I got back to Beijing yesterday morning at an unspeakable hour (5.45 in the morning), so 36 hours later I’m still finding my jet-lagged feet in pre-Olympic Beijing. These are my first impressions:
The air is as bad as it has been for months. The air is grey, so thick you could eat it. The sun hangs like a red golf ball in the sky, not shining, just glowing distantly through the smog. I can see no improvement in air quality, and an investigation on the BBC website at:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_pictures/7506925.stm shows that there is a strong correlation between visibility and pollution.
There seem to be very few Western tourists. I’ve been walking up and down along a street which boasts the Lido Holiday Inn, the Rosedale Hotel and the Yanxiang Hotel. I saw no more Westerners than usual, perhaps fewer. At about eight this evening, the Rosedale Hotel’s Beer Garden was empty. The Lido’s, complete with big screen sports coverage, was decidedly sleepy. This is not a scientific survey. Maybe all the tourists are hiding in the Olympic village.
Among the population of Beijing, opinion is polarized. Some people think the Olympics are the best thing since sliced bread and are genuinely excited.
Many taxi drivers have decorated their cars with Chinese flags. On our street, identically-sized Chinese flags hang above the storefronts (which have recently been renovated so that they too are identical.) All this flag-waving does not look like a spontaneous act of patriotic fervour – these bright new flags are not heirlooms dragged out of the attic for a special occasion.
Perhaps the flags have been issued, complete with instructions for flying them. One man described how tomorrow’s opening ceremony was going to be as happy an event as Chinese lunar new year, with families gathering around the TV set.
Other people are offended and angry because of what they describe as excessively heavy-handed security operations. ‘This should be a happy occasion,’ one man said to me. ‘Why do they have to be so anxious?’
There are staff at every bus stop who check bags of passengers for bombs. If you carry a bottle of water, you’re ordered to take a sip to prove it’s not toxic or explosive. If you refuse, you’re not allowed on the bus.
It goes beyond that. Around the city, posters have gone up asking people to inform on each other if they overhear subversives plotting against the government. ‘It’s just like the Cultural Revolution,’ said one man, referring to the bleakest years of Communist history, forty years ago, when people were encouraged to turn on one another. It is said now that if people make remarks criticizing the Olympics in public, they should expect to be taken away and detained until the Olympics are over.
I have spoken to no one who has direct knowledge of anyone being taken away, but the fact that people believe this is so is indicative of people’s state of mind. They feel their leaders don’t trust them (or why would they keep checking their bags?), they suspect that the security measures are as much about political dissent as about terrorism. In return, they are willing to believe the worst of the very leadership which seems to think the worst of them.
I have heard a few people mention an explosion on a bus in central Beijing last week, in which two people were allegedly injured. Again, it is not clear to me whether such an explosion actually happened, or whether people are observing the heavy-handed security measures that are disrupting their lives and are speculating that something specific must have triggered it.