From 1984 to 2008

A year before the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, China’s preparations are already well underway. Earlier this month, a celebration marked the one-year countdown to the Games, and already Beijing has undertaken massive reconstruction efforts, tested the environmental effects of decreasing car traffic within the city, and banned spitting.

While these efforts, and the economic boom accompanying them, will produce comforts and amenities for Olympic athletes and visitors, Stanford University Press author Ross Terrill argues in an August 22, 2007 New York Times Op-Ed that all of this spring cleaning has a sinister side as well: “banished from Beijing for the Olympics will be not only fractured English, but disabled people, Falun Gong practitioners, dark-skinned villagers newly arrived in the city, AIDS activists and other “troublemakers” who smudge the canvas of socialist harmony.”

Terrill compares the Beijing being build for the Olympics to the impossible promises Mao made, such as “mak[ing] the sun and moon change places,” promises he explored in Mao, A Biography. He urges us not to become too complacent about accepting the façade being built, less we forget the “Orwellian impulse to remake the truth” that lies behind it.