Excitement over Olympics hasn’t hit street level
By Ann Mah
International Herald Tribune
Published: November 7, 2005
BEIJING: Yuan Yongli, a street food vendor, lives and works in Dongcheng, a central Beijing district, where construction sites for the 2008 Olympic Games loom over his tumbledown neighborhood.
Wang Min, a graphic designer, is working on the image of the games.
Despite the preparations going on around him, Yuan says, his days in Dongcheng, just three kilometers, or two miles, east of the Forbidden City, remain unchanged.
“Everyone’s saying that the Olympics are bringing good, good, good,” Yuan said. “But for me nothing’s happening.”
Wang, who returned to China in 2001 after 17 years in the United States, has a different take. Since moving to Beijing from Northern California, he has sensed a change in the attitudes of local people.
“The games have definitely boosted people’s confidence and spirit,” Wang said. “They’re looking forward to the future.”
With less than three years to the lighting of the Olympic torch, preparations for the games are highlighting a divide in the lives of Beijingers. For those who work on issues related to the Olympics, and especially for an elite of planners and organizers, it is a consuming endeavor. But the excitement has failed to reach most ordinary people who live from day to day in the economically supercharged capital.
If there is one common concern for many Beijing residents, it is commuter congestion.
“The only way the preparations are affecting me is the traffic,” said Jackie Yu, a Beijing native who works in publishing as an assistant editor. “I don’t care about the new stadiums - they’re not going to affect my daily life. But the traffic should be better and it’s not.”
To tackle congestion, the Beijing municipal government is investing about $1.2 billion a year in subway and light railway construction over the next three years, expanding the Beijing subway network to 300 kilometers from 54 kilometers, with the addition of four lines and 70 stations. It is also planning to invest nearly $5 billion in the next five years to build 360 kilometers of expressways, according to local press reports.
But future benefits are being paid for in present misery. The subway and road construction sites are adding to the congestion caused by the heady growth of Beijing’s vehicle population.
“Traffic is the only thing that affects my life,” said Cheng Meihua, a taxi driver.
“The government is constantly building new roads and fixing the streets, and it’s terrible.
“I hope they fix it by the Olympics, but I’m not optimistic.”
Sun Weide, a spokesman for the Beijing Olympics organizing committee, agreed that traffic is a problem.
Along with building more roads and subways, the city government hopes to educate the public on traffic rules, he said. To that end, Chinese state television has begun airing public service spots encouraging considerate driving behavior, a campaign through which the authorities “hope to dramatically reduce traffic jams,” Sun said.
In positive-thinking mode, the organizing committee has billed the Games as the “Green Olympics,” and the “High-Tech Olympics.”
“Environmental protection is a key requisite for developing technology and buildings,” at the sporting venues, Sun said.
The committee is also calling the Games the “People’s Olympics,” a reminder, Sun said, that they are “a business opportunity for residents in Beijing, the whole country and the rest of the world.”
Wang, the graphic designer, shares the official enthusiasm. “This is a great opportunity for the city to show to people - athletes and observers - that Beijing is no longer closed, or behind,” he said. “It now has a new image.”
The dean of the design school at China’s prestigious Central Academy of Fine Arts, Wang is working with a team of students and faculty to establish a clear visual image for the games.
Wang hopes his work will have a lasting impact on the city. “I do hope through good design and good preparation for the Games that we’ll show local people that design can make our lives more enjoyable and at the same time improve the economy,” he said.
Yet for the street food vendor, Yuan, this optimism has yet to reach the tangle of narrow, shabby centuries-old lanes, known as hutongs, that his neighborhood comprises.
“Those of us in the hutongs hardly go out,” he said. “I don’t understand what the government is doing and it hasn’t affected us here yet. The ordinary citizens just want the country to be stable and the people peaceful.”
The official Olympic licensed retailer in the centrally located Guiyou department store was certainly peaceful enough - in fact empty of customers - during a weekday lunchtime visit recently. The store opened in early 2004, and business has remained “stable,” said Liu Hongyuan, a shop employee.
“The Olympics don’t have much of an effect on my daily life, but it’s good for the city,” Liu said, without visible enthusiasm.
But perhaps not good enough. “If the situation with traffic, pollution, congestion - everything - doesn’t get better soon, I feel by 2008 it’ll be a mess,” Yu, the editorial assistant, said. “When Beijing won the bid in 2001 I felt really excited. But now, I don’t even want to go watch the Games.”