The worst place to try to put Beijing’s Olympic Games into context is perhaps actually Beijing. Arrive in the city at present and the overwhelming impression is of a modern, successful, prosperous, happy and western-looking population, greeting the forthcoming sporting festival with a greater pride and joy than it has ever previously been received with.
The Games of the XXIX Olympiad will superficially be the grandest in history, staged in venues that are already being seen as architectural landmarks, with every ticket for every event in Beijing sold out in advance. Even the small bore shooting. And yet the International Olympic Committee seems constantly ill at ease and takes immense care with the diplomatic wording of every public statement from its temporary base at the Raffles Beijing Hotel.
Rarely has there been such a disparity between what visitors know and what the local population believes.
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