...Photo for NEWSWEEK by Mike Powell

For up-to-date coverage of the 2008 Olympics please see our new blog on the Games, "Beijing Beat". Here's our Web story on the stunning Beijing Olympics opening ceremony:

     From inside the 91,000-seat Bird's Nest stadium, fireworks dazzled and the thunder of 2,008 performers drumming on traditional fou percussion instruments rolled throughout the stadium. High-tech special effects gave even the kitschiest subject matter a startling edge. An ode to China's invention of movable type—ho hum, you might say— morphed into a vast sea of undulating cubic shapes, simulating a giant computer keyboard—and took my breath away.

     When five-time Olympic medal winner Li Ning prepared to ignite the Olympic flame, invisible wires swooped him skyward for a gravity-defying space-walk around the stadium's rooftop opening. When gymnast Li, who launched a successful sports clothing and accessories empire after snagging three gold medals in Los Angeles, finally lit a gigantic torch perched on the rim of the Bird's Nest, the crowd went wild.

Today I de-camped at dawn to watch the torch relay in that you-know-which-famous-square. A couple dozen other journalists and I were herded to a spot facing Mao’s portrait, We waited and waited. The last time I’d waited that long in that place, that early in the morning, was in 1989 during a brief and ill-fated Beijing Spring.

Waiting for Yao Ming and the torch relay...

      Back then I was waiting for Chinese police to come clear the square of hundreds of youthful protestors who’d hung colorful silk banners off official flagpoles in front of the granite obelisk known as the Monument to the People’s Heroes. (Chinese look down on your political movement if you don’t have flags made of luxuriant silk, and if you don’t know how to brandish them just right so that the fabric floats like butterflies’ wings.) These kids in 1989 – about the same age as the youth in the square this morning -- chanted pro-democracy slogans and strummed folk-songs on guitars.

 Jennifer Conrad reports on continuing post-quake relief efforts in Sichuan:

Are authorities dangerously downplaying the threat?  Not always. A People’s Daily editorial last month warned grimly that “The Beijing Olympics is facing a terrorist threat unsurpassed in Olympic history.”  With such mixed signals – and the Beijing Olympics just days away – Chinese Netizens are buzzing with questions and speculation about the most recent incident. What seems clear – perhaps the only thing that’s truly clear – is that already stringent security precautions in China’s capital will no doubt become tighter still.

This morning Web postings on an Internet bulletin board popular with IT professionals revealed surprise, alarm, and some conspiracy theories. One post starts out “F---! Xinjiang attacked by bombs. 16 armed police died, 16 injured. CCTV just reported it” and goes on to describe the 7:55 AM incident in which two vehicles tried to ram a group of People’s Armed Police engaged in their routine morning exercises, including jogging in formation. The drivers threw two grenades and slashed their victims with knives. “Terror” says one respondent.
　
A person using the cybernym Orion frets “I was even thinking of driving to Xinjiang in August. It’s not safe even in a non-Games region.” To which another Netizen says “They’re too bold, even picking on the border troops. It looks like the border troops don’t have enough fighting force, so many died and injured.”
　
Then someone posts a news report of the press-conference comments made by Kerexi Maihasuti saying the East Turkistan separatists aren’t as powerful as reported by some media. “When I watched this news the day before yesterday, I realized the terrorists wouldn’t let this go,” says William920. “They did this because of that news,” agrees Eggcom. “Was Kerexi Maihasuti bragging or [public security personnel] not doing their jobs?” Concludes another, “Obviously it was not appropriate for him to give those comments at that moment.”

Yesterday we brought you the Extrauterine Pregnancy Express, journalist-blogger Chen Feng’s Oniony news parody on Beijing’s Olympic prep work. The unseemly title, as was explained in the post, derives from a punning Chinese nickname for the Games that's been creeping around the blogosphere (Gongwaiyun). Chen bashed out his cycle of mock dispatches in a flurry on Thursday. When complimented on his wry wit, he could only scoff back. “What’s so creative about it!”

Anyway, translated herewith is another installment:

Beijing's standout bloggers (like its natives) are an intrinsically grouchy lot. No surprise then that they’ve been griping on and on about Olympic-related hassles of late – though in many cases more offline than on.

      “Achhhh, we’ve been spending half our days erasing posts,” groused the founder of one of China’s edgier blog forums, reached by phone earlier this week. Come Olympic time, he said, “I’m not even sure we’ll be operating.” He asked not to be named and declined to elaborate. “Please don’t ask me to talk about it.” (His site, incidentally, is still up.)

    This morning’s attack, which killed 16 police in the far western region of Xinjiang, did not exactly surprise me, but it may have startled at least one senior official from the area, Kerexi Maihesuti. Just last Friday in a Beijing press conference for foreign media the vice chairman of the Xinjiang region described the threat of ethnic Uighur separatists there as a disorderly band of wanna-be’s “with limited power” who are “not competent make the attacks which some hostile forces wish".

It’s bad news for a mainland newspaper to let something slip about the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown. Really bad news. The news only tends to get worse when the slip-up occurs at a time as delicate as now, with the Olympics days away and Beijing on tenterhooks about, among lots of other things, foreign TV broadcasts and tourists at Tiananmen Square. But one week after its well-publicized infraction, the propaganda-meisters remain eerily silent in the case of The Beijing News. Persons informed on the matter say it may very well stay that way until after the Games.

Last Thursday the paper, one of the country’s elite commercial dailies, ran an interview with Pulitzer Prize-decorated photographer Liu Heung Shing. Liu is the editor of a new coffee-table volume of photos that spans the tumultuous history of the People’s Republic (Newsweek’s Alexandra Seno profiled him about it last week). Much of the subject matter is politically tinged, including images of the Tiananmen demonstrations, the Cultural Revolution and previously unreleased shots by Chinese photojournalists. As a result the book is unlikely to be sold on the mainland, and some copies shipped in have been impounded by customs officials.

To accompany the interview in The Beijing News, Liu says, he e-emailed the paper three photos of his in the book, though he was cautious not to select any that would be to o risque to publish. When the interview appeared, however, the spread of images featured a fourth he never sent, at the bottom corner of the page:

The Beijing News, July 24, 2008, Page C15

The corner photo, entitled “The Wounded”, was one Liu captured during the June 3-4, 1989 crackdown on protesters at Tiananmen. Its shows civilians pierced by bullets being wheeled away on tricycle carts.

The goal of a “Green Olympics”, to Beijing’s chagrin, has become just another green light to have a go at its environmental woes. It is hard to hold back. After all, water is being pumped into a man-made addition to a parched riverbed, just to hold the Olympic rowing regatta. A reeking lather of algae docked on the shores of sailing host city Qingdao last month, requiring more than 10,000 workers to remove it. China's weather mod squad – officially, the ‘Weather Modification Office' – conducts constant aerial experiments in man-made rain to cool the cities and clear the skies. And the only thing less transparent than the air seems to be Beijing’s air pollution testing, which critics say is configured to lowball the numbers. Some Olympic runners are swooping into town for the days of their events alone, so leery are they of the haze. They’ll come muzzled in super-sophisticated masks.

The government's had to pull out all the stops - ordering half the cities' cars off the road (alternating daily bans on even- and odd-numbered license plates), closing factories, and shutting down construction - in the mere hope of making Beijing appear a less forbidding city.

So acute are the problems, however, that China’s also opened up to all sorts of innovative efforts at fixing them. At one newly established forum in Beijing earlier this month, environmental experts, green business gurus and grassroots activists pondered the future of the “environmental economy”. We emailed with Richard Marks and Sophia Trapp of Productions 1000, co-founders of the “International Earth Forum” (IEF), about China's prospects of improving a grim environment and their own challenges operating in a toxic climate of pre-Olympic security. Excerpts from our e-interview follow:

NEWSWEEK: Tell us what the International Earth Forum is and how it came about.

We brought together a mix of communicators, connectors, forestry experts, business people, renewable energy & carbon trading leaders, academic and youth leaders from the UK, US, Netherlands, Germany and China. Our core discussions centered around the theme of leadership within the new “environmental economy”, in which attendees asked, “How can we do Business with Nature?”

Why China?

Four years ago, China invited us into early discussions about the urgency for addressing its serious energy concerns. That first renewable energy business delegation brought us face-to-face with senior government leaders from Shanghai to Beijing to discuss renewable technologies, investment and long range environmental planning, sustainable development in China, clean energy technologies and policy planning for the protection of China’s environment.

To organize the International Earth Forum, we partnered with senior level Chinese business people and government officials to connect re-forestation projects with international venture partners. But as we proceeded, we realized the importance of communicating fresh international and inter-cultural thinking. We all want to know what China is doing about the environment. In addition, our third co-host, Jing Su, is a young Chinese woman who has undertaken to help the environment by bridging the gap between China and the international community on environmental ideologies and practices. She is now the China Program Associate for the American Council on Renewable Energy (ACORE).

Timing-wise, why did you choose the run-up to the Beijing Olympics?

Planning an international event in the run-up to the Olympics was an obvious opportunity to celebrate and communicate the positive changes happening in China, to share common ideas and desires for sustainability, and discuss how doing business that is good for the environment can be profitable and healthy. In a dialogue, people coming from different backgrounds typically have different basic assumptions and opinions. In the course of our dialogues, we seek to question our assumptions, set them aside, and are willing to set them free if we find we can do better with the words and ideas that will light the way for others.

But the Olympics hasn’t made for the freest of times here. Plus conferences in China normally require local partners and official approvals. Yet you managed to avoid all that. How and why?

In the beginning, Productions 1000 was eager to partner with a Chinese environmental NGO that wanted its organization to be recognized as the host; otherwise "it wasn't interested." We had to hold firm that it's an inappropriate role for an NGO to host a business-oriented forum. We decided to risk it and continue on our own. Launching for the first time in China, it was touch and go until the end.

Through two years of relationship-building with private sector environmental business ventures in China, we had made friends with business people and NGO’s in China. Our idea to bring international people to the table required an agenda that would be communications-driven, so our approach was to remain a private and social gathering – an invitation-only event. This ensured the integrity of doing business while protecting the exposure to our guests, many of whom are CEO’s and presidents of significant venture funds for the environment.

While the original people we felt we needed to work in China did not stay along for the ride, some very senior government and business people working in China's environmental space ultimately gave us the "nod" to allow it to happen [on an unofficial basis]. We feel that’s because they recognized we are good people who had something good to contribute to China's environment and people.

I suppose it was inevitable.

After four days of (relatively) blue skies, the summer haze has descended once more upon Beijing. Nature's palette includes many lovely hues of blue: cerulean and cyan, turquoise and teal, azure and aqua; but the blue of a Beijing sky is seemingly indescribable and lies somewhere along the visible spectrum between tar heel pride and acid-washed jeans.

Granted, what we’re looking at today, Thursday, July 24 – a sky you can’t quite call overcast – is better than the polluted pall that usually hangs over our God-forsaken city. But still, it’s a sky the color of bed sheets that have been slept in too many times. Shadows lack defined edges. Visibility barely extends beyond the buildings across the street.

Which makes us wonder, will Beijing’s ambitious plan to reduce pollution in the capital ahead of the Olympics actually work?

By Mary Hennock and Manuela Zoninsein

The stage at D22 has fallen silent and dark--and Michael Pettis, owner of the popular Beijing rock club, says he never saw it coming. City authorities shut down the music without warning in early July because his club lacked a performance license. "They just turned up," says Pettis. "There was no notice … No time to adjust."

Beijing is full of bars, restaurants and businesses that have operated successfully for years without a full set of licenses. The rules were often so hard to understand that even city inspectors made little effort to enforce them--until now. Suddenly the city is cracking down on everyone in sight. Pettis, a 50-year-old New Yorker, has filed his license application, and all he can do is sweat out the few weeks that remain before Aug. 8. Whether or not he gets permission to reopen his bar for the out-of-town crowd of a lifetime, the Games are about to begin.

China's leaders want this Olympiad to be perfect. "The smiles of 1.3 billion Chinese will be reciprocated by the smiles of people all over the world," Premier Wen Jiabao promised at his annual meeting with foreign media earlier this year. But in the name of perfection, Beijing's inspectors are dusting off the rulebooks and pouncing on the tiniest supposed infractions. "In the last two months, all kinds of checkups have been harsher and harsher", says Tobi Demke, the Swedish manager of a Thai restaurant near the Workers Stadium expatriate bar zone. "There are a lot of regulations… and now, because of the Olympics, they really enforce them." Bar owners say inspections are taking place at least weekly. One pasta restaurant has been ordered to stop serving salads and desserts. Why? The license lists its business as "noodles," and the enforcers say that means nothing but spaghetti. "They don't understand the way it's done," says manager Angela Wang. "Western food, you eat appetizers, salad, dessert."

China has made enormous sacrifices to get ready. To clear the city's notoriously dirty skies, authorities have closed factories in a half-dozen nearby provinces and restricted cars to driving on alternate days, based on odd or even number plates. To boost security, police have set up hundreds of checkpoints on major roads into the city. But that's creating other problems. "It's difficult to get deliveries, ingredients," says French barkeep Matthieu Magery. He's been stockpiling wine recently, alarmed by rumors of a possible ban on transporting liquids during the Games.

Club owners say the government's runaway regulators are trampling the city's once-thriving entertainment scene. The nightlife guide Time Out Beijing is planning a double issue for August and September: there's not enough going on to fill two single issues. Commercial and legal uncertainties have made clubs nervous about committing to hire big-name DJs and bands. "In the month of the Olympics, there's less to write about than at any time in the last few years," says the magazine's editor, Tom Pattinson. "It's either a private party, or it's not happening."

For plenty of expatriates the party's really over: if they haven't been tossed out of the country, friends of theirs have. Formerly lax enforcement of China's visa laws has turned strict. Younger members of the expat community have been particularly hard-hit, and they're the ones who keep many of the city's nightspots in business. "Numerous bar owners have told me that a good portion of their regular customers are gone, and gone because of visa issues," says Jim Boyce, a self-confessed barfly who blogs about Beijing's nightlife. "I've lost, like, 50 percent of my customers," says Stefano Fin, proprietor of the once-bustling Aperitivo, in the suddenly quiet Sanlitun bar district. "No one comes anymore." Club owners and patrons worry that the next step might be a crackdown on Beijing's previously ignored 2 a.m. closing law.

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