China Despatch: Beijing's Olympic Makeover by William Langewiesche April 2008
(http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2008/04/china200804?currentPage=1)
With its grandiose architecture, cowed citizens, and earnest self-improvement efforts—No pushing! No swearing! No irony!—Beijing is determined to be the perfect host. But no amount of pomp and prep work can buy China the role it wants.
I've been flying around China on the state-owned Air China under the supervision of impeccably uniformed stewardesses described in the airline's literature as "pretty young things," who have taken it upon themselves to teach their passengers about the international norms of behavior: Don't shove strangers from behind when boarding the airplane, or spit on the floor, or climb over your neighbor's lap to take your seat, or stand up and start pushing for the exit immediately after the airplane has landed. An airplane is not a train, you see, and there is no chance you'll miss your stop. Also, there is no longer any need to applaud just because the airplane has safely arrived. In other words, Chinese pilots are not like Chinese drivers. In some ways that's too bad, because driving here is a sport, however hesitant, and it helps to pass the time. Chinese airline travel, on the other hand, is becoming so tame that, though some traces of an old helter-skelter remain, much of the fun is gone. The Chinese are said to be individualists, and a culture of self-centeredness is often on display, but at this point in their history they seem to be mostly just imitative—indeed, to such a degree that the entire country can appear to function as a single giant karaoke bar, with the singers refusing to stray from the written lines. Certainly, rebellion and its close cousin, creativity, are in short supply. This means that when the uniformed young things on Air China show their disapproval the passengers are quickly shamed. The effects are multiplied by the huge numbers traveling by air every day for the first time. Along with all the other breakneck developments so visibly under way, I have seen a change in cabin manners over just the past few weeks. By the time the Beijing Olympics come around this August, airline travel in China will unfortunately have been reduced to the mundane.
What seems unfortunate to me seems just the reverse to the Chinese. They see the Olympics as an exercise in national prestige. The authorities' main focus is not on the sporting events but on the accumulation of gold medals. They are also obsessed with the opening ceremony—sure to be a display of jingoistic pomp, and to include the hideous marching formations and synchronized crowd movements so dear to Chinese leaders. Already the boasting is uncomfortable to witness, because it stems so obviously from insecurity and a fear of losing face. It will naturally provoke reactions opposite to those intended—though probably unspoken, and beneath the official praises. Not that the Olympics much matter one way or the other. They will be hyped on television and soon enough forgotten. But it's as if the Chinese government does not realize that the world already has a fairly accurate view of China. Yes, China is booming. And, yes, China's cities are big and modern. But also, yes, China has serious problems—pollution, rural poverty, water shortages, the suppression of civil liberties, corruption, and the abysmal condition of its universities and schools. The problems are understandable, and hardly a state secret. I suppose people tidy up their houses before parties, too. But the Chinese would appear in a better light if they were not quite so nervous in advance.
The Beijing Organizing Committee for the Olympic Games has announced that at least 90 visitors will be "Very Important Persons," a designation reserved for the global class of rich politicians and royals, all of whom will expect special handling. This presents the spectacle of a government that is still nominally Communist kowtowing to classes it should disdain. But in practice the differences are small between these elites and those. It is telling that, according to the requests and schedules, the greatest interest expressed by the visiting V.I.P.'s also is in the opening ceremony. George W. Bush and his entourage will be there and show up on television at whatever cost to American taxpayers. Over the period of 17 days, more than 500,000 additional foreigners are expected to arrive for the events—why, I cannot fathom. Out at the airport, the Civil Aviation Administration of China (C.A.A.C.) has been preparing for years, under the questionable theory that first impressions are the most important. It has built the huge new Terminal III, scheduled to open soon, despite the fact that Terminals I and II are vastly under-utilized compared with, say, the airline terminals of Europe and the United States. Terminal III will be served by a new runway and linked to the city by a new rail line—additions, like the ongoing extensions of the Beijing subway, that are more likely to be of lasting significance in the life of the Chinese. Meanwhile, C.A.A.C. staffers are undergoing training to make them "more conscious of the Olympics," as if perhaps they have been living in solitary confinement for the past seven years. I would love to sit in on the training but will not. Other forms of training, unrelated to the Olympics, are a daily sight, with fast-food workers, for instance, lining up in strict formation to receive exhortations to perform well. Consider that China is a country where smartly uniformed airport security agents are efficient and polite, and where at some airports they stand at parade attention saluting the arriving passengers. Americans accustomed to the rudeness of the T.S.A. will find the attitude disorienting. For its part, Air China is proud that—surprise!—it beat other airline candidates in a competition to become the sole "Olympics Airline Partner" for the Beijing Olympics. It has designated a special airplane and is flying the Olympic torch in the global relay that will lead to the lighting of a flame in the opening ceremony. The torch relay was first cooked up by Nazi propagandists under Joseph Goebbels in preparation for the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. Air China does not wince at the thought. In its literature it proclaims, "Together with 1.3 billion Chinese people, the company will arouse passions, carry dreams, spread hopes and happiness to the whole world, and write another glorious page in the Olympic history."
At the forefront stand the 15 million residents of Greater Beijing. In preparation for the Games, a municipal agency called the Capital Ethics Development Office is trying to whip them into shape, with campaigns against spitting on the street, using foul language (even though in Chinese), or getting rowdy while watching, for instance, Ping-Pong matches on TV. A survey conducted by Renmin University in 2007 showed that progress was being made (naturally), and that over the previous year public spitting had been reduced by 2.41 percent. According to the Chinese state news service, the survey was based on observations from 300,000 people at 320 public places and in 200,000 cars. Littering was down 2.44 percent. Meanwhile, the Civic Index was up by 4.32 percent. The Civic Index scores the Beijing population on its compliance with rules regarding public health and public order, attitudes toward strangers, etiquette at sporting events, and demonstrable enthusiasm for the Olympic Games. I myself have conducted a survey, based on 457.5 observations, and have concluded that 98 percent of the Chinese lack any measurable sense of irony. This is a preliminary finding only, and further funding is required, but there is no doubt that the Chinese Earnestness Index is extremely high. The 11th of every month is now officially Queuing Day, when people are expected to give up their traditional scrums and practice standing in orderly lines. The date was chosen as a variation of pictographic script, because the two digits 1 and 1, when placed together to form 11, represent the expected behavior during the upcoming world championship in delays. And, sure enough, on the 11th of every month Beijing residents earnestly go about the assigned practice, temporarily transforming the city into a variation of a Germanic ideal. Individualism then re-asserts itself on every 12th, but the Queuing Days help, and the Capital Ethics Development Office expects that the coming months will continue to show improvements.
Cleaning up for the Olympics is a time-honored tradition. The Germans, for example, swept Berlin's Gypsies into prison camps and temporarily took down the signs banning Jews from public places. They even loosened their restrictions on homosexuality, demonstrating the largesse of the Fascist creed while personally serving no small number of Nazis as well. For the German government, it became crucial that the Olympics do Germany proud. China is not Nazi Germany, and indeed is led by a particularly pragmatic regime, but its political culture is shallow, and it seems to have been overcome by a similar mood. A pre-Olympic crackdown is under way, with troublemakers and vocal opponents of the Games being confined to jail or house arrest for the crime of subverting state power. In all sincerity the deputy director of capital ethics, Ms. Zheng Mojie, has steeled the press for the possibility of some national embarrassment. "There is a saying that it takes three generations to bring up a noble," she said. "So I cannot guarantee that impolite behavior will be eradicated in time for the Olympics." I was not privy to the encounter but know that the press dutifully copied down her concerns. Others in government are more confident of the outcome. Clean-air plans are in place to remove private vehicles from the streets, to shut down dusty construction sites, and to ban the burning of coal upwind in the suburbs. Other plans call for a shift in working hours, and for ordinary traffic to pull aside to allow convoys of Very Important Persons to whisk by. Evidently the government expects the public to comply. Earlier this year a municipal official predicted success. He said, "Our people are used to making all kinds of sacrifices when we are told to." Indications are that he is right.
Beijing is in fact a perfect venue for the Olympics. Amid the published worries about its polluted air and overburdened infrastructure, and despite larger concerns about political repression in China's minority regions, this needs to be said. Similar to the Olympics themselves, with their artificial claims to permanence and their promotion of patriotic sentiment, Beijing is a city built in glorification of the state. With its immense boulevards, overgrand buildings, and monumental spaces, it presents the most unabashedly totalitarian cityscape in the world today, the kind of parade-ground capital that governments everywhere dream of building—hinted at in Washington, D.C., and achieved in Moscow to a greater degree, but nowhere executed to this extent. Add the recent arrival of grandiose corporate towers and shopping malls, stir in a few new stadiums for athletic events, and the match to the Olympics becomes complete. All together the display is vast. At the center lies Tiananmen Square. It is a barren expanse framed by a triumphal gate and the Forbidden City, and designed by Stalinist architects who may be safely dead but are not soon enough forgotten. Every evening at sunset, traffic is stopped along the boulevard that tops it, and thousands of people gather to watch as soldiers goose-step in close formation from the Forbidden City to lower the flag. Why all the fuss? Well, of course, so that with every sunrise the soldiers can raise the flag anew. It is said that even at that hour the crowds are large. I have not verified their size firsthand, because the Beijing dawns are frigid now, and crawling out of bed for a flag-raising ceremony is something I simply will not do. This is clear evidence, probably deplorable, that I am not Chinese.
But being Chinese would be rough in the writing business. A few weeks ago I slogged across town to the large and modern headquarters of China Daily, a state-owned English-language paper with a circulation of 200,000, which presents a sanctioned and sanitized view of Chinese realities primarily to foreign readers. As usual with propaganda sheets and their brethren in advertising, the paper makes for interesting reading because so often it cannot help but highlight the very weaknesses it intends to gloss over. Is the dynamic new China suffused with special integrity? Does the Olympic torch spread hope and happiness to the world? Why are we even discussing these matters? Recently, China Daily has been emphasizing heartwarming stories about the newly rich making voluntary donations to the poor. The paper's staff includes a smattering of native English speakers—young adventurers playing this gig before moving on, and washed-out expatriates who have had to settle for the job. For the most part, however, the reporters are bright and earnest Chinese, and graduates of Chinese journalism schools. A few had asked me to speak to them about my work, and I in turn needed their advice on breaking through to the Beijing bureaucracies. Hence my willingness to travel across town—usually a daunting prospect in Beijing.
The China Daily building was designed around a lofty atrium with an espresso bar. It had guards dressed in snappy uniforms, who stood at the entrance at rigid attention, eyes ahead, and patrolled the hallways marching two abreast, making snappy turns. They were not, in other words, like the guards at Vanity Fair in New York, who slouch with the confidence of navy seals, ever vigilant for terrorist attack—a nefarious assault on free speech, which might be preceded, a guard once warned me, by the use of lasers to map the building's foyer. I shudder for hostages up at the magazine Gourmet—what would they eat? At China Daily, at least, such worries were far away. In fact, I didn't see why guards of any kind were necessary there, in the middle of Beijing. When I asked the question, my hosts seemed not to have wondered. I was free therefore to imagine that the guards were some kind of Thought Police. But it turned out that Thought Police are not necessary at China Daily. In a conference room upstairs, I described the range of editorial liberties available at Vanity Fair and watched as one by one the assembled reporters decided that we inhabit the same earth only in name. It surprised me that they showed no sign of regret about their roles, or of envy about the possibilities offered by freedom of the press. They seemed to believe genuinely in the need for censorship, and executed most of it themselves before even beginning to write. They said that when they want to interview officials they submit their questions weeks in advance and usually receive an official response in writing. There is no place for give-and-take or challenge. When I mentioned my goal of speaking to a certain high official face-to-face and without prepared questions, they implied they could not help without jeopardizing their own positions, and they predicted with certainty that my request would be denied. I asked why. One of the reporters called it a cultural disinclination. He said that when he asks innocuous China Daily–style questions on the streets—What do you think of Kentucky Fried Chicken?—people refuse to answer even anonymously. He said that the Chinese cherish their privacy. More likely they are afraid of singing the wrong lines.
The karaoke bar. For global entrepreneurs China is the Wild East—a free zone where anything goes, operating costs are low, and new wealth can be built and flaunted. Beijing, however, is a political town, where the Communist Party, having abandoned its egalitarian ideals, has exposed itself as just another opportunistic clique, secure only as long as the economy continues to boil, and determined above all to remain in power. The national leadership has solved the internal problem of political succession, but it remains fundamentally insecure. This explains the great Chinese dichotomy—between the freedoms allowed to business and the restrictions placed on people's minds. Much is made of Beijing's rising arts scene and the existence of an unofficial counterculture here—as if such departures from uniformity amount to significant openings for personal expression and creativity. It's nonsense. The arts are impotent by definition, the counterculture is pretend, and creativity is allowed to flourish only in measure of its irrelevance to power. Ultimately this will prove to be a huge problem for China—larger than pollution or quarrels with Taiwan. As it is today, no one turns to China to learn about anything but China itself. This is an ominous reality for a would-be world leader, and is one reason we will likely never see the "Chinese century" we've been told to expect. Recently I've been reading the memoirs of George Kennan, the American diplomat and historian, who wrote that the future is possible to predict, but not the timing. I am a casual visitor to China, with no great interest in forecasts, but this much seems clear: as wages and production costs rise, and China loses its special appeal to manufacturers, the lack of invention is going to sideline this country. The paradox facing China's leaders is that they cannot encourage the fix without as a result being removed from power. Meanwhile, the Olympics will come, and no doubt add to their glory for a little while. The games will open on August 8—on 8/8/2008—at 8:08 p.m. Eight is considered to be a lucky number because in Mandarin it sounds like the word for "fortune" or "prosperity." Beijing will be well mannered, and I myself will gladly be gone. August 8? I think I'll head offshore for a few days of sailing on the far side of the world, safely beyond television range.
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