Summer in the City of To-morrow

From most angles, China tends to be a study in gigantism; whatever's experienced anywhere else, China has probably done it on a far larger scale. The architectural monuments are grander and more imposing, the factories and dams more massive, the geography more extreme, the population more numerous, the classical innovations more sophisticated and the atrocities more horrific, the pace of change, on the whole, harder and faster and more erratic. This is the marrow of most reflection on China through the ages, from Marco Polo and Coleridge singing hymns on the Mongols, to Qianlong wagging his cultural endowment in the faces of the British, to Fairbank or Wakemen or Spence clearing whole forests with their college primer texts, to any given 21^st-century business periodical sizing up the new China market, spittle fresh on chin and with cartoon yuan-signs for pupils. As a general rule, reading about the place becomes a tour of one sweeping cliche to the next. But China's bigness, the sheer weight of its historical footfalls, is a narrative conceit that quickly becomes uninteresting, not so much for its lack of subtlety or its monotony, but rather from the difficulty of comprehending what truth it does in fact contain. Try, for example, to consider the actual significance of certain familiar statements, say a figure like one-point-three billion people, or the idea that everyday life has never changed more quickly for any society in human history. These are facts that seem to beg a kind of reverence or wonder, but they are large to the point of real absurdity. Superlatives at this scale are eerie; they seem to degenerate into meaningless abstractions. Something like the word astronomical seems apt in the directly metaphorical sense—you might as well be contemplating the distance between the stars.

Beijing of recent has been reconfigured as a celebration grounds of sorts for various milestones of scale, with the summer Games serving as its centerpiece. To be sure, whatever historical import attributed to this specific moment is the product of self-conscious mythmaking; it is first and foremost a branding campaign, albeit a wide-ranging and extremely well-funded one. As such, one could reasonably expect the whole city to become a unified pain in the ass during August of 2008. In the first place there is the panoply of day-to-day nuisances attendant to what will surely be the greatest international tourist spectacle of recent history: crowds composed of the world's spoiled hoi polloi and their screaming children, the epidemic proliferation of chintzy Olympics swag, rampant price-gouging at restaurants and hotels, and the descent of China's petty merchants, they of world-class malevolent tenacity, from their festering vulture nests. On top of this is a short-term municipal security detail whose omnipresence and paternalism are worthy of an occupying army. Most people I know who are familiar with China are avoiding Beijing like SARS.

Those of us who came to Beijing anyway have to justify our presence as a kind of meta-tourism, an exercise in the anthropology of spectacle. It's not the Event that we've come to see, but rather the Fuss over the Event. It's an effete pose and perhaps not altogether earnest. I've decided that the best we can possibly do is to have a look around us and wonder what any of it means. For observers with a certain savvy and cynicism, mostly academics and lefty journalists, there's a suspect ethics in patronizing an event that seems to consecrate an empty affluence bought off the trampled backs of China's poor. What's important to note about this point is how it acknowledges the basic claim that the Beijing Olympics actually signify something, even as it reverses the semantics of the official party line. Thus you can view the city from opposing angles and stumble upon an exciting idea all the same. Beijing could be unpleasant for any number of reasons, but it's hard to deny that the moment is exciting, even if not for the obvious reasons.

Three years ago I had written this about China:

We saw fabulous suburban developments built up next to dusty shantytowns. If China were a mythical beast, it would be one that eats pieces of itself and somehow manages to grow larger.

Faust it ain't, but at the time I thought it was pretty good image, with the requisite reference to a vague Orientalia, and also seeming apropos to what was staring me right in the face. What I didn't realize at the time was that there was nothing unique to China about this particular process—in fact it's the same Janus-faced, world-historical steamroller that the world's great literature has been simultaneously championing and lamenting since the dawn of modern society. In a very real sense, the process is modern society. China's experience with economic development in the 21^st century may or may not contain within it genuine variations on this theme, but before all else it is an intensification, an information-age caricature of something that was already immensely fantastic and horrible to begin with. But to put it like this brings us so quickly back to the type of superlatives of scale that are simply too vast to grasp.

If these are strange days for China, they are stranger still for its capital city. Above and beyond the rapid development experienced by most of China's large cities, Beijing has the added burden of acting as the nation's millennial showpiece on the international stage, and for at least the duration of the Olympics, it must represent not only what China has achieved, but what it promises to become: safe, clean, efficient, polite, law-abiding, culturally and technologically sophisticated, and affluent to an abstractly high degree.

Of course, as with any vision of the future that is projected self-consciously into the present, it's a garment that fits awkwardly, and only after profligate commitments of time, money, and manpower. The city administration has acted the part of an obsessive-compulsive Robert Moses crossed with Henry Higgins on the juice. It has paid top dollar to foreign designers for a steel-beam menagerie of monolithic new structures; it has renovated and extended its subway system; it has imposed an alternate-day ban on motor-vehicle traffic; it has tutored its residents to say hello and thank you, and to refrain from public spitting and excretion; it has even gone so far as to fire chemical payloads into the air in order to manicure the city's air quality and rainfall. The result of all this is a public presence that could be described as a sort of rictal smile, or maybe a marionette curtsy. In either case, the welcome is something short of warm.