One World, One Dream - Beijing Between the Olympics
I wrote this opinion piece for The Telegraph, intended to go live a few days before the start of Beijing’s Winter Olympics in February 2022. But due to delays, the editor wanted to shift the emhpasis away from the games and put a covid spin on it. Below is the original piece as it was intended (the published version is here).
Soldier outside the Water Cube in Beijing, 2008
In a matter of days, the Olympic torch will ignite once again above Beijing, nearly fourteen years after the last Olympiad in China’s capital. The iconic ‘Bird’s Nest’, its latticework curves sketched out by dissident artist Ai Weiwei, will become the first stadium to host both summer and winter games.
Travellers have been barred from China since March 2020, and the gates will remain welded shut for the Winter Olympics. With the CPC putting all its chips on zero Covid, the more optimistic China watchers now venture that the first chinks of light might appear after the National Party Congress in November. Others say 2023 at the earliest. Even those with valid residence permits, like me, have been largely prevented from entering.
When visitors do return, it will be to a very different Beijing than would have greeted them after that heady Olympic summer of 2008. That was when I landed in the city, trudging through arrivals at T3, Norman Foster’s showpiece Olympic terminal, in time to watch wheelchairs whizz around the track where Usain Bolt had broken the 100m World Record a few weeks earlier. Guidebook in hand, I had come to Beijing on a six-month language course. I was so taken with the city I stayed on. Just before Covid struck, I wrote the 12th edition of the Beijing Lonely Planet.
My own Beijing life is neatly bookended by the two Olympics, a period of constant flux where just about the only thing that didn’t change is the Olympic site itself, that vast and lifeless concrete void five miles due north of the Forbidden City. In those intervening years, I’ve been a bystander to Beijing’s evolution, and come to realise that things haven’t turned out quite like I once thought they would.
Tom watching the Paralympic athletics in the Bird’s Nest, 2008
“Beijing back then felt like a Wild West of opportunity, a superpower-in-waiting, where you could get a bowl of noodles and a beer for under a quid. ”
In his brilliant 2008 book The Last Days of Old Peking, Michael Meyer lamented the razing of historic neighbourhoods in the lead up to the games. But to us recent arrivals it felt like the first days of a thrilling relationship. The Olympics had been billed as China’s coming-out bash, and in the afterglow of the games, both sides – east and west – seemed well up for it.
Beijing back then felt like a Wild West of opportunity, a superpower-in-waiting, where you could get a bowl of noodles and a beer for under a quid. Anticipating Orwellian mechanisms of control, instead I discovered you could live contentedly, and under the radar, in Beijing’s hutong, a retreating mess of historic lanes inside the ghost of Beijing’s city wall. And that’s where lots of foreigners ended up. It was all still cosily low-fi. Handcarts delivered coal through the narrow alleys, kites fluttered above Tiananmen Square, and taxis were hailed the old-fashioned way – with a wave. A paltry four subway lines existed a year before the games, compared to 27 at the last count.
As the rest of the world reeled from the financial crisis, we started businesses, went to raves at the Great Wall and ate cumin-spiced lamb on the roadside. Ours was a ragtag crew of students, artists, entrepreneurs, NGO workers, errant backpackers, foreign correspondents and freelance hacks, united by a sense that we had struck gold. The liberalising power of the Internet seemed to make the future all the brighter. Nobody could put up walls in the great new digital age ahead. At least Bill Clinton thought so.
In 2012, around the time of Britain’s ‘Golden Era’ of China relations, I was involved with something called UK Now. Utterly forgotten, it was billed at the time as the largest ever festival of UK arts and culture in China, framed against the handing over of the Olympic torch from Beijing to London. I watched author David Mitchell give a talk in a Beijing bookshop, wide-eyed at the crush of Chinese fans. I interviewed a breathless Kenny Anderson, aka Scottish singer-songwriter King Creosote, after a packed gig at Mao Livehouse, then ground zero for Beijing’s punks, now long since closed. In the foreword to the festival’s companion book, I wrote with zeal about culture channelling the exchange of ideas. In reality, those channels were already getting cut off.
Mao portrait over the entrance to the Forbidden City.
Facebook and Twitter were blocked by the government in 2009, following riots in Xinjiang. For a while, we believed the bans were only temporary. Google left soon after. By the time Xi Jinping came to power in 2013, China had its own, strictly monitored version of Twitter with 50 million active daily users, and had shifted 100 million smartphones in a single quarter. Seemingly overnight, an entire population leapfrogged computers and emails and went straight to mobile, spurring the rise of super-apps like WeChat and Alipay, with messaging, mobile payments, social media and more all in one place. It was clear that market saturation had been reached when my local cleaver sharpener, a toothless gent who hawked his services on an ancient bicycle, pulled up a QR code on his phone to accept payment. Today, those same apps also contain the algorithmic ‘Health Code’, phone software that dictates all freedom of movement since Covid.
China’s tech revolution was coded in Beijing, in an area called Zhongguancun near the Summer Palace. In 2008, it was where you went to buy a computer keyboard; now it’s China’s Silicon Valley, birthplace of TikTok, ride-sharing giant Didi Chuxing, smartphone manufacturer Xiaomi, and some of the world’s most advanced AI research centres. There’s an unsettling veracity to the guidebook cliché of Beijing as a city where old meets new. Stroll through the hutong today and you’ll still see retirees playing xiangqi (Chinese chess) and sipping from flasks of tea, but you’ll also spot facial recognition camera arrays, incongruously hi-tech amid the cable salad of dusty wires that line the eaves of old courtyards. Existing under the radar in Beijing has ceased to be a possibility.
For those of us in the expat bubble, the quiet creep of authoritarianism was muffled by the distractions of craft beer bars, cheap online shopping and cleaner skies. In hindsight, there were waypoints: the clampdown on foreign NGOs, the razing of migrant housing and grey economy businesses, more and more minutes shaved off the few foreign movies that made it past the censors. I remember the day workers removed the Islamic symbols from the façade of my local Uyghur restaurant. And the public notice boards that appeared near my house showing a cartoon depicting a Chinese girl getting duped by a smooth-talking foreign ‘spy’. As I write this, the British Olympic Association has cautioned its athletes to beware of Chinese spies in Beijing. The Golden Era feels like a distant age.
In 2008, to the strains of Jackie Chan singing ‘Beijing Welcomes You’, taxi drivers would try out bits of English they’d memorised. In recent years, courting foreigners has fallen out of favour. Patriotism and partisanship rule in the comments sections of China’s walled-off internet. The closed ecosystem of apps has made visiting Beijing more difficult, and consequently less welcoming. Beijing’s streets are once again full of bicycles, thanks to the dockless sharing schemes first tested on the tech campuses of Zhongguancun, but tourists cannot access them. The same goes for Didi, China’s Uber equivalent. Even the ticket office for the Forbidden City, now online only, requires payment from a Chinese app or bank account.
When dawn breaks after Covid, and overseas visitors trickle back into Beijing, they will find a city objectively levelled up. The skies are blue, an extraordinary clean-up job. Gone are the roadside lamb skewers, replaced with shopping mall food courts. You can take a bullet train to the Great Wall in under half an hour, and disembark at the world’s deepest underground station. It might not feel like the Beijing I fell for – scrappier, more expresisive, and dare I say freer – but the world has moved on, ready for the next chapter in the story of one of the great capitals.