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.

... contd.