down an unhealthy mix of particulate matter.
Censorship: The Chinese government still blocks access to the majority of international news websites, and Google will only take you so far, and while rules for foreign journalists have been relaxed, it also jams the Chinese and Tibetan programmes of 10 international radio stations.
Forced redevelopments: Much of the construction work around the Olympic facilities involved forced evictions of some sort, especially in the traditional hutong neighbourhoods, often without adequate compensation or access to new housing.
Human rights: There is simply no side-stepping this issue, not just in terms of labour rights and religious freedom, but when China is still responsible for two-thirds of the world's total in the practice of the death penalty, which is currently mandated for 68 crimes.
Demonstrations: On the one-year-to-go mark, at a section of the Great Wall near Beijing, six Tibet independence activists raised a 42-metre banner that read "One World, One Dream, Free Tibet" in protest of China's annexing of Tibet in 1950, and it's inevitable that similar demonstrations will take place during the Olympics.
