Gadling blogger Ember Swift posted some great photos of Beijing construction sites featuring the national bird of China (the construction crane), along with an art exhibit tribute to the migrant laborers who work, and live, at these sites:
http://www.gadling.com/2007/06/23/a-canadian-in-beijing-the-national-bird-of-china/

I have a friend doing a startup in Beijing. He says the roads change so fast that maps are useless. People just stop in the middle of the freeway and get out of their cars to see where they need to go.

Totally wild.

When I was there in '05, they had traffic lights at every intersection as you'd expect, but none of them were working; they were all dark in all directions.

Perhaps they will plug them in this year.

Breakneck pace of construction in Beijing

Just the neck? I imagine that quite a few other parts, physical and moral, have been broken in this process.

We visited Athens a few months before the summer Olympics there - same thing was going on, though I am certain it was on a smaller scale.

The most incredible example we saw first hand was walking down a busy shopping street one morning and commenting on how strange it was that the sidewalk area along several blocks was just beaten down dirt ... Walking back to our hotel in the late afternoon, the same stretch of sidewalk was completely finished in perfectly fitted and joined marble ... very impressive.

Knowing China, I imagine the same stuff goes on to the 100th power. Morning: dirt lot. Evening: skyscraper, stores full of shoppers, hotel full of guests and 100s of those people trying to hawk you bicycle bells and those enameled balls with bells in them ... and a perfectly fitted marble sidewalk.

Good to be on time. Can it hold up after the event?

We lived in the University quarter of Beijing for a year around '04 & '05. In that time a grubby dirt patch between our apartment and the railway line turned into an enormous supermarket that quickly grew a car park which sprouted shops and restaurants around the edge; one of the dirt track shortcuts to my language school grew into a tarmac road with shops and housing, and a building appeared opposite which towered over us by the end of our stay.

This was prior to the major Olympics building boom and well away from it. I probably wouldn't recognise much of the city now...

Just in case anyone thought this burst of construction was positive:

http://www.olympicwatch.org/

And re Athens, a modern European country, I'm only useful enough to find this first story, which only says more than 14 workers died, but theirs more if you poke around the webspace:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/3920919.stm

I suppose theirs some irony in the olympic projects being called modernisations, in that they always involve mass evictions so some jerk can have a second town house . Welcome to the future, Beijing.

Dude, beijing is nothing! You should see the whole rest of the country! There are 1.8 billion people in china and ALL of them are Olympics crazy.

Sorry, no Olympics for me this year.

Not as long as China is stomping so hard on Tibet.

Oh yeah: And I'm not buying anything that gets advertised on the Olympics, either.

One of the most interesting (to me) and unmentioned stories of pretty much every recent Olympic Games is the systematic purging of homeless people from the city hosting the games.

It's not surprising when you think about it - with all this construction done to pretty up the town, 'Olympic City' will be damned if its unsightly beggars ruin the image for visiting tourists and dignitaries. The same basic game of "hide the poor people" happens in most cities, but it's usually much more subtle and gradual. When the Olympics comes to town, it's like time-lapse photography of gentrification.

What's interesting to me is how consistent it is - Atlanta, Sydney, Salt Lake City, Athens...there's always this sweep in the months leading up to the Olympics, with police or city officials trying to bus all homeless people out of town, or arrest them.

I'm sure Beijing will have a similar policy, but it'll be interesting to see the Chinese spin on this phenomenon.

#10 Poperatzo:

This isn't meant as a flippant question, but is there any way for us to know what products are being advertised on the Olympics since we won't be watching the Olympics and/or their ads? I'm totally with you on not watching, for that reason and so many more, but I would love to have a resource by which I could find out what to boycott.

"Now if the government in Beijing could just stop exploiting its citizens, persecuting Tibet, destroying its rivers and air, denying Tiananmen Square, stifling free speech, exporting poisonous products, and serially abusing human rights, this new China might really be on to something. "

Guh, I was just a kid in the 1980's but did every article about Japan end this way?

Is that just the deal? visit a place, get a sense of its life and culture, experience wonder and a bit of awe, and then of course poohpooh the whole affair?

'this new China might really be on to something. Of course if it keeps doing anything the slightest bit hypocritical or unjust, we will be forced to nuke 'em into orbit.'

I'm living in Beijing right now, and while yeah it's very different from the states it's certainly not any filthier than an American city, and that's amazing when you consider the poverty of most of Beijing's citizens.

And we're back on the poisonous goods angle? Right before I left everybody's chuckling advice was 'well don't use the toothpaste!'

All your toothpaste is made China! That's the deal! Product safety is not the best, you're supposed to inspect imports!

I am a citizen of a country where one in every 100 citizens is locked day and night in a cell. Somehow I don't see that little fact used to conclude every profile of Manhattan's new museums or Chicago's restaurant scene.

Moment of sanity: the fling about Beijing being filthy is off base. The trees are imported because Beijing is a desert and nothing but dune grass grows on its own. However every other fact in the article, especially about the irreverence of modern society, is spot on. I especially like the way he describes the hurried but serviceable concrete building style.