KRIEGER: As advertising campaigns go, this is a Great Leap Forward

By Dave Krieger, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Published August 7, 2008 at 4:43 p.m.

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Photo by Feng Li/Getty Images

Terminal 3 at Beijing Capital International Airport is a two-mile-long portal.

From the window of my room on the eighth floor of the brand-new Green Homeland Media Village here, the view is dominated by two even newer high-rises under construction across the street.

They are nothing like the cookie-cutter architecture you might associate with a communist state. Incomplete, their curved glass exteriors reflecting one another in the milky atmospheric haze, they symbolize China's modern ambition.

All these towers, growing like weeds in the busy skyline, don't approach the audacity of Terminal 3 at Beijing Capital International Airport, a two-mile-long, dragon-inspired portal into the country Warren Buffet predicts will dominate the 21st century the way the U.S. dominated the 20th and Britain the 19th.

Designed by British architect Norman Foster, T3 is billed as the largest building in the world, its 14 million square feet roughly twice the size of the Pentagon. You take a train to get from one end to the other. And it's still not big enough.

Beijing recently announced it will need another international airport to accommodate its growth.

In sport, too, the most populous country in the world is on the verge of international domination, likely beginning with the first Olympic Games within its borders.

"The majority of the pollsters are picking China to win the gold medal count, if not the total medal count," U.S. Olympic Committee CEO Jim Scherr said this week.

"We certainly believe that this is a system that will be very long-lived. This is not a one-shot opportunity for the Beijing Olympic Games. The sports infrastructure, the sports facilities, the coaches that are going to develop here and the young people that will be inspired by these Games, we think this will be a formidable system that we'll have to contend with for a very, very long time."

Beijing's $50 billion Olympic makeover dwarfs the preparations of any previous Olympic host city. Over the next 2 1/2 weeks, China is determined to show that the Western stereotype of a grim, authoritarian society is fiction. Its press is full of complaints about foreign mischaracterizations, and it is difficult to dispute that modern China defies traditional Western labels.

If the latter half of the 20th century was a struggle to the death between communism and capitalism, how is it that China now embodies both? This is a country with companies sprouting on foreign stock exchanges, and on its own 18-year-old version, in Shanghai, faster than those skyscrapers are crowding the skyline. It has announced plans to build 97 new airports in the next 12 years. The scale of its economic development, both public and private, boggles the mind.

Of course, single-mindedness isn't all that comes with a determined dictatorship. Development unbridled by debate or dissent also produced the milky, polluted sky. Four American Olympic cyclists showed up this week wearing gas masks, embarrassing their Chinese hosts and prompting a hasty round of apologies.

When the International Olympic Committee declared the post-apocalyptic haze safe to breathe, China trumpeted the news. Still, the sun burns faintly through the contaminants as if they were the smoke of a forest fire. The haze is almost too perfect a metaphor for shortsightedness.

Pollution is just one of China's issues. Its poor human rights record prompted Steven Spielberg to withdraw as artistic adviser to the Opening Ceremonies. Its support of Sudan and apparent indifference to the genocide in Darfur earned it the outrage of human rights advocates the world over.

As if to prove their point, China revoked Winter Olympian Joey Cheek's visa to attend the Games this week. A 2006 gold medalist in speedskating, Cheek is co-founder of Team Darfur, a group of activist athletes trying to stop the killing.

"I asked for a reason, and they said we don't give reasons," Cheek told The Washington Post.

This is the dilemma China presents to the world. It made a series of promises to get these Games, from unrestricted media freedom to improvement of its human rights record. Those who bought these assurances, including the IOC, now appear naÃve.

True believers in the Olympic movement say the Games can only bring China closer to the community of nations. Critics point out the 1936 Games in Nazi Germany did not exactly have that effect.

Meanwhile, China's development as an economic superpower roars on unabated. Outside my window, eight new lanes of Beiyuan Road cross eight new lanes of Hongjunying South Road, excess cable for the traffic lights drooping in long loops above the pavement.

Each morning, legions of bicyclists pedal to work alongside multiple lanes of every motorized vehicle known to man. Mao Zedong's grandiose communist propaganda suddenly seems merely premature. China's Great Leap Forward is happening right now. For better or worse, its Olympics are likely to be the most widely seen advertising campaign in history.

kriegerd@RockyMountainNews.com

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