Blitzed Beijing

In a corner of the park was a weight-training area. I wandered over and watched a Chinese man with a long beard stained a nicotine yellow. He looked as though he was in his seventies, was wearing grubby linen trousers and was bench-pressing enormous weights. He saw me watching, stopped lifting and came over. When he smiled, I saw that he had three top teeth and a full bottom row of false teeth, each gold-capped. Through the fog of my poor Mandarin, I gleaned that his name was BanYue, that he was eighty-two years old and that he was a park regular. At one point, I seemed to supply him with a sequence of baffling answers, at which he laughed extensively. I later reconstructed the conversation with a bilingual speaker, and it appears to have gone something like this:

BY: How old are you?

RM: Three o’clock.

BY: What’s the nature of your work here in Beijing?

RM: Old man literature.

BY: Where are you living?

RM: Also Fruit Nursery.

We might have been two spies verifying each other’s pass codes. But it didn’t matter. Following an affectionate handshake that lasted twenty seconds and jellied my fingers, we parted company: me to continue my ascent of the city, BanYue to continue bench-pressing the equivalent of a small family car.

So my legs kept me walking forwards, crossing Beijing’s third ringroad (it now has six in total). I passed scores of men at work on the embankments: trimming, planting, digging, potting. Millions of yuan are being spent on the city’s so-called ‘greenification’ campaign in advance of the Olympic Games,whose manifestations range from printing litter bins with messages exhorting people to KEEP ENVIRONMENT BEAUTIFIED to the establishment of thousands of box hedged flower beds — peonies, roses — lining the major routes in and out of the city. The aim is Potemkinist: municipal legerdemain, a floral distraction fromthe otherwise wrecked state of Beijing’s natural environment.

The nearer I got to the Olympic Park area itself, the denser the Olympic signage became. Every bus stop and hoarding carried images of China’s sporting heroes — Yao Ming, the seven-foot basketball star, and Liu Xiang, the gold-medal hurdler — or the five Olympic mascots, primary-colour sprites who already have their own hit cartoon series.

North of the fourth ringroad, the upper surfaces of the Bird’s Nest Stadium, Beijing’s flagship venue, rose into view: undeniably fabulous in their ribboned swoops and curves. And there, too, was the blue corrugated fence marking the perimeter of the Olympic Park itself.

In 2005, a huge area of northern Beijing was requisitioned, cleared of its inhabitants and fenced off. Human RightsWatch estimates 300,000 people to have been displaced in order to make way for the Olympic developments: BOCOG, the Party committee in charge of the Games, puts the figure at 6,000 households. Either way, the Chinese Olympic Park — like London’s — has now become an exclusion zone: cleared and enclosed and accessible only to apparatchiks and constructors. Beijing’s new Forbidden City.

I tried to cadge or bluff my way into it several times: the confident stroll past the barrier, the feigned incomprehension… But access was repeatedly denied. Teenage security men in oversize greatcoats were only too pleased to tell a foreigner to turn back. So on the south-western corner of the zone, I gave up. I had followed the axis as far north as I could go: walking a 700-year-old line through a city that was set on abolishing its own past. I looked back across the park. Tens of miles of razed ground, scores of emptied buildings, thousands of men at work.

On the pavement a few yards from me, a middle-aged woman wearing a blue serge Mao jacket was flying a kite. She controlled the kite with a wooden reel a foot across — big enough to play a marlin — and on her left hand she wore a white glove, to save her from friction burns.The line was as taut as piano wire, and I could hear it humming quietly in the wind. The kite — eagle-shaped, sharp-beaked — hung perhaps 800 feet up, gazing down on to the Olympic Park. Higher still an aeroplane was flying due south, and its contrail lay white in the sky: a surveyor’s chalk stroke