What if it rains on Beijing’s Olympic parade?

No official visit to China’s capital is complete these days without paying homage at a large and rather shabby building in the sprawling northern suburb of Haidian. The Beijing Olympic Tower is the nerve-centre of a seven-year, $48 billion project that has the potential to define China’s rapid ascent to economic superpowerdom — or to turn into the greatest public relations disaster the world has ever seen.

Dignitaries and politicians fly in from all over the world to be welcomed, and lectured, by mid-ranking Chinese officials. The chief executive of UK Sport popped in for a pot of green tea in May, as did minor dignitaries from Canada, Australia and Greece. In April, Prince Albert II of Monaco graced the building’s corridors, while this summer a more post-millennial royal visitor is expected in the person of David Beckham.

The 2008 Olympic Games, which start on 8 August next year, will be Beijing’s great coming-out party. China’s mandarins want the world to see a dazzling, forward-looking city emblematic of a thriving country rising rapidly and peacefully — rather than any reminders of Chairman Mao’s madness, or of tanks firing on defenceless students during the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre.

To that end, Beijing’s central Olympic organising committee — which boasts the rather unappetising acronym BOCOG — has flattened and rebuilt vast swaths of this once-elegant city. More than $12 billion has been lavished on an array of fantastical new buildings for the Games themselves. The Swiss-designed Olympic Stadium is supposed to resemble a bird’s nest, but lit up at night it looks more like a giant hairy doughnut. The swimming events will be held nearby in a building nicknamed the Water Cube, designed to shimmer and flow like a clear mountain pool in the sunlight. Estimates of spending on other real estate planned to be finished in time for the Games, plus related infrastructure works including two ring roads, 100 miles of light rail and subway and the world’s largest airport terminal, go as high as $36 billion.