Who, other than young athletes-to-be in the world, would feel the greatest urge when watching the Olympic Games in Beijing? They must be the Chinese mayors and their city planning lieutenants.
For the last couple of weeks, they were staring hungrily at, instead of the game floors and record bulletins, the Bird's Nest and Water Cube - two multi-billion-yuan main Olympic venues, and Beijing's all other new public facilities, roads and subways, and its shopping and restaurant streets, if not its blue sky. Many of them would be asking themselves questions about how to build their cities.
Small wonder that Han Zheng, mayor of Shanghai, restated once again on August 19 the city's ambition to be China's international financial center to host as many types of financial markets as possible. The mayor pledged better integrated services in Lujiazui, the financial district in Pudong area, meaning greater convenience for the business community in the already glittering business center of Shanghai.
Shanghai won't let Beijing steal the show. Nor will other cities let just Beijing and Shanghai be the only cities to keep changing their skylines by adding impressive new buildings every several months. On a less imaginative level, development is a game to keep up with the jones, and local officials all know how to do it.
So at least in Chengdu and Suzhou, two southern cities, China has had two local-level look-alikes of the Bird's Nest. The one in Chengdu, estimated by the Chinese press to have cost around 1.2 billion yuan, has become a laughing stock for participants in Internet forums, as it was originally meant to be the municipal government's office, and for fear of mounting condemnation for its conspicuous waste of public funds, the municipal government attempted to sell it by auction, but only to find there were no bidding interests.
Things become truly ugly when compared with the makeshift houses, just a short distance from the city, for the massive number of victims of the killer earthquake that recently struck Sichuan, a province of which Chengdu is the capital.
The "Bird's Nest" in Suzhou, a commercial building as part of the convention and exhibition center of its new industrial area, does not seem to have caused any problem, although the project appears as much costly.
Now that the 2008 Olympics has drawn to its close, local officials must have made up their minds as to how to realize the inspirations they had gained from Beijing. Are they going to build for themselves expensive copies of the Olympic architectures? Or, are they going to spend more on public facilities, as Han, the Shanghai mayor, has promised?
We have no way to tell in which way the local officials are heading. It is going to be a test for both central government and the local lawmakers whether they can effectively curb officials' wasteful ambitions, as seen in the fake "Bird's Nest" in Chengdu.
People can accept expensive building projects in public infrastructure and for commercial purposes. But they cannot tolerate a race, by officials from different cities which had barely lifted themselves out of poverty, to build luxury large houses for themselves. The success of the Beijing Olympics should not be allowed to be hijacked for this purpose.
The real race, however, should take place in government spending on environmental protection. The largest, and costliest project to make the Beijing Olympics so successful is not the Bird's Nest, nor the Water Cube, but actually the relocation of the largest polluter of Beijing's air, the industrial Shougang Group. This is the true lesson that all local officials should learn.
Now, after spending as much as 67.7 billion yuan ($10 billion), the steelmaker is moved to the seashore of Bohai Bay, with many of its old technologies replaced by the new ones.
By contrast, the Bird's Nest cost only 3.2 billion yuan. Even the No 5 subway line in Beijing cost no more than 12 billion yuan, and the high-speed express rail to connect Beijing with Tianjin cost 14.3 billion yuan.
E-mail: younuo@chinadaily.com.cn
(China Daily 08/25/2008 page7)
