In 2008, the Chinese built a ball field — boy, what a ball field — known worldwide for its lattice-like architecture as the Bird’s Nest. Alas, after the 2008 Olympics, the ticket buyers haven’t come. Right now, the Bird’s Nest serves as a winter amusement park known as the Happy Ice and Snow Season. In April, a promoter may stage a celebrity rock concert to “establish China as a world leader for global peace and a healthier planet.” Or not.

After that, the government says it may build a shopping center there.

The accompanying photographs, shot at locales for the 2008 Beijing Olympics, succinctly depict the loneliness of where the long-distance runner once strode. In a week when the United States contemplates how long its future will be spent deep in debt, they also hint at how much its greatest creditor is pinning its own hopes of building wealth on dreams.

Two summers ago, China’s Olympic extravaganza was recognized worldwide, and especially here, as a barely disguised metaphor for this nation’s rise to worldwide importance. Eighteen months later, China is more important than its leaders could have imagined.

The Times also includes a slideshow of the buildings in their current incarnations.

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Post tags: China's rise, Olympics construction
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Beijing Capital International Airport is the main international airport of Beijing, China. It is located 32 km northeast of Beijing’s city center in an enclave of Chaoyang District that is surrounded by rural Shunyi District. The airport is owned and operated by the Beijing Capital International Airport Company Limited, a state-controlled company. The airport’s IATA Airport Code, PEK, is based on the city’s former romanized name, Peking.

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Post tags: Beijing airport, Olympic preparation, Olympics construction
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One thing that struck me about the Olympic architecture is that, unlike the Great Wall or the Forbidden City, they were not built to exclude, but rather to embrace (and impress) the rest of the world. It is an interesting and positive new twist on China’s obsession with grand architecture. Rather than us commoners and foreigners being forbidden, we’re all invited.

This is the New China, which at least in the major cities has all the trappings of a modern, developed, capitalist country. But of course, it isn’t new at all; this is still the China of Chairman Mao, at least technically. The current government is the direct lineal descendant of Mao’s rule. No official retraction of policy has occurred. Indeed, one young Chinese professional, without a trace of irony, asked me to share my impressions about visiting a communist country. As he said this, we drove by an Armani store.

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Post tags: Beijing, Beijing architecture, Olympics construction, views of China
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If the defendant demonstrates good behavior after two years, his sentence may be changed to life imprisonment.  The New York Times reports:

…in June 2006, [Liu Zhihua] was stripped of his post after being linked to a bribery scandal. He was expelled from the governing Communist Party six months later.

Mr. Liu’s case was a major embarrassment to the party. Corruption is endemic, but party leaders had pledged that the $43 billion preparations for the Games would be the “cleanest in history.”

Construction of the Bird's Nest three months after the head of Olympic Construction was dismissed. (Doug Mills/The New York Times)

…On Sunday, Xinhua said Mr. Liu had taken roughly $1 million in bribes during his tenure as vice mayor and as overseer of construction for a scientific research park in the city’s university district from 1999 to 2006.

A 2006 article by Reuters details how Hu Jintao was personally involved in dismissing Liu from his position. Analysts believe this move was motivated by Hu’s own political agenda rather than a desire to weed out corruption.

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Post tags: death penalty, Liu Zhihua, Olympics construction, Olympics corruption
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As I sat in my seat at the Bird’s Nest, watching thousands of Chinese dancers, drummers, singers and acrobats on stilts perform their magic at the closing ceremony, I couldn’t help but reflect on how China and America have spent the last seven years: China has been preparing for the Olympics; we’ve been preparing for Al Qaeda. They’ve been building better stadiums, subways, airports, roads and parks. And we’ve been building better metal detectors, armored Humvees and pilotless drones.

The difference is starting to show. Just compare arriving at La Guardia’s dumpy terminal in New York City and driving through the crumbling infrastructure into Manhattan with arriving at Shanghai’s sleek airport and taking the 220-mile-per-hour magnetic levitation train, which uses electromagnetic propulsion instead of steel wheels and tracks, to get to town in a blink.

Then ask yourself: Who is living in the third world country?

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Post tags: China's rise, infrastructure, Olympics construction, Olympics preparations, thomas friedman
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Chua Chin Hon runs the office of Singapore’s Straits Times. As a journalist, Chua has documented Beijing’s dizzying transformation over the past two years. Chua’s newly published book of photography is dominated by everyday photos of scaffolding, skyscrapers and workers in Mao jackets. Shabby apartment blocks stand side-by-side with amazing feats of architecture. Beneath towering high-tech stadiums built using the most environmentally friendly techniques available, horse-drawn wagons carry stones through clouds of dust.

“Modern China has been shaped by constant and often relentless transformation,” Chua told SPIEGEL ONLINE. Chua has tried to compile a testament of sorts to this series of changes. Some of the upheavals have been inevitably destructive or unsettling “because they happened even faster than we could perceive them.”

A slideshow of his photographs is here.

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Post tags: hutongs, Olympics construction, photography
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Designed by the Swiss architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, the stadium lives up to its aspiration as a global landmark. Its elliptical latticework shell, which has earned it the nickname the Bird’s Nest, has an intoxicating beauty that lingers in the imagination. Its allure is only likely to deepen once the enormous crowds disperse and the Olympic Games fade into memory.

Great architecture can never be fully conveyed through a television screen, of course, and it saddens me that so many Americans will experience the building only via satellite. In a site for mass gatherings, Herzog and de Meuron have carved out psychological space for the individual, and rethought the relationship between the solitary human and the crowd, the everyday and the heroic. However the structure attests to China’s nationalistic ambitions, it is also an aesthetic triumph that should cement the nation’s reputation as a place where bold, creative gambles are unfolding every day.

The Times’ Olympics blog has an interview with artist Ai Weiwei, who co-designed the stadium but has now become one of the fiercest critics of the government as it prepares to host the Games:

Q: What disappoints you about China’s Olympic effort?

Ai: The biggest disappointment is that China has fallen short of its promises, which is, “One World One Dream,” or to show the world a “New China, New Beijing, New Olympics.” I doubt there’s anything new here. What we’re seeing are the deep-rooted lack of courage and confidence, and the want for real happiness and civil participation. Instead, we see more of inept management and a blind sense of self-defense.

The Chinese society is undoubtedly bound for more freedom and democracy, and the Olympics are a great opportunity to show the world our longing for, as well as effort to achieve, democracy and freedom, rather than the opposite.

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Just as many of New York City’s most iconic landmarks rose in breathtakingly brief succession a century ago, Beijing has been re-inventing itself since 2001 with a rush of showstopping buildings by internationally renowned architects: Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron’s National Stadium, Steven Holl’s Linked Hybrid complex, Rem Koolhaas’s China Central Television headquarters, and Norman Foster’s Terminal 3. On the eve of a controversial Olympics, Kurt Andersen sees China’s true promise in a more enduring spectacle of daring commissions, bravura engineering, and creatively humanistic design.

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The redevelopment project, covering an area roughly 17 blocks long by six blocks wide, will bring big change to a neighborhood near the old imperial city and Tiananmen Square that dates back more than 400 years to the Ming Dynasty. It gets its name from the towering gate — Qianmen means ”front gate” — that was once an entrance to the city.

”Old Beijing is not just for Chinese people but for people of the world,” said Zhao Gengjun, 50, whose family was evicted after living in the same home for five generations. ”But they want to demolish it and make fake houses after all the ordinary people have left.”

It wasn’t supposed to happen this way. Alarmed by the destruction of old Beijing, the city agreed in 2002 to preserve 25 historic areas, including part of Qianmen. That year, the national government pledged in a Beijing Olympics Action Plan to pay ”special attention” to conserving buildings in those areas.

But the destruction has continued — and in some cases accelerated — amid a property boom that is transforming the city.

See also “Ancient quarter makes way for modern antiquity” from the Financial Times. For more on this topic, read a CDT review of The Last Days of Old Beijing by Michael Meyer.

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Post tags: Beijing, cultural preservation, Olympics construction
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Less than four months before the Summer Games open, the forced relocations in Beijing are highlighting another cost of the Olympics, as residents make way for such architectural glories as the National Stadium, known as the bird’s nest, and the apartment and office towers springing up nearby. Whole neighborhoods have been wiped out. Especially controversial has been the destruction of about 800 of the city’s 1,200 hutongs, lanes full of traditional, courtyard-style houses.

Beijing real estate prices are soaring, but residents are often blocked from realizing the full value of their homes when the government orders them out. Many complain that compensation levels set by authorities are far below market rates, making it impossible for them to find comparable housing elsewhere.

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Post tags: Beijing, forced evictions, hutongs, Olympics construction
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