On your marks

The worst place to try to put Beijing’s Olympic Games into context is perhaps actually Beijing. Arrive in the city at present and the overwhelming impression is of a modern, successful, prosperous, happy and western-looking population, greeting the forthcoming sporting festival with a greater pride and joy than it has ever previously been received with.

The Games of the XXIX Olympiad will superficially be the grandest in history, staged in venues that are already being seen as architectural landmarks, with every ticket for every event in Beijing sold out in advance. Even the small bore shooting. And yet the International Olympic Committee seems constantly ill at ease and takes immense care with the diplomatic wording of every public statement from its temporary base at the Raffles Beijing Hotel.

Rarely has there been such a disparity between what visitors know and what the local population believes. There was a genuine, spontaneous protest close to Tiananmen Square this week, with mostly respectable middle-aged and elder ladies complaining forcibly about the loss of traditional housing to the rapid development taking place in the centre of Beijing, but it was almost nationalistic in bringing attention to the disappearance of something inherently Chinese, and otherwise entirely apolitical.

There was no feeling of the ruling government being opposed and security personnel observed the events without clamping down on the local residents making their demands. But any suggestion that the authority of the Chinese regime was being challenged and the response would have been quite different. It has been made clear that foreign involvement or the raising of uncomfortable subjects like Tibet will not be allowed to blemish Beijing’s big moment.

While the rest of the world has been debating about politics and sport, and assessing Beijing, nothing similar has been going on in Beijing itself. Only positive images related to the Olympics have been permitted. The city is filled at every turn with official flags, banners and posters, covering lamp posts, walkways, roadsides, public buses and trains, and even whole buildings, all in the Olympic colours with the Beijing 2008 logo and motto of “One world One dream” in multiple languages.

Television screens have been set up in public locations and transport systems, even in Beijing Subway carriages, to get the “feelgood” Olympic message across. And of course it has been helped by many of the big Chinese and multinational corporations, which sponsor the Olympics and want to maximise their exposure from it by paying for enthusiastic advertising in every remaining space. No wonder the city’s population has responded to the Games with such delight when faced with such a barrage.

The term ‘Beijingoism’ has emerged this week to describe the locals’ passion for their hosting of the Olympics. But it is actually the outcome of a sustained propaganda campaign, something that the Chinese government are of course very good at. Indeed, the fact of a huge propaganda operation has not changed from the old communist times, it is just the subject that has been adjusted, from supporting the ruling party to pushing Beijing 2008.

The results have been so successful that there is no room left in Beijing now for the old party symbolism. It is exceedingly hard to find any remaining communist emblems in most of the Chinese capital, though rare leftover ones have seemingly been missed and do crop up unexpectedly, such as on an ancient cleaning trolley on the otherwise completely new Beijing Subway, which is actually kept spotless by at times appearing to have a cleaner assigned to every passenger, following them with dustpans and brushes to ensure no footprint will mar the pristine floors. Only the Chinese have a population to achieve that ratio of labour.

The next effort could try to persuade Beijing residents to modify their beloved habit of spitting, from aiming on the ground to using the numerous new bins. But with the authorities now placing a public relations emphasis on environmental awareness – something that seems perverse in the continuing smog enveloping the city – would the locals be able to decide whether to deposit their spit in the ‘Recyclable’ or ‘Other Waste’ sections of the newly-compartmentalised bins?