2008 Beijing Olympics

The 2008 Beijing Olympics are entering their final stretch. It’s been a thrilling competition, designed in part to showcase China’s considerable power. In Granta 101, Robert Macfarlane explored Beijing – including the now-famous Bird’s Nest stadium – and questioned why the Olympic city seems intent on demolishing its past.

In Granta 98, Hugh Raffles examined the ancient Chinese sport of cricket fighting. The essay, which is included in this year’s Best American Essays, details the transformation of China’s ever-expanding urban areas. ‘In less than one generation,’ Raffles writes, ‘the fields that gave the crickets a home have all but gone. Now, dense ranks of giant apartment buildings, elongated boxes with baroque and neo-classical flourishes, stretch pink and grey in every direction, past the ends of the newly built metro lines, past even the ends of the suburban bus routes. The spectacular neon waterfront of Pudong, the symbol of Shanghai’s drive to seize the future, is only ten years old but already under revision.’

In Granta 89, Isabel Hilton detailed the evolution of the Chinese factory. ‘The hinterland behind Shenzhen, the Pearl River Delta, is the heart of the fastest growing industrial zone in the world, the Chinese province of Guangdong,’ Hilton writes. ‘This is the landscape that produces two-thirds of the world’s photocopiers, microwave ovens, DVD players and shoes, more than half of the world’s digital cameras and two-fifths of its personal computers. Guangdong’s business is to make things. It sucks manufacturing from Europe and North America and other economies with high wage rates, cheapens it, increases it, then ships it by container to overseas markets. The factories here bear no relationship to the ones I knew thirty years ago in Shanghai. It is as different as Manchester in the 1840s was from rural England in the eighteenth century and to come here is to feel a little of what Friedrich Engels felt when he set out to describe Manchester, the world’s first uncompromisingly industrial city. Here too, the visitor marvels at the industrial energy and is appalled by the degrading conditions in which the workers live. “In this place,” as Engels put it, “the social war, the war of each against all, is here openly declared.”’

In ‘The Lost City’, from Granta 73: ‘Necessary Journeys’, Hilton returned to Beijing after a ten-year absence. ‘Ten years later, globalization and the market economy has changed the city so much that I struggle to recognize it. The city in my head, the map that is imprinted on my brain as clearly as the map of the London Underground, no longer corresponds to the Beijing I see around me.’

In ‘We love China’ from Granta 92, Lindsey Hilsum chronicled China’s ‘rapidly growing influence’ on Africa. ‘The Chinese are the most voracious capitalists on the continent,’ Hilsum writes, ‘and trade between China and Africa is doubling every year. Second only to the United States in its oil consumption, China needs Africa’s resources to fuel its own phenomenal growth. In oil-rich countries like Angola, Chad, Nigeria and Sudan, the influence of former colonial powers is waning. The Chinese government imposes no political conditions on African governments before signing contracts for exploration or production. No Chinese pressure groups lobby Chinese oil companies about “transparency” or environmental damage. Not surprisingly, African governments welcome these undemanding new investors.’