Nor is it a matter of outdated cultural infrastructure. In the very center of Beijing, something sarcophagus-like, rounded, is being erected; it is the Opera and Ballet Theater. Three stages; a glass dome; the same French architect who built the Shanghai airport and the very terminal at the Paris airport named after Charles de Gaulle that successfully collapsed a month ago. The Chinese superstitiously wince; the French project is disliked not only because it is too avant-garde, but also because it too much resembles a traditional local tomb, and that is a bad omen. However, wince they do, but they build without stopping—and will soon complete construction. They will test the stage with their favorite pop acts (from the Alexandrov Ensemble to the Moiseyev Ensemble), invite once or twice the ballet troupe of the State Kremlin Palace with the unfailing 'Swan Lake', and then commission something ultra-topical and ultra-avant-garde—and present it to the advanced guests of the Olympics. Just as new Chinese cinema is presented to audiences of international film festivals; that audience does not even suspect on what TV series the younger generation of Chinese filmmakers is building its muscles.
And these TV series are akin to the Alexandrov Ensemble: just recently a multi-episode revolutionary action film 'How the Steel Was Tempered' passed with colossal success, following it a two-episode revolutionary drama 'The Gadfly' is about to be launched, and then, possibly, it will come to the promised but not yet filmed serial adaptation 'The Dawns Here Are Quiet'. The filming was postponed not for ideological, let alone artistic reasons; it was postponed for financial reasons. It turns out to be too expensive. Even in Ukraine, where Chinese TV series based on Russian books are usually made.
So it is not a matter of hotels, not stadiums, and not theaters. What then? Perhaps it is the lack of an intellectual habitat? That in 2008 Europeans, Americans, and Japanese will arrive in a country that knows nothing about the latest achievements of Western civilization? Nothing of the sort; we would like such backwardness in this field. Beijing bookstores are bursting with translated literature, and next to the hieroglyphs, right on the cover, the title and the author's surname are reproduced in the original language. Everything is there: from Fassbinder's screenplay drafts to the history of American liberalism, and from a photo album with Putin to a collection of Bill Gates's lectures. Students who lack money for books read them right in the store. One girl even knelt before a shelf of translated economic treatises, resembling a mullah ready to eat the Koran to get closer to the truth. Right there, nearby, are shelves with Mao's works; I didn't notice any fuss.
In today's Beijing, you understand how right Margaret Thatcher was when, making the decision to hand over Hong Kong, she told her critics, who predicted the communist demise of Hong Kong's market economy: the virus of capitalism, introduced into the communist system, will eat it away from within. And so it is eating away. The building of the Beijing city committee is not without reason like a luxurious office of a large banking corporation; today's Chinese communists are top managers of a state monopoly with all the managerial mannerisms and habits. If they do sometimes leave the interiors of their luxurious foreign cars and descend into an underpass, they indifferently push through a crowd of beggars, the homeless, and the wretched—an inevitable consequence of sharp transformations.
But in 2008, beggars will be asked to leave Beijing peacefully. So that is not the main reason for Beijing's falling behind the Olympic preparation schedule. What is it then? Taxi drivers. Not only do they not speak English. (Our domestic drivers, let's say, are not too English-speaking either.) But they are also unable to read an address written on a piece of paper. Moreover, many who came from the countryside can hardly even decipher hieroglyphs, and do not know Beijing at all.
But that's nothing. The communist managers have already ordered everyone to learn English by 2008. And the most interesting thing is—they will learn it. And whoever does not learn it will be fired and will cease to be noticed in the underpass below Tiananmen Square, where he will spend the rest of his days, having failed to fit into the framework of the transition period.