Beijing 2008 Olympic Games: Mount Olympus Meets the Middle Kingdom The Perils of China's Explosive Growth (Special Report) officially Games of the XXIX Olympiad

by Dorothy-Grace Guerrero

The China of 2007 was indeed a far cry from the country that in the 1950s Swedish Nobel Prize-winning economist Gunnar Myrdal predicted would remain mired in poverty. In anticipation of the 2008 Olympic Games, Beijing was undergoing a huge makeover that would show how fast change could happen in a country of 1.3 billion people. New subway lines were close to completion, and more skyscrapers were being added each month to the landscape to replace the fast-disappearing hutongs (“residential alleyways”). As the world’s fourth largest economy and third largest trading country, China accounted for approximately 5 percent of world GDP and had recently graduated in status to a middle-income country. Beijing was also emerging as a key global aid donor. In terms of production, China supplied more than one-third of the world’s steel, half of its cement, and about a third of its aluminum.

China’s achievements in poverty reduction from the post-Mao Zedong era, in terms of both scope and speed, were impressive; about 400 million people had been lifted from poverty. The standard of living for many Chinese was improving, and this led to a widespread optimism that the government’s goal of achieving an overall well-off, or Xiaokang, society, was possible in the near future.

The figures that illustrated China’s remarkable economic achievements, however, concealed huge and outstanding challenges that, if neglected, could jeopardize those very same gains. Many local and foreign-development analysts agreed that China’s unsustainable and reckless approach to growth was putting the country and the world on the brink of environmental catastrophe. China was already coping with limited natural resources that were fast disappearing. In addition, not everyone was sharing the benefits of growth—about 135 million people, or one-tenth of the population, still lived below the international absolute poverty line of $1 per day. There was a huge inequality between the urban and rural population, as well as between the poor and the rich. The increasing number of protests (termed mass incidents in China) was attributed to both environmental causes and experiences of injustice. If these social problems remained, it could imperil the “harmonious development,” or Hexie Fazhan, project of the government and eventually erode the Communist Party of China’s continued monopoly of political power.