Beijing’s Face Lift: Costs For Everybody

Beijing was plastered with Olympic fervor – billboards everywhere with the "One World One Dream" slogan, plants and flowers trimmed perfectly to represent the Olympic rings, gigantic athlete statues, big screens to watch the games and red banners wherever you turned that contained Chinese characters and their strangely translated propaganda-like sayings into English.

Here are a few examples:

• Welcome to the Olympic Game Pay Attention to Civilization Set Up a New Trend
• Welcome Olympic Games With Joyfulness and Construct a Harmonious Society
• I participate I contribute and I enjoy
• Impossible is Nothing

What seemed the strangest to me was that although I knew Beijing to be a modern city, full of skyscrapers and bustling residents, I assumed I would also see the cracks in the system, as can be seen everywhere else on earth (most notably in our own country, one of the richest on the planet with plenty of reminders that the riches aren't for everybody). But there were no homeless on the streets of Beijing. And there were no street vendors either – no silly tourist gadgets to be found on a street merchants' stoop or a taste of traditional food to be found at a steaming corner stall. I was terribly disappointed, as it is something I long for when I am in other countries after too many months of the sterile streets in the US. But Beijing had been given a face-lift and many of the folks who would normally be making a living off the street economy had been displaced. According to varied reports (both newspapers and residents' stories), the street vendors had simply been paid to leave for the duration of the games. Had they paid the homeless to leave as well? And if not, where were they? And where are they now?

While we taxied through the streets observing a plethora of multinational businesses (all the American fast food chains weren't surprising, but I could hardly believe my eyes when I saw a Cold Stone Creamery. I had my second heart attack when I learned that there were 70 Starbucks just in the city of Beijing), we also noticed what was behind so many of the 20 foot billboards expressing Olympic pride: slums. Entire neighborhoods that looked run down and poor had been covered up with tall, temporary cardboard walls. Instead of allowing the foreign heads of state and average tourists to see the full spectrum of life in Beijing, the Chinese government had simply slapped up these visual barriers to cover up the unsightly parts of the city. And hundreds of other houses were simply demolished to make way for the new, like the huge and impressive China Central TV building. Would those billboards stay up now that the games were over? And where had the hundreds of residents who were victims of Beijing's face-lift, gone now?

Of course, there were many parts of Beijing that were great. I loved that bicycles were separated in their own lane by a real divider to prohibit the cars from taking over the bike-space. I enjoyed practicing my Chinese with an enthusiastic taxi driver. It was great to hang out in the 798 arts district (one of the coolest arts districts I've ever been in), see the views through the doors of the Forbidden City and of course, my Beijing bling orange and golden sneakers were the find of the century!!

Beijng, like anywhere, was a mixed bag. But it was very evident to me, after only five days of being in the country that the Tibetans aren't the only ones suffering at the hands of this repressive regime. There are costs for everybody.

You can check out my photos of Beijing here.