Beijing in 2008, especially in the years leading up to the Summer Olympics, was nothing short of a madhouse. The games were scheduled to open there on August 8 — “The date,” Tom Scocca writes, “was a cascade of lucky numbers in China”: 8/8/8 — and the leaders of the Communist Party were determined to show the world the city’s, and the country’s, best face. China had emerged from decades of isolation to become one of the great powers, and it wanted to look and act the part. In a frenzy of construction, Beijing was being transformed:
“By 2008, there would be 2,000 extra police on duty and 1,500 new monitors keeping order on the buses. By 2008 there would be a new $1 billion airport terminal, three new subway lines, an express train to the airport, one high-speed railway crossing the Taihang Mountains to Taiyuan and another connecting Beijing to the port of Tainjin. By 2008, rats, mosquitoes, black beetles, and lice would be exterminated in the area around the Olympic sites. Beijing residents would quit their ingrained habit of spitting in the streets. Thirty-five percent of Beijingers would speak basic English. All rivers inside the city’s Sixth Ring Road would be free of pollution, and 50 percent of municipal water usage would employ recycled water. More than a hundred historic sites would be renovated; more than three hundred zones classed as slums would be redeveloped.”
The process had been going on for a long time. In the fall of 2005, I was in Beijing for two weeks, and evidence of the frenzy was everywhere: old neighborhoods (some of them historic) being ripped apart to make way for new ones, traffic on all of the Ring Roads more dense and chaotic than Washington’s Beltway at its worst, cookie-cutter skyscrapers rising almost overnight, the air so polluted from vehicle exhausts and construction dust that at times the sun and the horizon vanished from view and one’s eyes almost constantly smarted. It seemed to me an incredibly exciting place, positively pulsating with energy, but also a singularly unhealthy one, and I worried about my three young grandchildren, even though they lived in expat land out near the Fifth Ring Road.
Tom Scocca worried about that too. A freelance journalist and blogger, he went to China with his wife, Christina, whose parents had “left for Taiwan as children to escape the Communist Revolution, but had moved on to upstate New York, where Christina was born.” She worked for “a nonprofit opening an office in Beijing,” and the two of them made frequent trips there as her work progressed. Finally, they decided to stay for a while, she to continue in her job and he to do the research for this book. They took a fourth-floor walk-up in an alley “outside the Second Ring, not in Old Beijing so much as Indeterminate Middle-Aged Beijing,” in a neighborhood with “sort of an embassy row” but also “aging apartment blocks, new shopping centers, construction pits, massage spas, worker barracks, and office towers.”
It was, in short, almost a miniature of Beijing in 2008, with its three components – “the moneyed artificial one, the wretched and broken one, the live and bustling one” – in uneasy coexistence. Scocca quickly came to love it, but he seems never to have been sentimental about it. His brushes with the Chinese bureaucracy were almost unfailingly unpleasant, he chafed under the obsessive and intrusive security imposed by the police state, and he despised the pollution. The very day the Olympics opened, he and Christina had to take their infant son to the doctor because he had been wheezing and coughing:
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