Travellop – Travel Blog

IN THE language of architecture, the Beijing Capital International Airport’s statement of intent is concise and unequivocal: it is a building designed for shock and awe.
This week, as hundreds of thousands of tourists, athletes, journalists, and administrators descend on China in advance of the Olympic Games, the new Terminal Three building will offer them a startling introduction to the nation.

Designed by Norman Foster at a cost of £1.75 billion, it is one of the largest structures in the world, dwarfing even the combined size of all five of Heathrow’s terminals.

Encompassing a double-skinned aluminium canopy of silver slats under a russet roof, it is a potent symbol of what outside observers have been declaring as the engagement of China with westernisation.

For all their aesthetic power, however, the creations of Foster and his peers – such as Herzog & de Meuron, the Swiss architects behind Tate Modern, who designed the new National Stadium – the new skyline of Beijing ought not to suggest the fruits of three decades of modernisation are all-encompassing, or have emerged without pain or strife.

The grand Socialist landmarks still remain – the Great Hall of the People and the Revolutionary Museum – but more telling is what has been razed to make way for the vast Games infrastructure.

According to the Geneva-based Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions (COHRE), about 1.5 million people have been displaced from their “hutong” homes since 2000 due to construction and urban redevelopment, not including those migrant workers living in temporary neighbourhoods, or those dissidents rounded up and removed from sight. In a report published this month, it directly blames the Beijing Organising Committee for the Olympic Games (BOCOG) for destroying affordable housing units, and using tactics of harassment, repression, imprisonment, and even violence.

Salih Booker, the executive director of COHRE, said: “This is important to note because despite hosting the Olympic Games, China has been undeterred in undertaking massive housing rights violations and promises to continue along this path once the Games are over.”

Few would regard such widespread human rights abuses as compatible with loftiest of the Olympic ideals, especially in a country which backs Burma and bankrolls Darfur, but it represents just one example of the tensions that have been played out in China since it was awarded the Games seven years ago.

With less than a week before the opening ceremony, debate is ongoing as to what, if any, lasting legacy the Games will bring to China and her people. What is not in doubt is the scale of transition China has embarked upon. With a price tag of more than £21bn, no expense has been spared to host the most eagerly anticipated Games in recent history.

Aside from the new Beijing skyline imagined by western architects, the vast effort is most noticeable in the small cultural tweaks, which while seemingly minute in their significance, have been pursued relentlessly.

Symbolic above all is the decision to drop the face of the nation’s greatest communist icon, Mao Zedong, from millions of new 10 yuan banknotes. Replacing the image of the Great Helmsman will be a likeness of the new National Stadium.

There is also work of the group known as the Capital Committee to Promote Culture and Ideological Progress, whose members have been out on foot, handing out tens of thousands of packets of tissues to residents, along with the warning that should they be caught spitting in public, they will be fined. The group has also organised “Queuing Days” and “Seat-Giving Days” on public transport in order to bolster manners.

There also is the influx of colour suddenly appearing around once drab streetscapes, with no less than 40 million flowerpots being brought in.

Aesthetics and refined mannerisms aside, genuine political change has not materialised similar to the move towards multi-party democratisation by the South Korean government following the 1988 Games

Certainly, globalisation has breached China in terms of its economy and telecommunications services, but the People’s Republic of China maintains the firm top-down authoritarian grip on the country it has held for the past half century, a calculating dictatorship.

It is a situation which does not surprise analysts familiar with China’s Byzantine ways.

Dr Yiyi Lu, a research fellow at the China Research Institute at the University of Nottingham, told The Scotsman: “The Olympic Games is a huge event for China, but its significance should not be exaggerated.

The extent of globalisation has already been felt in China, so a single event like the Games, although significant, will not bring revolution or change the way the country is governed.”

The mixture of uncertainty and stubbornness was further made clear this week regarding internet censorship. On Wednesday, it emerged the tens of thousands of journalists visiting Beijing were to have their internet access monitored, a reversal of China’s initial pledges of unfettered access.

Sites to be blocked included Amnesty International, which published a report this week chastising China for failing to honour its Olympic pledges, including environmental claims made to look ridiculous by the Beijing smog. “This blatant media censorship adds one more broken promise that undermines the claim that the Games would help improve human rights in China,” said Mark Allison, Amnesty’s East Asia researcher.

By yesterday, however, China relented to a degree, with Amnesty’s site and that of the BBC’s Chinese-language website made available again. The president, Hu Jintao, offered a justification which fell short of an apology, saying: “It is only inevitable that people from different countries and regions may not see eye-to-eye with one another on some different issues.”

Dr Lu believes such sensitive issues show that although the government values a good international image, domestic stability is paramount.

She said: “The risk is that once they open up the country to thousands of journalists, they will find a side of China the government does not want them to see or show the world.”

The sense of reluctance is no surprise to John Keay, a historian and author, whose most recent book, China: A History, was published last month.

“China has never been indifferent to the rest of the world, and has been poised to westernise before,” he said. “But it has lost interest, drawn back, or succumbed to internal stresses.”

Mr Keay, who will be speaking at the Edinburgh International Book Festival on 12 August, added: “Its record of relations with the wider world – as opposed to relations with its immediate neighbours – has been exemplary – we should be vigilant, patient, not panicky.”

Just as the state is likely to view the XXIX Olympiad as a coronation rather than a “coming out”, Dr Lu believes its people regard it as little more than “a big party with a lot of visitors.”

The lasting differences, she suggests, will be of other nations’ perceptions of China and how its ancient civilisation fits into a modern age.

“There is a story I like to tell about a journalist working in China who had his mother visit. She arrived in Beijing airport, and when they embraced, she whispered in his ear, ‘Can we talk here?’”

Sport is just diplomacy by other means

THE Chinese are no strangers to Olympic competition. When the warring states of ancient Greece held their first Games, in 776BC, similar games were being staged among the warring states of northern China.

Later, athletic excellence played its part in the conduct of foreign relations. Under the Tang dynasty (AD618-907) the so-called “tribute” required from neighbouring states included troupes of acrobats, dancers and riders.

Later still, Maoist China signified its willingness to re-engage with the western world, issuing an invitation to a passing US table tennis team. This “ping-pong diplomacy” prepared the way for the Nixon-Mao encounter of 1972 and the Sino-US rapprochement that followed.

Opening its doors to the world is nothing new. In anticipation of China going global, the past four centuries have witnessed periods of intense foreign excitement – lip-smacking in commercial circles, hand-wringing among geo-strategists, hallelujahs from the zealots. But hopes have been dashed, fears dispelled. China’s size and prodigious achievements, while apparently irresistible, have a way of exacerbating internal stresses and aborting foreign engagement.

Westernisation may well be in for another brush-off. But in a country with its own Olympic traditions, and with a rather better historical record for global restraint, that may not be such a bad thing.

Imprisonment and torture continue apace

AHEAD of the Beijing Olympics, the Chinese government is taking security measures against activists and potential protesters on a scale unseen since the period immediately after the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989.

Many vocal activists, such as Hu Jia and Huang Qi, are already in prison, and many others have been threatened.

In the past two weeks, two more individuals, Yuan Xianchen and Liu Jiangjun, were detained on suspicion of “inciting subversion of state power”, a crime frequently used to punish individuals exercising their right of freedom to express views unacceptable to the government.

It is believed that Yuan was arrested for assisting Yang Chunlin, an imprisoned human rights defender, and for collecting signatures to the open letter We Want Human Rights, Not the Olympics.

Meanwhile, torture and ill-treatment of prisoners of conscience have continued.

While the Chinese government defends its record of implementing the convention against torture, this and other ill-treatment remain widely practised in China’s prisons, and imprisoned human rights activists are especially targeted.

In June, scores of prominent activists and dissidents were detained, put under house arrest or warned, to prevent them from meeting visiting members of the US Congress and European Parliament.
By MARTYN McLAUGHLIN

Tags: Heathrow's terminal, Norman Foster