OLYMPIC UPSIDE

BEIJING - China's had a rough road to the Olympics, but you'd never know it when you look across the Olympic Green today.
Put aside for a minute the human rights questions, the censorship and the troubled torch relay, and you simply think: "Wow!"
Sun Weide, the suave diplomat serving as deputy media director for the Beijing Olympic Committee, puts it more formally. Beijing, he says, "is ready to show the outside world China's social and economic development."

The Swiss-designed National Stadium, better known as the Bird's Nest, poised to take centre stage at the Games.

The cleanup crews need to make a few more passes, but for all intents and purposes the Olympic sites are ready to go, with the Swiss-designed National Stadium, better known as the Bird's Nest, poised to take centre stage.
The tangle of pewter-grey steel twigs with a red "egg" inside that seats 91,000, is an architectural marvel. Who would have thought steel girders could be whimsical?
There is nothing like it anywhere else in the world and people coming to the 8-8-8-8 opening ceremonies - Aug. 8, 2008 at 8 p.m. - will be dazzled. It is the symbol of the modern country China wants the world to see.
Across the Olympic Green, the Australian-designed National Aquatic Center, or Water Cube, vies for attention. It's a simple steel grid of a building clad in "bubble wrap" - actually, a material called ETFE that self-cleans and changes from white to pale blue when the sunshine finds it. The Cube is already a favourite with Beijingers. In the evenings now, they bring chairs and snacks and sit along the perimeter fence - they can't get any closer yet - to watch the lights switch on and turn the Cube a brilliant blue.
Next to it sits the low-slung, curvy-roofed National Indoor Stadium. There's no nickname for this Olympic gym, and considerably less pizzazz about it, too. But that's by comparison. Like the nine other newly erected Olympic sports venues, the stadium was built primarily for athletics, not admiration.
Still, these less-than-iconic venues, plus the extensive renovations done to 11 existing sports centres that will be used during the Games, form a large part of Beijing's Olympic legacy. Not only will they give a whole raft of new sports facilities - pools, playing fields, gyms, arenas, tracks and marinas - to a city that sorely lacks all of these things, but most of the venues were also built or revamped with the environment in mind. The green technologies that are showcased in many of them could have an impact on how buildings around China are designed for a long time after the sports fans have gone home.
The Olympic Village, which will house 10,000 athletes during the Games and be sold for much-needed housing afterwards, contributes to the environment-friendly theme Beijing is emphasizing, too. It's an interesting looking apartment block in a fabulous setting, but its real claim to fame is that it is partially powered by solar energy. That's rare in China, one of the world's leading polluters.
The signature Bird's Nest and the Water Cube anchor the grand Olympic Green, a 1,135-hectare park that connects 13 venues, plus the Village.
The Green is built on Beijing's historic north-south axis and visitors are likely to find it slightly daunting. The avenues stretch forever and shade doesn't seem to have played a big part in the design. Given temperatures that will soar above 30 C most days, organizers might have considered installing fans in the sleek light standards that march down the centre of sidewalks instead of high tech surveillance cameras and loud speakers.
Sun's job with the Beijing Olympic Committee is to talk up the Olympics, but even he has a hard time just focusing on the sports venues when it is so glaringly obvious the years of preparation for the Games have transformed all of Beijing.
It is an "imperial" capital now, with wide boulevards and hundreds of imposing new buildings and grand hotels that have transformed a skyline that used to be dominated by dowdy, Stalinist style buildings and red slate roofs.
The 230-metre twisted tower of the Dutch-designed state television building isn't quite finished, but it is awesome anyway. French architect Paul Andreu's National Theatre, dubbed "the alien egg," is set in a "lake" with the Forbidden City as a backdrop, and it is a definite conversation piece.
Everyone has an opinion about it - and most are negative.
British architect Norman Foster's dragon-shaped Terminal 3 now dominates the Beijing airport and a brand new high-speed train built by Bombardier links it to downtown in just 20 minutes. There are three new subway lines, for a total of eight, making travel around the capital significantly easier, plus ribbons of new roads and hundreds of kilometres of newly paved and cobbled streets.
There were also hundreds of measures, big and small, taken to deal with the choking pollution that still threatens to spoil Beijing's day in the sun.
Factories were re-located outside the city, fleets of "clean" buses were introduced, auto-emission standards increased and buildings across the city were forced to convert from coal to oil or natural gas.
With or without the Games, Beijing was eventually going to have to make these kinds of infrastructure and environmental improvements, but add them to the price of building and staging the Olympics and China is facing a bill that makes these Games the most expensive ever. Estimates range from $20 billion US to as high as $40 billion.
There is little mention anymore of who and what had to give way to bring change on the scale Beijing has seen in the seven years since it was awarded the Games.
Suffice to say, the Olympic building spree employed an estimated 1.3 million workers on 7,000 building sites, one million people were removed from their homes, and, officially, six workers, but perhaps 10, died building the Olympic venues China needed to realize its ambition of "One World, One Dream."
Sun makes it clear the cityscape isn't the only thing that has been spruced up for the Olympics - Beijingers have, too. "They have been socialized," he proudly reports.
In a bid to make the residents as welcoming as their city, the Chinese government subjected them to several years of English instruction and manners training.
Sun explains how informal language groups were nurtured in neighbourhoods around the capital, tea parties and English "corners" were organized in local parks, Mandarin newspapers printed one paragraph about the Olympics each day in English and the Beijing television news began each night with different celebrities talking for one minute in English.
To a casual observer, the results are disappointing. You still can't take most Beijing taxis and expect to get anywhere close to your destination without speaking Mandarin or showing the driver an address in Chinese characters. And on the streets, bargaining is still a matter of passing a calculator back and forth. After attracting your attention with a shout of "hey lady," most vendors have used up their store of English.
The official campaign to cultivate "civilized" manners produced better results. There is definitely less spitting on the streets. While still not sacrosanct, the effort to make Beijingers practise lining up on the 11th of each month (11 resembles two lines) means queues are more or less respected now. The newly sprouted No Smoking signs are mostly heeded, too.
On the downside, the city seems a little less Chinese without the bamboo poles covered with drying laundry sprouting from every window, with fewer food stands on the streets and with nobody sleeping on their doorsteps on these sultry summer nights.
No one even attempted to change the age-old Chinese custom of keeping toddlers diaperless, however, so seeing them do their business on crowded sidewalks is still a cross-cultural experience in store for foreign visitors.