Changing China
Giant on the move
A tale of two stadiums
This weekend, Beijing inaugurated the new Bird’s Nest Stadium with the “Good Luck Beijing” track and field event. I attended less than 24 hours after covering the earthquake in Sichuan, and the contrast between sports and rubble was a little hard to digest.
The Bird’s Nest stadium, built for the Olympics, can seat 91,000 fans. The air flows through well, keeping it cool in the muggy Beijing summer. The seats are well-positioned, so the contestants can be seen easily. The screens are visible, the sound-system clear, the lighting strong but not harsh.
The Mianyang stadium, in Sichuan, is currently housing nearly 20,000 refugees. Every railing is covered in clothing, the floors covered in cardboard and quilts. The glassed-in second story helps shield old people and children from the rain. The screens are tuned to television coverage of the disaster and the PA system booms out the radio news.
Lucky Beijing, Unlucky Sichuan.
But the two stadiums have some things in common.
A small army of young volunteers works in each. Fresh faced volunteers in Beijing answered the call to help China’s Olympics make a shining impression on the world. Masked volunteers in Mianyang answered the call to serve fellow Chinese in an hour of need.
Lines for snack food in Beijing’s stadium are polite and orderly, in line with campaigns for “cultured queuing.”
The earthquake and the Olympics
The tenor of China’s Olympic year changed dramatically over the past two weeks.
What had been a building crescendo of celebration and national pride turned into an outpouring of grief and support for the earthquake-hit province of Sichuan.
Wall-to-wall television coverage of the torch relay, a blissful affair once on Chinese soil, gave way to heart-rending reports from the devastated epicentre and uplifting scenes of a nation pulling together to confront disaster.
And though the declared three-day period of national mourning has ended, China will carry its grief into the Olympics.
But if there were any questions about whether Beijing would, bit by bit, shift itself back into gear for the Games, these were put to rest for me the other night on the subway.
As I walked into Fuxingmen station, on the edge of downtown, I came upon a scene of the feverish yet meticulous work that has characterised Beijing’s Olympic preparations.
Two dozen high-school boys were running round and round in tight circles through the turnstiles. They were testing the resilience of a new ticketing system. With magnetic swipe cards in hand, they ran, one after the other, through the automatic turnstiles non-stop for nearly half an hour.
Barbara, Shame on you! While the whole world is talking about helping the Chinese earthquake victims, you are calling for boycott of the Olympic games. Shame!!
Disaster in Sichuan
I was one of the first foreign reporters on the scene after a devastating earthquake hit the southwestern Chinese province of Sichuan on May 12.
It all seemed so normal when I arrived in the provincial capital Chengdu, some 12 hours after the 7.9 magnitude tremor hit, that I thought maybe the area had got off lightly. But heading in the hard hit town of Dujiangyan, just north of Chengdu, two hours after arriving in Sichuan, I realised how bad the situation was.
Dujiangyan looked like a war zone. There wasn’t a building that had not been damaged. Some had lost just a wall, or had a few cracks. Others had crumpled into the ground, as though a giant foot had descended from out of the sky and stamped on them.
Survivors, for the main part, either stood around in a state of total shock, or huddled together in tents, buses and cars, trying to avoid the drizzle that made what was already a depressing scene a thoroughly miserable and distressing one.
We had heard that a school in the town had collapsed. Finding it was not a problem — everyone could point the way there.
Having seen bodies lying in the streets I thought I would be emotionally and mentally prepared for what I would see next. I was wrong.
“…and if the almost incessant criticism of China now ends, or at least abates for a while.”
Mr. Blanchard seems to have reopened the floodgates with his poor reporting of the mosque being demolished. Why is it only one side of the story ever come to light? And it’s always the side that seems to be sensualized.
I am not the reporter here, so go and find out what the other ‘real’ reasons may be why that mosque was demolished.
Where next for the torch?
Preparations for the Beijing Olympics have understandably taken a back seat to the tragedy in Sichuan.
On Sunday, it was announced that the torch relay would be suspended from Monday to Wednesday to mark three days of national mourning.
The question officials at the Beijing Organising Committee for the Olympic Games (BOCOG) returned to wrestling with after observing the three-minute silence at 2.28pm today is what should happen when it restarts?
On Tuesday and Wednesday, the torch was scheduled to visit Shanghai. Can a torch relay that is supposed to visit all of China’s provinces really skip the country’s financial capital (and venue for several Olympic soccer matches)? Will Sichuan, and most particularly the city of Mianyang, really be ready to host the flame in mid-June?
Some in China have said that it should not resume at all, despite the fund-raising for the victims that has taken place along the route since the earthquake.
A former deputy editor of the Communist Party mouthpiece People’s Daily suggested last week in Caijing Magazine that when the worst of the destruction was cleared, the torch should be taken to the epicentre of the 7.9 magnitude quake and relayed from there to Beijing.
“Continuing the high profile torch relay must take a large quantity of resources and attention of people, which does not match either the need of concentrating on disaster relief, or the deep grief at losing our compatriots,” wrote Huangpu Ping.
