Over the past few years, CDT has been compiling news and updates about the elaborate preparations underway as Beijing gets ready to host the 2008 Olympic Games. These archives provide a useful resource for anyone watching the Games as a journalist, a China specialist, or a sports enthusiast, and help place the Olympics in a broader context of China’s social, economic, and political landscape. The issues involved with the Olympics preparations are, like everything related to China, complex, diverse, and full of surprises. Click the following links to read about:
– The rebuilding of Beijing: In the years leading up to the Olympics, the city of Beijing has been morphed into a modern metropolis housing cutting-edge architectural feats by some of the world’s most famous architects. In the process, the traditional parts of the imperial city have been destroyed, and old-time Beijingers have been forced into new homes and a new way of life as their residences are bulldozed to make way for shopping malls, office towers, and luxury condos.
– Environmental challenges: A major concern from the athletes competing in Beijing is whether the air will be safe to breathe. The government has said it will be and is taking measures to ensure this is true. Some observers have their doubts.
– Olympics diplomacy: As Beijing gets ready to play host to the world, its leaders have to deal with a host of diplomatic issues, from confronting criticism over their role in Darfur to negotiating with the Dalai Lama following an outbreak of ethnic unrest in Tibet, and scuttling protests during the global run of the Olympics torch, to planning an opening ceremony attended by several world leaders. Yet Chinese leaders insist that they do not want the Olympics to be politicized.
– Security: In an effort to prevent both terrorist attacks and unwelcome public protests by critics of the regime, the Chinese government is preparing elaborate security arrangements for the Games. As part of their security concerns, the government has launched a crackdown on dissidents, journalists and other activists in the run-up to the Games, and issued guidelines for foreigners visiting the city.
– Olympics humor. Read and see how Chinese citizens and others are getting some comic relief from the Olympics hysteria.
All of CDT’s Olympics coverage can be found here. Other topics of note include:
* Chinese citizens’ views of the Olympics
* Doping
* Olympics food
* The media’s role in the Olympics
* Olympics etiquette
* The business of the Olympics
* Last but not least: Olympics fakes.
(Photos by Linjun Fan)
