KEY POINTS:
Less than two weeks out from the Olympics, Beijing is frantically getting ready to impress the world.
Everywhere, in the city's endless tower block-lined boulevards and remnants of picturesque hutong (alleyways), workers toil away, their efforts reminiscent of the last-minute hanging of decorations for a party.
Gardeners trim topiary that resemble something out of Hansel and Gretel, with lollipop trees and flowering hedges in the form of the five cutesy "fuwa" Olympics characters, whose names together say "Beijing Welcomes You". Trees with pink flowering baskets for boughs break up the six-lane expressways; workers in face masks clean the metal road barriers.
A startled young Chinese woman is shooed aside as a wiry street-cleaner manoeuvres into an ATM booth to get at some litter in the corner.
Beijing's makeover is all part of a $56.8 billion investment in infrastructure to prepare for the Olympics.
Even Beijing's notorious jungle-law gridlock has been partly tamed, traffic volume shrunk by new rules allowing only vehicles with licence plates ending in odd numbers to drive on odd-number dates, even on even (taxis, public transport, Olympic and Government vehicles are exempt). A trip from the airport that would normally take an hour and a half took us 40 minutes.
(However, despite campaigns encouraging courteous driving, intersections still feel like a game of mass chicken and crossing the road on foot remains an extreme sport.)
Equally unmissable is the tension, ratcheted up a notch by bus bombings in Shanghai and Kunming last month. You can't walk 100m without passing a security guard or police officer or soldier. July brought bag screening on the subway, random passport checks, a ban on outdoor seating in thoroughfares, and 2am bar closing.
In airports and main hotel areas, young, good-looking Olympics volunteers in their blue polo shirts and yellow and red arm-bands, smile at the streams of luggage-trundling arrivals. And, everywhere, the multi-lingual Olympic banners pronouncing One World, One Dream and Host Great Olympics, Build a New Beijing.
Among it all, the city's population get on with their day-to-day lives in the sweaty heat. Men roll up T-shirts (irrespective of physique), and women wear chiffony doll-like dresses that they somehow keep pristine. Girls hold pearly parasols, children pee into drains, and everywhere cars, bikes and the occasional rickshaw.
The city's pre-Games makeover has been an Olympic feat in itself. Since 2001, 22.7 million trees have been planted city-wide. Some 43 per cent of Beijing is now green, including a new 650ha park. The expressways have been extended by 700km; the modern subway has gone from three to eight lines since 2000, with a ninth opening soon.
Old neighbourhoods have been summarily bulldozed to make way for gleaming malls, five-star hotels, and theme restaurants. The much-publicised forced evictions are not a pre-Olympic invention: even without the RMA, you can't grow a city this fast with a quaint adherence to individual property rights.
Avant-garde architecture has come to town, most famously in the latticed UFO form of the Bird's Nest, also in the twisted square horseshoe of the internationally vaunted Chinese Central Television (CCTV) Headquarters. (When I flew out three days ago it wasn't finished. I don't doubt for a second that it will be before next Friday.)
By last week, many of the migrant workers whose labour built and planted new Beijing, and who numbered at least three million in the city this year, had been sent back to their provincial homes, by force where necessary.
I spoke to one of the few still here, a 50-year-old gardener from Hebei province, as she waited with her workmates for a lift a block away from the Olympic village. She arrived here in March, seeking better job prospects. She works eight-nine hours a day, six days a week. She hasn't been paid yet - it's common for companies to pay migrant workers only after six months or a year. She guesses she'll earn about 800 yuan ($160) a month. Her employer provides basic accommodation, food and transport.
Exploitation of migrant workers - some of whom are packed off without pay at all - is just one example of the way China is falling short of its pre-Olympic commitment to improving human rights.
Another is the Government's token designation of three official "protest zones" for demonstrators during the games. The zones are in parks tucked well away from Olympic areas, and protesters must get permission. Pro-Tibetan, human rights or Taiwan demonstrations won't get clearance.
When my translator Eddy Zhong and I visit one of the parks, an idyllic neighbourhood oasis called Black Bamboo, no one we approach has heard anything about the protest zone, including staff. Groups of friends play cards on shaded stone tables, a couple canoodle overlooking a pink lotus-choked lake, and the saccharin Beijing Welcomes You theme song is piped repeatedly through loud speakers. Harmony rules.
ONE THING that seems to be defying the state's vast powers is the air quality. Authorities have temporarily shut down factories and some coal-fired power generators, closed construction sites, and virtually halved traffic but still for most of last week the air was thick and soupy; the smog a close, yellow-tinged grey through which a radioactive orange sun could occasionally be glimpsed.
Views vary on the culprits: one theory is it's the factories and generators further afield compounded by the pollution-trapping bowl formed by Beijing's geography.
Upon stepping out of the plane last week, reports a fellow passenger, French athletes looked appalled and murmured "c'est impossible!"
But Dave Currie, the New Zealand team's chef de mission, is chipper. "There's no sense of it being injurious to your health," he says. Los Angeles is more fumey; and the first four days he was here were clear.
"You've got to acknowledge the extra effort Beijing has gone to. They're working really hard to get it right."
He says the sense of excitement in the city is greater than it was in Athens at the same stage. "They were focusing on putting the roof on the stadium."
He looks out into the grey. "You get the sense there's going to be an
almighty rain storm in the next few days and blow it all away."
The next day it rains: no cleansing storm, but a brief lukewarm downpour, enough to leave the roads awash with a greasy, scum-whorled run-off. Despite its modern technologies, China is still a developing country. Every so often you walk into it: the old Beijing smell; a rude, lumbering musk of rotting vegetables, cigarette smoke, sewers and human sweat.
Enter the marble-tiled malls of new China, and all this falls away.
Over a milk tea in a mood-lit mall restaurant, Jacqueline Zhang sums up the meaning of Beijing 2008 to many Chinese. "We can show the new Beijing, the new China, to all the world, which is not exactly the same as what's in foreigners' minds."
She suspects outsiders still harbour images from the Cultural Revolution - "long hair, dull clothes, no modern beauties, they're not allowed to open [to the world]."
Zhang, who works in a real estate office, and her friend Zhen Mao, both 24, aren't ignorant of outside perspectives. Mao, a software developer earning a healthy 10,000 yuan a month, has friends studying in America who send him links to stories about China in the Western press (the internet is heavily state-monitored and censored - there's a joke about the Great Firewall of China - but there are ways around it, especially if you can read English).
What do they make of the attacks on China's human rights record, its environmental damage, its chumminess with despotic regimes like Zimbabwe and Sudan?
Mao: "If something happens in China, the information abroad is very much, I can learn much more and make my opinion, agree or disagree with the Government. Many times I agree with the Government's attitude."
"You know what?" says Zhang. "I totally trust our Government. They make their decisions for the majority people's good. You can disagree with the way they do it, but their motivation is good."
Zhang's defensive pride, the tension between anxiety and self-assurance, is common in new China. The usual line goes: the Government's not perfect, but it's improving; the Premier is a good man and in touch with the people. And look at China's pace of material progress, with growth at a breathtaking 10 per cent. Rather than an interfering Nanny, the Chinese state is still widely imagined as a mostly benevolent Grandpa with some unfortunate habits.
Not that there isn't dissent. A minority of lawyers, academics and activists criticise and seek to change things.
The state tolerates them to a point, beyond which comes anything from house arrest to imprisonment. Popular Shanghai-based blogger Han Han got away with poking fun at the official Chinese cheer, an elaborate sequence of arm movements. But after peasant-land rights activist Yang Chunlin collected thousands of signatures for a petition titled "We Want Human Rights, Not the Olympics", he was arrested in July 2007, held and tortured for eight months, then tried and sentenced to a five-year prison term for "inciting subversion of state power".
Blogger and Aids activist Hu Jia got three and a half years' for the same crime because of his writings, including a critical open letter headed "The Real China and the Olympics".
There's an argument that authorities shrewdly allow expression of dissent at the margins of society - on blogs, through apparently subversive contemporary artworks - as a kind of pressure-release, knowing only a minority take notice.
Meanwhile, consumerism is distracting the burgeoning middle classes from political engagement in the same way it does in the West. Ikea has a huge following here.
Even foreign media here for the Olympics have found access blocked to certain websites, such as Amnesty International and various media sites.
Privately, some Chinese gripe about the proliferation of new pre-games rules and restrictions - "The Olympics have taken away my life!" complains one businessman I meet. There's talk of suing the Government for reimbursement of road taxes to cover the days you can't drive, but it's almost certain such a suit would fail with no independent judiciary.
Beijingers seem to be largely taking on the chin the slew of finishing-school-like public campaigns designed to make them foreigner-friendly - no spitting, orderly queuing, what not to ask Westerners (example: are you married? How much do you earn?).
The extra subways and trees will outlast the games, but will the commitment - however chequered - to greater openness, respect of individual rights and judicial fairness?
Liu Kaiming is the director of China's biggest non-governmental institute researching human rights and corporate responsibility.
He's tentatively hopeful. Violations are still widespread, he says, but there's been a big improvement on the human rights front in the past decade.
The internet is playing a critical role in bringing freedom of information, especially to the younger generations.
"I believe China will make progress because the door has been opened, they can't close it."
My 27-year-old guide agrees. "We should confront our problems - this is a really good chance.
"We should show a colourful China; it's not possible that everything is good, but thing are getting better."
