Foster’s terminal, speckled with the red and yellow of the imperial quarters, demands that the visitor linger a while. In this Olympics of superlatives, the terminal is audacious for more than its diminishment by size of the Pentagon and the futuristic readiness to handle more than 50 million passengers a year. On an afternoon when the Beijing sun comes out bright, walking though the airport (to which the baggage tags still say PEK, for the city’s old name, Peking) is surreal. In its play of materials and lavish use of glass, the idea of being enclosed has been redefined. But Terminal 3, today, is itself a city waiting to be inhabited.

Today it’s too new. It is also cheerily awash with the volunteers, waving you through the formalities and so averting the delays that force the arrivals to linger and absorb the embarkation point’s peculiarities. The volunteers breeze you away with directions to the next counter, or the shuttle to baggage check (the layout and transport within of Terminal 3 have the familiar texture of old sci-fi depictions of self-contained mini-cities) and into the media buses waiting to take away the thousands of journalists to their hotels and Games venues, the road out of the airport having a lane cleared for them.

But the airport’s beguiling interplay of enclosed spaces and impressions of being out in the open in a way catches this very Beijing moment. Each Summer Games brings out a facet of the host city and the government that brought it there. China today is eager to show its arrival and its internationalisation as a world power. And having got the global attention that the ambition deserves, it is finding that it must negotiate all kinds of questioning of its ways from critics and sympathetic observers.

As Xu Guoqi, author of the recent history of Chinese sport, Olympic Dreams: 1895-2008 (Harvard University Press), tells The Indian Express: “The 2008 Beijing Games will be a major turning point in Chinese century-long search for national identity and internationalisation no matter how China performs in the sports arena or political games.”

He adds: “Historically all host countries have tried to use the Games to promote their national images and identities, even national policies. But China as a host has traveled further than most of the hosts since the Chinese have linked their national identity and national honour to the Games for almost 100 hundred years. The current regime shares the century-long dream and launched all out effort to make this Games a great one.”

So, Barcelona 1992 was about Spain’s integration into Europe with the confidence that its cultural markers would not be blurred. Atlanta 1996 confirmed the age of the big brands (Pico Iyer’s famous study of the Olympics as commercial globalization could only have been written after that summer). Sydney 2000 was Australia’s affirmation of confidence that it could come to terms with its conflicted past. Athens 2004, well, showed the many confusions of Greece.

Now, with banners announcing “One World One Dream” fluttering all across this city — and making such an impression on India’s big boxing medal hope, Akhil Kumar — it’s Beijing that the world will watch for the next fortnight.