Beijing is preparing for the 2008 Olympics in spectacular style, with its largest building project since the 14th century, writes Clifford Coonan
Standing out stark against the cool blue winter skies of Beijing, 230 metres above the gridlocked streets of the Chinese capital, the CCTV tower is powerful evidence of how the Olympics will transform Beijing, and China, into a land of superlatives.
Beijing is a city holding its breath. The citizens of the Chinese capital are waiting for the fateful moment at 8.08pm on August 8th, 2008, when the eyes of the world will watch as a lavish opening ceremony, choreographed by Steven Spielberg and Zhang Yimou, China's top film director, sets the XXIX Olympiad in motion. For months there has been a buzz about this brightly coloured, Z-shaped construction, a spectacular continuous loop of steel and concrete designed by the ultra-hip Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, which is to be the headquarters of China's state broadcaster, CCTV.
Beijingers are proud because they know CCTV will be one of the most remarkable buildings in the world. Normally sceptical and disinterested in the way of folk from capital cities the world over, the people of Beijing have been watching, waiting, making private bets with themselves about when the small army of building workers would join the two towers of the "Twisted Doughnut". They finally connected early on Saturday, December 8th. "Everybody is excited about these buildings going up. This is a very special experience, even for someone like me who's been in the business for many years," says Rory McGowan, the engineer from Monaghan who is supervising the CCTV building programme. "You'll see a lot of physical and functional changes over the next few months, people will see it's really happening. They love unwrapping their buildings here and we can expect a lot of presents to be unwrapped over the next few months."
The CCTV building is a crucial chapter in the story of Beijing's Olympic preparations. As in a novel, it's one without which the plot wouldn't work and the characters would lack context and depth.
In other countries, particularly developed countries, the Olympics are just another sporting event, albeit a major one. But in China, the Olympics have become a symbol for China's re-emergence on the international stage and for its strong development in recent years. The 2008 summer Olympics is probably the most important sporting event the world has ever seen. On one level it is a two-week long sporting competition, with the usual line-up of track and field, football, table tennis and aquatic events, and sports fans can look forward to a spectacular event.
On another, deeper level it marks the coming of age of the world's most populous nation. It symbolises the hopes and aspirations of 1.3 billion people, nearly a quarter of the world's population.
THE MOST PUBLIC face of Olympic growth is the building boom, one unlike anything Beijing has seen since it was constructed along cosmological lines in the 14th century by Chinese master builders, centred on an axis around the Forbidden City, with the Temple of Heaven and the Temple of the Sun as key points to form a metropolis laden with symbolic meaning.
While much of the reconstruction of Beijing would have happened anyway, driven by double-digit economic growth in China and the opening of the country to foreign investment, the Olympics have played a powerful, symbolic role in shifting development from the biggest city and financial capital, Shanghai, to the traditionally sleepy political centre, Beijing.
The world's brightest and boldest avant-garde architects, including Koolhaas, Sir Norman Foster, Jacques Herzog, Pierre de Meuron and Paul Andreu, have built here. Zaha Hadid and Albert Speer Jr have also been involved in the Olympic projects, either taking part in competitions or helping with planning issues.
"China has spent so many years trying to become a host nation for the Olympics. We finally succeeded and this is our national pride," says one Beijinger, a 66-year-old retired engineer. "I have already bought the tickets for the Olympics and I am ready to see it in next year. I have also bought a roll of special edition Olympics stamps. They cost me 2,980 yuan (€275), but I think that's worth it. It is the milestone in our country's development. Its influence will last for a long time. China as a developing country is facing the common problem of sacrificing its environment for fast economic growth."
A subway network, as opposed to the current handful of metropolitan lines, is being built in the name of the games, and vast expansion of the suburbs has been driven by Olympics-inspired civic ambitions. Other transport initiatives are under way to keep things flowing along the city's increasingly sclerotic traffic arteries.
BUT IT'S THE building boom that has captured the popular imagination, both in China and abroad. Of the 31 Beijing Olympic venues, 12 are new, 11 are older buildings being refurbished and eight are temporary structures. Except for the National Stadium, due to be completed in March, all the venues will have been completed by the end of this year, with a total of 300,000 migrant workers making up the construction squad.
The CCTV tower is a structure that doesn't look like it should stand up at all. The 80-storey building will incorporate 475,000 sq m in a single structure, making it the largest in the world after the Pentagon. To get an idea of what it looks like, imagine four Canary Wharf towers, bend two in the middle, use one as the base, another as the top section and place the final two as upright towers leaning at an angle.
The first Olympic building that visitors to Beijing next August will see is Sir Norman Foster's €2 billion Terminal 3 building at Beijing Capital International Airport, a fiery dragon in the dusty landscapes of northern China around Beijing. It's the largest covered structure ever constructed and will have taken less than five years to build when it goes operational for the games. Its golden roof slopes above the glass and steel main structure, and the skylights dotting the top of the building are designed to let natural light into the terminal. They look like the raised scales on a mythical dragon's back.
The centrepiece of the games themselves will be the €300 million Olympic stadium. It will host the opening and closing ceremonies and will have a capacity of 100,000, making it one of the largest enclosed spaces in the world. "The structural elements converge into a grid-like formation - almost like a bird's nest with its interwoven twigs," is how it is described by architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, the Swiss-based duo best known for London's Tate Modern.
Other highlights include the €86 million national swimming centre, the Water Cube, which takes its structural design from the natural formation of bubbles. The physics of this was worked out by two Irish scientists, Prof Denis Weaire, head of the department of physics at Trinity College Dublin, and Robert Phelan. French architect Paul Andreu has created the National Grand Theatre, a futuristic, dome-shaped bubble just at the edge of Tiananmen Square.
The Chinese have wanted a central theatre to stage big productions since Premier Zhou Enlai first raised the issue in the 1950s. Right now it is invitation-only, mostly showing domestic favourites, such as the stirring patriotic extravaganza, The Red Detachment of Women, but it is set to host more Western-style shows, including opera from Europe and Cameron Mackintosh-produced musicals.
The board of Arup visited Beijing recently and were taken on a tour of some of the four Olympic signature buildings that the company is involved in: CCTV, the airport, the Water Cube and, of course, the Bird's Nest Olympic stadium itself. Remember, this is the company that built the Sydney Opera House and Sir Norman Foster's Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank headquarters in Hong Kong. "The board was gobsmacked. In Beijing they have four buildings the equivalent of the Sydney Opera House and the HSBC HQ," says McGowan. He lives in one of the ancient courtyard houses which line the hutongs or laneways of old Beijing, and he expects his neighbours to bring out their televisions for the Olympics. The entire area has already been scrubbed down and repainted.
"The Olympics will not necessarily make our life better. The Olympics has much negative influence, such as the rising prices of goods and real estate. Chinese people's economic pressure and life pressure is bigger," says a 37-year-old musician. "For those who only get 600 yuan (€55) retirement pay a month like my mom, how do they survive after the Olympics?"
POLLUTION IS GOING to be a major theme during the year. As the skyscrapers shoot up around this city of 17 million people, the dust from the building sites swirls to form a potent and toxic mix when combined with the exhaust fumes from the three million cars clogging the streets and the coal-fired power stations which still provide the lion's share of Beijing's energy needs.
International Olympic Committee (IOC) chief Jacques Rogge has said staging the games had encouraged the Beijing authorities to tackle environmental problems. He has praised initiatives such as efforts to close down polluting factories, eliminate 300,000 cars with high emissions, convert coal-burning furnaces to natural gas downtown, afforestation projects and the control of dust particles from building sites. But there is still a lot to be done. "Despite all these efforts, time may be running out, and the conditions required for the athletes competing in endurance disciplines might not be met 100 per cent on a given day. For this reason, we may have to reschedule some events so that the health of athletes is scrupulously protected," Rogge said in October.
While the Olympics will transform the city's hardware, the software is not likely to change much, and no one is expecting political reform to accompany the metamorphosis of Beijing.
"Expectation and reality are two different things," says Minky Worden, media director of the New York-based rights group, Human Rights Watch (HRW). There was always an optimism that the "Korea paradigm, where political reform in South Korea was boosted by the Olympic Games in 1988 [might work here], but that hope remains unfulfilled," she says. Instead, HRW is expecting the same kind of tightening that is seen around National Party Congress time, with activists rounded up, and other crackdowns, such as the destruction of petitioners' villages.
"The tightening has not lifted. In fact the general sense is of a further tightening, such as greater use of house arrest against people who are working in areas of civil society," says Worden. "On the one hand the large number of gleaming Olympic venues is improving the face of Beijing, but the pattern across China of inadequate workers' rights is writ large in Beijing. These gleaming towers were built by poorly protected migrant workers. There has been an improvement in some aspects of media freedom, but not if you are a Chinese journalist. This year we'll be looking for not just changes in the law, but implementation."
The torch will be lit at Olympia in Greece on March 25th and will be brought by relay across Greece to the Panathinaiko Stadium, the site of the first modern Olympic Games in 1896. After the handover ceremony in the stadium, the Olympic flame will arrive in Beijing on March 31st and is then due to cover five continents in a planned 137,000-km relay route, including a trip to the top of Mount Everest, before returning to Beijing in time for the games. Taiwan, which Beijing considers a renegade province, was originally supposed to feature, but says it will not take part. By August 8th, the façade and structure of the CCTV tower will be finished. And we can all see how much Beijing's amazing new skyline will have changed how people behave.
