Beijing 2008

I always thought that one of the reasons China embraced a modified form of Communism was because her leadership, or at least those with long range vision understood that China would have to be dragged into the modern world against her will, and Communism was the most direct route to modernization. Now a blink or two later, the nation of China is to be applauded for hosting the 2008 Olympics, keeping (almost) everyone safe, and showing tourists the sights and sounds of Beijing, popular, and completed - just in time - tourist attractions.

Now that the 2008 Beijing Olympics are over, and the foreigners are heading home, I am guessing a different side of the Olympics will start to be revealed. A country that has had its doors closed to the world by choice for so many centuries finally opens them, at least for a few days in a very controlled way, control being a key concept.

Over one million ‘volunteers’ helped with the Olympic games. I wonder who’s definition and criteria was used to determine exactly what volunteer means in this particular context? I am thinking the tweaked definition of ‘volunteer’  has a certain twist to it, perhaps similar to, “I did not have sex with that woman…”

According to dollarsandsense.org over one million people have been displaced by Olympic construction and other building needed for the games to be hosted.

Now that the 2008 Olympic games are over, the more than one million people left still standing post construction who were lucky enough to become ‘volunteers’ will be told to find work immediately or leave Beijing.

Now that the Olympics are over, those 1.5 million cars of the three million plus cars in the Beijing area that were banned from driving three weeks before the Olympics may be allowed to return to the streets once again.

I think in a land where a million people is not worth mentioning as a million people are of little importance inside China’s borders. Numbers that are not much more significant in ratio than the number of Americans who suffered from the measles outbreak in the last year from lack of simple immunization compared to the population as a whole.

However, for myself, one million ‘volunteers’, the estimated million plus no longer welcome migrant labor force, forced labor, and convict labor, made me to stop and think about what was accomplished in such a short time, and at what price? This is a staggering amount of people to contemplate. They all came from somewhere else and they all have to go somewhere else.

Where do a sudden almost three million displaced and migrant work force find work? For many of these people, new factories that specialize in churning out every conceivable product using cheap to machine, and preferably discarded materials. Many of the displaced people will probably ‘volunteer’ to work at these factories.

All in all, I do not know what I think about China and the Olympics. If the effort needed had taken twenty million people to complete, it would be done far easier in China than almost anywhere else on earth. I have not yet determined when a certain number of people compared to the whole population becomes significant.