Bread and circuses

Beijing

I am in Beijing making a film about the Olympic city with an ex-Lancashire police constable named Andrew. We spend our days aimlessly zooming around vast building sites. Most of the skyscrapers are covered with what resembles sanitary tiling. I feel we are trapped in a giant bathroom, with all the humans being flushed down eight-lane highways. As with the big red bungalows of the Forbidden City, what hits you about new Beijing is not architectural skill but the sheer scale, the purpose of which is to make you feel like a termite.

‘What stories do you think we should cover?’ I asked the press officer at the Olympic Media Centre. ‘No idea,’ he replied. You can’t visit the monstrous Bird’s Nest stadium. You can’t interview communist officials. The athletes can’t talk. China’s new open media policy means inviting hacks in to completely ignore them. Or, the idea is to regurgitate lists of statistics such as the fact that China uses 45 billion disposable wood chopsticks each year, which consumes 25 million trees.