Archives for April 2009

One simple question has defeated most Olympic hosts: what do you do with your collection of expensive and entirely empty stadiums once the Games are over?

Beijing believes it's come up with an answer: let everyone come in and have a good nose around.

At Beijing's Olympic venues, it is forever 2008. For $12 you can buy a ticket into Beijing's Olympic stadiums and relive some of last year's glories.

At the Water Cube, lines of tourists queue up for ice cream and popcorn. They stream into the main arena, the swimming pool, take their seats and get out their cameras. The trouble is there's nothing much for them to see. The Olympic swimming pool is full of water but there's no-one actually swimming in it.

The lack of anything to watch - apart from a pool of extremely still water - doesn't seem to bother any of the visitors. One woman, Fan Dongyan, poses in front of the pool with her hands above her head like a diver. She's on her way back home from a trip to Sydney. She's stopped off in Beijing specially to see the Olympic venues.

"I think China's Olympic stadiums are great," she says, "They're magnificent buildings. In Sydney I saw their Olympic stadium from the car. I think there is no comparison to China's stadiums."

The Bird's Nest athletics stadium next to the Water Cube has now become a kind of national cathedral - a Chinese Notre Dame or Westminster Abbey. The owners have decided that it mustn't be desecrated by allowing any of Beijing's not particularly good football teams to play their home games here.

So, for now, around 20,000 people every day buy tickets simply to get the chance to walk around an empty, albeit holy, stadium.

"It's a little weird to pay money to come into the stadium when there's nothing happening," says Mark Peterson, an American tourist from Idaho.

There is one thing you can do inside the stadium. In case you've managed to go through your entire life without winning an Olympic gold medal, you can pay to have your own medal ceremony on a podium set up on the pitch.

In a few months' time, the stadium's owners plan to start staging occasional concerts - and even an opera. If tourists keep coming, the stadium's investors say they'll get their money back in about 10 years' time.

"Of course we are working hard towards the goal of getting customers to come to the stadium over and over again," says Zhang Hengli, from the CITIC Consortium Stadium Operation Company, "But China has such a big population. I don't need all 1.3bn people to visit. But if only one billion people come just once, I think I can recover my investment costs."

For now, coming to the Beijing Olympic stadium is almost a patriotic duty - a pilgrimage to the symbol of this country's resurrection as a great power. The Olympics may now be on their way to London. But many here in Beijing still want to relive the glories of 2008.

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Don't call anyone insane in China. Professor Sun Dongdong has just made that mistake. In a recent article, the professor who runs Peking University's judicial expertise centre suggested that 99% of the people who repeatedly petition the government are mentally ill. Bad move.

The professor apologised and said that he would mind his words in the future. But for petitioners themselves an apology wasn't enough. One group demonstrated outside Peking University with the simple message that they are not actually insane and that their grievances need to be taken seriously. It's a serious point since the conclusions reached by experts such as Professor Sun can be used by the authorities to evaluate a person's mental health.

The official Xinhua news agency reports that up to 200 petitioners have carried on a vigil outside the university to demand a proper explanation from the professor.

In China, petitioning is an ancient form of getting justice. In imperial times, an ordinary subject who needed justice would come to the capital, throw him/herself at the feet of the emperor and beg for his/her case to be heard.

Nowadays, anyone who has a complaint can begin their search for justice in the legal system. But if they get nowhere in the courts, their last resort is to do what people in China have done for centuries - come to the capital and petition the country's top leaders.

In modern China, petitioners make up a marginalised collection of citizens. They are often arrested and sent back to their home provinces. Many spend years trying to get the government to hear their case, but very few ever get any results. They petition on a wide range of cases - I've met a builder whose wages were never paid, a man engaged in a long-running land dispute, and a father who sobbed as he explained his campaign for an investigation into his only son's death.

Petitioners are desperate to be heard. Whenever I've been to cover their protests in Beijing, I've been surrounded by groups who try to hand me copies of their petitions. These petitions are often 40-50 pages long and include legal documents, photos and letters. The petitioners hope that someone, or even anyone, will read their petition and hear their case.

Many petitioners have spent everything on their campaign. They have sometimes lost their families and their life savings. But not, they insist, their sanity.

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Being leader of the world's most populated country appears to guarantee you a good seat at dinner.

At the G20 summit dinner in London, China's President, Hu Jintao took the prime seat to the right of the host Gordon Brown. To Mr Hu's right was France's President Nicolas Sarkozy.

This could have been a reasonably glacial encounter. China has been angry with Mr Sarkozy for holding a meeting in December with the exiled Tibetan leader, the Dalai Lama. But, just a few hours before the dinner in London, China and France released a joint communiqué in which France rejected Tibetan independence. This communiqué was apparently enough to ensure that Mr Hu and Mr Sarkozy were able to munch their shoulder of lamb in harmony.

The Chinese media has covered every moment of President Hu's trip to London. Of particular interest appears to be his meeting with Barack Obama - the first time the two men have ever met. We probably won't learn much from the few minutes they spent together. But in the long term, the relationship between China and the United States may come to define the course of this century.

China is now starting to exercise the political, economic and military power it's built up in recent years. Until recently China preferred to follow the advice given two decades ago by its late leader Deng Xiaoping - "hide our capacities, bide our time, and never be in the limelight."

But that policy is slowly changing. The governor of the Central Bank of China recently suggested replacing the dollar as the world's reserve currency. China has confronted the US Navy in the South China Sea. This country believes it should now have a greater say in organisations like the International Monetary Fund.

But China also needs help. This country has risen because it sells things to the rest of the world. But right now, the rest of the world can't afford to buy as much as it once did. So, factories in China have closed down. And 20m Chinese workers have lost their jobs. This country needs the world to start spending again.

As I write this entry, Hu Jintao has just gone into the conference hall in London (I noted that his limousine arrived fourth last - ahead of stragglers Lula, Sarkozy and Berlusconi).

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