Correspondent's Notebook
Reflections on Beijing 2008
19 September 2008
Sports reporter Tanya O’Shea was in Beijing last month for Radio Australia, covering the 2008 Olympic Games.
In this week’s Correspondent’s Notebook, Tanya reflects on her experiences and difficulties in dealing with China’s bureaucracy during the Games.
This is really a message to my young Chinese friend, Bridie. That is not his real name, but he says it easier for me to pronounce.
I also met a Viviane, CC and Mickey – they’re some of the thousands of young Beijingers who volunteered to help visitors during the 2008 Olympic Games, rather than taking the precious one month leave offered by the government.
To many Beijingers, who get just two weeks off a year, it was a good deal, but for China’s burgeoning middle class, educated young people who want to see the world and travel, the chance to mesh with Westerners was a carrot.
It was hard for everyone at the Olympic venues. Part of the problem was that University students, were assigned to marshall crowds of professional journalists who’d been covering international events for years.
Many of these teenagers had never met foreigners before and were on orders from the government to run the games like a military campaign.
I have never encountered such senseless bureaucracy. But somehow, we managed to get where we wanted after a couple of laps of the stadium and up and down stairs, and it was a great experience.
That is apart from being prevented from interviewing any of the visiting Pacific Island heads of state because the Chinese foreign affairs agents just wouldn’t allow it, refused to listen or follow articles three and six of their own Olympic charter for the media.
The government has announced that these so called press freedoms will be curtailed with the end of the Paralympics.
My immediate impression of Beijing, when we arrived at an empty international airport, was where were all the people? The population had been halved with most offered the month off – they went to the provinces apparently.
The trains and buses were empty and ran smoothly into the city – where was the traffic? With the population halved and the new odds and even number plate system for vehicles, traffic, although heavy, was never choked. The government has kept this system.
There were flowers everywhere, roadsides lined with pots of blooms, and wild flowers, hedges trimmed and the streets in pristine condition- and this wasn’t done just for the Games. Beijing – Bei means North and jing is capital, making it an imperial city with architecture of breathtaking scale and beauty.
We could see the sun, and would continue to see it off and on. The usual pattern being extreme humidity and heavy fug ahead of a crashing storm that left puddles and gutters overflowing and then a day of sunlight..
The Games brought the world to China and we saw its progressive culture and ingenuity adopting some features of the Western World…and hopefully it will continue to reach out to the West.
That said, Bridie, if you do ever get to travel, drop me a line, I think we can learn a lot from each other.
