Beijing: With 999 days to the Olympics, a new skyline every two weeks!

BEIJING, China – To someone who’s not been in this capital city since the year 2000, Beijing – aside from Tienanmen Square and the old Forbidden City – is unrecognizable. As you speed in from the airport where a huge new terminal building three times the size of the original two is being rushed, as you traverse six ring roads, the skyscraper skyline is like a giant erector set. Giant cranes working night and day to produce more high rises. Workers scrambling all over building skeletons and facades like a battalion of Spidermen, riveting, painting, putting in glass fronts – the Glass Age has come to Beijing.

Shanghai-Pudong may boast 4,000 skyscrapers by now, but Beijing, with the 1000-day Countdown to the Olympics having been launched last Saturday (yesterday marked Day 999, an auspicious date in numerology) the race to present thousands of athletes, millions of tourists and guests, and 80 heads of state and VIP officials from more than 100 countries with a super-streamlined metropolis on August 8, 2008, has accelerated. If any group has been awarded a project for completion before that date didn’t get started by last Friday it has been automatically cancelled.

Everywhere one gazes, bulldozers, earth-movers, and other construction equipment are roaring and wheezing. Entire districts have shot up, with chrome-plated, glitzy high rises and shopping malls, every structure designed by American, Western European, or other top global architectural firms, but the competent Chinese finishing up each job under strict quality-control supervision.

The mark of a modern city is that it is well-lighted. Beijing, on boulevards which used to be leafy but dark now blazes with light, from cunning lamp-posts to glaring neon and pulsating laser.

Paris, the City of Light, is being overtaken by Beijing. If Napoleon III and Baron Haussmann leveled palaces and buildings to create these fantastic Grands Boulevards of the French capital so Napoleon’s cannon could rake any rebellious mobs with cannon balls and grapeshot (not just the aesthetic aspect), Beijing’s rulers have the same power – to tell everybody to move out tomorrow because the bulldozers and cranes are coming. (No Lina Law to protect squatters and objectors here).

The mushroom growth is so amazing that my old friend, Joachim Burger, Chief Executive Officer of IHA (International Hoteliers & Associates (China) Limited, whose head office is in Beijing’s Chaoyang District (with other offices in Hong Kong and Shanghai, told me yesterday at breakfast: "If you leave town for two weeks, when you get back you’ll find the skyline different!"

This is not a flippant remark. Burger has worked in China for 25 years, building and managing hotels. I remember well one of his first projects in Guangzhou (Canton) where he constructed the 900-room China Hotel, inaugurated in 1983. Then he supervised the Garden Otel with 1,600 rooms. In Hong Kong, while with Mega Hotels, Joachim opened the Kowloon Panda Hotel. I recall this vividly because Burger and Gordon Wu invited me to their topping off ceremony. When we got to the roof, it rained heavily (said to be propitious, but it was disastrous for this writer and the other guests). The downpour ruined my new Brioni suit. Gordon breezily promised to have a new suit delivered to me, but he got me one from Sam the Tailor. Oh well. Since Manu Melwani is an old friend, and his late father, too, how could I complain?

Joachim, the prototype of the hardworking German (before the Germans, to their downfall discovered leisure and almost two months of paid vacation and the clout of a strike by AG Metall), is going double-time to keep up with his commitments. Among the projects on which he advises is Eton Place, the hotel cum business Twin Towers of Taipan Lucio Tan in Pudong, Shanghai, he is also a "Manilan." He’s married to Jenny Assad of Manila, and their daughter Joanna – who trained in New York – works in a bigtime Hong Kong real estate company. Jenny and Joachim have their "home base" in Makati – but they’re seldom there.

If even an old China hand like Burger is impressed with the relentless pace of building for the coming Olympics, you can bet the Chinese are really going. Years ago, a biographer called the late Great Helmsman, Mao Zedong, "The Emperor of the Blue Ants." The ants are no longer in blue Mao jackets, but in snazzy blue suits, branded with names like "Georgio Armani" knock-offs to genuine suits named "Geodi Amoni." OMEGA is the Official Timekeeper of the Beijing 2008 Games, but this doesn’t prevent the Chinese from selling knock-off reproductions or ersatz OMEGA watches in the Silk Street building, or the Weekend Market (a sprawling market teeming with Buddhas, Mao retro stuff, brass, porcelain, clocks, and everything else, also known as Panjiayuan Antiques Market. In these markets you must bargain ruthlessly and relentlessly, otherwise you’ll find you paid three times too much).

In any event, Beijing seems to be winning its race with time. On Tienanmen Square there’s now a huge digital clock with the "countdown" figures – 999 days to go, then 998, then 997. Below are the hours, and even minutes up to the opening when the Olympic fire is lit on August 8, 2008. Mao Zedong’s mauseleum is close by, and you almost expect him to rise up from his Red flag blanket, and cry out: "Higher, Faster, go, go, go!" It was Deng Xiaoping, really, who turned China around and established "to get rich is glorious," therefore Capitalism with a Communist Party Face. But it is still Mao’s large portrait which hangs above the Forbidden City gate. Now that Mao is safely dead and can’t meddle, his legend can be perpetuated – indeed, there’s an entire nostalgia industry of Mao photographs, posters, cheap watches, figurines of Mao young, old, and sitting or walking, snapped up by tourists and worshippers with equal rapacity and glee.

President Hu Jintao, who has been tourist triumphantly through Britain and Germany, etc. (in Paris, they turned the lights on the Eiffel Tower red on a previous visit to do him honor, by golly) is jetting to Pusan, South Korea, for the APEC meet, then on to Kuala Lumpur for the East Asia Summit. He’s on a roll, knowing that the capitalist world is at his feet, applauding China’s progress – and China as a customer and potential business bonanza partner. Nobody seems to remember, or mourn what happened in June 1989 in Tienanmen Square: nothing succeeds like success, and even more "admirably" excess.

But what the heck: Make love, not war. Alas, the biggest motivating factor in this world is the profit motive.

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The inaugural Philippine Airlines flight, PR 358, to Beijing last Friday was a big success. The Airbus A40-300, smooth as... (gee, that’s another airlines’ motto), left Manila with ease, and less than four hours later was landing in the Beijing airport, ten minutes ahead of schedule. The flights will now be jetting back and forth, every Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

We’ll write more about this tomorrow.

In the meantime, I notice that there’s a new Ombudsman being nominated. If you ask me, the Judicial Bar Council nod is just a formality.