Unveiling the Capital City of the Future

But I already knew the numbers, more or less, before I ever got to China. The reality behind the numbers was something else. It began to register with me at the Great Wall, at Badaling. I arrived there in August 2004, my first time on the Chinese mainland. It was almost exactly four years—1,458 days, to be exact—before Beijing was scheduled to host the Summer Olympics. This meant very little to me at the time. Experts were proclaiming or warning that the world was at the dawn of a Chinese Century, and China saw the Olympics as a chance to prove the proclamations true, to demonstrate that its capital city had become a great global metropolis. Though I didn’t yet know it, I would be living through that demonstration from the inside. I would become the audience for the display of the New China and a part of the display itself—tied to Beijing by habit and blood, but still a foreign body, for China to tolerate or not.

Author: Tom Scocca
Source: PopMatters
Published: Aug 26, 2011
Length: 18 minutes (4,662 words)

High Stakes Criticism: An Interview with Greil Marcus

Source: PopMatters
Published: Apr 26, 2010
Length: 32 minutes (8,239 words)