They Made the Buses Run on Time

By Thomas Boswell
Monday, August 25, 2008

BEIJING

So, what did you think of China?

That's what we all ask any friend who's visited here. At the start of the 21st century, it may be the question Americans want answered the most. One ex-Post colleague is having his 3-year-old son learn Mandarin. The assumption: 1.3 billion Chinese will big-foot into any field they target. Their 51 gold medals in this Olympics, 15 ahead of the United States, are the latest evidence. (By my 25-15-10 scoring system for gold-silver-bronze medals, China won narrowly, 1,870-1,830.)

After four weeks here, a blink compared with real students of China, I have only impressions. But they are vivid.

At 3 a.m. on most Olympic nights, a bus with a few reporters would return to the Beijing Tibet Hotel. A dozen security officials met us to make sure we had credentials. During the day, knee-high tape outside the hotel created lanes for entering and exiting -- a reasonable way to keep things organized.

But in the middle of the night in a sleeping city, the tape was irrelevant. So, exhausted, we'd step over the tape and take the direct route to the front door. And every night the security people objected, insisting forcefully that we obey the stupid tape maze.

Finally, a Chinese solution was devised. Instead of stopping by the front door, our bus continued to the side of the hotel so, even though our walk was longer, the direct route now obeyed the tape.

Though we were the guests and they the hosts, we didn't matter. Common sense was irrelevant. The tape -- symbolic of a decision made by somebody somewhere in an unknowably complex and security-conscious control structure -- was all that mattered. They had uniforms. We didn't. That's big everywhere. It's huge here.

The current Chinese culture doesn't just reveal itself in the middle of the night. All day long, every 20 minutes (to the split second), hundreds of buses run back and forth from media hotels to the Olympic venues. There's even a special "Olympic lane" for all official traffic to the Games. Because the Chinese are obsessed with appearing efficient, the number, size and frequency of buses comically exceed the need. I often had a bus to myself.

However, I can barely believe what I saw Saturday when, by accident, I had to return to my hotel at 1 p.m., when almost no reporter has reason to leave the Olympics. Several football fields full of buses all pulled out simultaneously, headed to hotels all over Beijing, theoretically transporting media.

But I was the only rider on any bus I saw. Dozens were empty.

They still made their runs. They still wasted fuel. They still clogged traffic. But nobody, in an activity as state-controlled and Communist Party-scrutinized as these Olympics, would deviate from the original plan, no matter how stupid it might be.

In decades at The Post, this is the first event I've covered at which I was certain that the main point of the exercise was to co-opt the Western media, including NBC, with a splendidly pretty, sparsely attended, completely controlled sports event inside a quasi-military compound. We had little alternative but to be a conduit for happy-Olympics, progressive-China propaganda. I suspect it worked.

Everything that met my eye at every venue was perfect. Everybody smiled. Everybody pretended to speak English. Until you got past "hello." Everyone was helpful until you went one inch past where you were supposed to go. Then, arms sprang out to stop you. Everywhere you went, even alone at 2 a.m., you felt completely safe. Because every hundred feet there were a pair of guards -- at attention in the middle of the night.

As sports spectacles go, I've never seen one more efficiently or soullessly executed than this one. I have no idea where they put the real people for 17 days, but I felt like Jim Carrey in "The Truman Show." Where's Ed Harris saying: "Truman is going to turn left on Main Street: Cue the smiling girl and the hearty hot dog vendor."

The family that's always perfect in public is the one you worry about. What's going on under the surface? The complete lack of dissent here -- not one person could get a permit to use the designated Olympic "protest area," though some were detained for trying -- has an eloquence of its own.

As for the Chinese people, I like them a lot. But they've been through so many purges and plagues, cultural revolutions and great leaps forward, followed by the whipsaw from socialism to "rich is good," that I think they're happy to toe the societal line. This decade, it's entrepreneurial capitalism -- hyper-boom phase. We'll see how they like the bust part. It's probably coming.

China has, by every account, made incredible material progress in the last 25 years. This city, merely one of several in China that now rivals New York and Los Angeles for size and wealth, isn't going to do anything but continue to grow. The 21st century will, no doubt, be a vast improvement on the last few awful ones here.

Nonetheless, I'll leave here more concerned about China's future, and its impact on those around it, than the future of the United States. Part of that is probably xenophobia, though I've spent a lifetime repeating, "Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel."

Some of it, however, is my suspicion that the cycles of capitalism and the inflexibility of authoritarian regimes make for a spectacularly happy marriage in the virtuous-cycle good times, but perhaps an ugly partnership in the inevitable bad periods.

China got aboard the free-market love train at roughly the time -- in the early 1980s -- that worldwide capitalism hit one of its long secular hot streaks that frequently last 15 to 20 years. Money couldn't wait to invest itself here. Let's see how the Party enjoys its first secular bear market.

When political writers wander into sports, they often sound like rubes. The odds are high that I've merely flipped that script.

But if China were a stock, based on what I've seen and felt at this Olympics, I'd downgrade it from buy to hold.