Beneath the Surface, Something in the Air

By Thomas Boswell
The Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/
Sunday, August 3, 2008; D01

BEIJING- You don't have to be here long to grasp the plot line of these Olympics. It's writ large everywhere. A few days give you the message. From the moment you land at Terminal 3 in the largest and perhaps most beautiful airport in the world, from the instant you glimpse the seminal, glowing-red "Bird's Nest" stadium and the translucent, heart-catching Water Cube, you know that China is about to knock the world's eyes out.

For 17 days starting Friday, viewers around the world, and millions here, will be riveted by what should be the most vividly spectacular and maniacally efficient Olympics ever organized. From the day in '01 when Beijing was awarded the Games, this has been conceived as the ultimate TV extravaganza and subliminal political infomercial. That's why NBC paid $2 billion to show it and China spent $40 billion to stage it.

That is one Olympics -- so visible that 4 billion will watch it.

However, there is another Olympics that no one will see because it is invisible, hidden, abstract. It is, rather, a contest of ideas, a comparison of systems, a contemplation of two versions of the future.

To pretend that these Games are primarily about the 100-meter dash, or an American swimmer who wants to win eight gold medals, or a glamorous Chinese hurdler would be incredibly obtuse. We can, and will, enjoy all that. But this month is about China. This Olympics will be remembered as a worldwide multi-week debate on the historic experiment that evolved by accident here over the past 25 years.

In that quarter century, China has improvised a hybrid political and economic system that the world has never before seen, at least not on such scale -- authoritarian capitalism.

The largest nation on earth has unexpectedly evolved to the point where it is capitalist in every practical sense, including an entrenched elite every bit as ruthless as America's robber barons. Yet China has kept its strict, one-party, often-thuggish Communist rule.

Here, the billionaires and the party bureaucrats are in bed together while human rights, freedom of the press, the environment -- make your own list of issues -- go by the boards. This stuns proponents of democracy, yet fascinates other nations that weigh what seems a devil's bargain between freedom or fortune.

"The West has assumed that capitalism must lead to democracy, that free markets inevitably result in free societies," Philip P. Pan wrote in "Out of Mao's Shadow." "But by embracing market reforms while continuing to restrict political freedom, China's Communist leaders have presided over an economic revolution without surrendering power."

From Darfur to Tibet to the pollution engulfing this city, we see the harsh implications. But in many other ways, which Olympic viewers will recognize at the most basic human level, this society has gone from poverty to boom times. Is the much-publicized, ever-growing list of Chinese billionaires, now up to 106 (measured in the Chinese currency known as RMB) simply a measure of an immature McMansion society that has wealth but not weight?

No answers provided. But prepare yourself for two entirely different Olympics -- one about sport, splendor and profit; the other about China's impact on 21st-century politics and economics. The stakes are that high.

How much should democracies engage such a one-party state? Has giving Beijing the Olympics helped open Chinese society a notch, as many believe, or has it merely given a rising power a chance to ignore promises to Olympic officials about greater "openness" and do as it pleases?

With every step you take here, you feel the undercurrent of that other ideological Olympics. The instant you step into an authoritarian state, whether it's China or Cuba, you know the feeling. Everybody's nice. Nobody dresses very differently from anyone else. The entire atmosphere in Olympic Beijing feels as wholesome as a Rotary convention in Omaha. Well, a convention for 15 million people. Yet you know that someone may be watching you, monitoring your e-mails or, at least, influencing all that you see with the omnipresent machinery of the state.

If there is a metaphor for this ambiguous double-edged Olympics, it is Beijing's polluted, throat-burning air. High-handed environmental indifference is China's trademark; hyper-growth, at this stage of China's economic life, is essential, so the argument goes. Later, there'll be time to grow a conscience. And the devil take any biased foreigner who disagrees.

Some days, like Thursday of this past week, you can literally see the air. It looks gray. It tastes metallic, seasoned with -- is that sulfur? You can't see far or clearly. The sun is a rumor. In the slightest breeze, you can feel the air pecking at your eyes, coating your throat. No day in Los Angeles that I've ever experienced approached it.

Yet that day's pollution reading was only 69. Beijing says less than 100 is okay. So a beach day hereabouts! However, by the Opening Ceremonies, the world may witness what a state-controlled country can do, even to its air. As we landed, eight days before the Games, the roads near Beijing at noon were as deserted as 5 a.m. on a Sunday morning in Kansas. All those filthy cars? Gone. Once in the city, only half the city's autos -- divided by odd-even license plate numbers -- were allowed to drive.

Do such restrictions on cars and factories actually work in such a short time frame? You wouldn't think so. But on our second day here, you could see the sky. It didn't hurt to breathe -- much. And by Saturday, we might as well have awakened on a Caribbean island. Warm, cloudlessly sunny. Let the Games begin?

This is the China conundrum. With luck and the right wind patterns, the world may think Beijing is a health spa, inhabited by helpful smiling citizens, many of whom appear affluent, if not rich.

What don't you see? All the migrant workers -- there are 100 million in China -- who have been swept out of town like unsightly litter. Nor do you see all the homes knocked down by edict to make room for venues.

What we also may not see is very much protesting. For decades, who has repressed dissent better than Chinese Communists? Now, they forgot how? At one level, the only response to China's accomplishment in preparing these Games is amazement and respect. To a vast nation, these Olympics are nothing less than vindication for hundreds of years of humiliation, often at foreign hands. Far from hiding this motivation, this country rejoices in it. For great China, with its 5,000 years of history, this is no coming-out party but the greatest imaginable "coming back" to prominence as a civilization.

The British colonialists and the Japanese occupiers are gone. Memory of the famine of 1959-61 that may have killed 35 million has receded. The purges of the Cultural Revolution officially have been erased from public discourse. Don't mention the Tiananmen Square massacre; scapegoats were found.

Perhaps no people can match the Chinese for their anguished ability to forget a painful past and instantly create an utterly different present. If China's history were a massive manuscript, then it might be a medieval palimpsest -- a parchment off which an earlier text had been scraped away to allow a new text to be written on top.

The current incarnation of Chinese culture has so many such layers of rewritten text, with hidden taboo histories underneath, that it makes the mind swim. Which former leaders' names can be mentioned safely? How much enthusiasm for democracy is it safe to express? Or is China breeding a cynical narcissistic generation, obsessed with mimicking Western fashion? For money-mad materialists, they sure seem friendly.

As great nations rise to power they often leave a moral mess in their wake. That doesn't mean their sins should be ignored or tolerated. But in the long arc of history, much that distracts us now will probably fade. And the broad profound outlines of this Olympics will emerge.

In New York City from the 1880s into the Roaring Twenties, the city's population, wealth and iconic architecture exploded. The time frame and pace of growth is not so different from Beijing's.

Now, a hundred years and half a world away, another city is bursting at the seams, feeling its power, changing its shape before our eyes. The world arrives here this month -- in the form of 4 billion pairs of eyes -- to inspect the behemoth that is being born.

Everything you see will blow you away. Everything you don't see should make you think.