Cultural Evolution

Of course, such a crime could happen in New York City or Cleveland (and does more often than in Beijing) but at the Olympics, facts often run a poor second to perception. Twelve years later Atlanta is still recovering from that backpack bomb. The knifings were expected to put police on high alert and harden an attitude toward protesters that had seemed to be softening. Indeed, some activists demanding freedom for Tibet were treated so gingerly during the Games' first days that for minutes at a time you could imagine that China actually allows dissent.

This was no fluke: Officially, anyway, the Olympics made China's Communist Party nearly invisible. The history lesson at the opening ceremonies jumped from trading on the Silk Road to modern times without mentioning war, famine, decades of tension over Taiwan, or the brutal rule of a man named Mao. Aside from one quick Young Pioneers salute by a multiethnic collection of children—and the presence on the dais of Communist Party general secretary Hu Jintao—you would not have known that China had ever been ruled by an intransigent and red-starred cadre. These Games are being trumpeted inside China as a patriotic, not a political, triumph. "In all my years in China, I don't think there has been a more important interaction with the outside world than the Olympic Games," said Orville Schell, director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society in New York City. "They view this as their coming-out party, christening, bar mitzvah—you name it. And the leadership understands that the Chinese people, too, even those who don't like Marxism-Leninism, desperately yearn to have their country be great and respected."

It didn't hurt that China encouraged residents throughout Beijing to a dizzying level of hospitality. Athletes from the U.S., Iraq and North Korea were cheered with gusto as they made their walk around the Bird's Nest. But it meant much more that China, for the first time, publicly acknowledged Taiwan's delegation by its own preferred name, Zhonghua Taipei (Zhonghua means ethnic Chinese), and the stadium—as well as four girls watching a TV screen at The Place—applauded. "As long as they're called part of the Chinese people, we'll cheer for them," said Claire, a 19-year-old volunteer at the Olympic softball venue who, like many young Chinese, has taken an English name.

Nearby, a woman named Vivian Hu was working the Fresh Fusion smoothie stand, opened just three days earlier. It's Hu's 12th location in China. She left the nation's capital in 1993 to study in Vancouver and now lives in both Sacramento and Beijing, trying to navigate this brave new world of Chinese capitalism. "Everything is gone," she says of the courtyard neighborhood she grew up in. "Being back in Beijing is still a little culture shock for me."

The city is different, wildly so, from the one put in the vanguard of change by Deng Xiaoping just 30 years ago. Above Hu's head, the largest LED screen in Asia spanned the corridor of the mall. The ceremonies played out on smaller screens arrayed on the walls, but even on its biggest night the Olympics couldn't compete with China's big picture: an endlessly scrolling ad touting the virtues of Coca-Cola.

AT 10:15 LAST SATURDAY morning 73-year-old Yin Daomo walked easily up the many steps to the Beijing Shooting Range Hall, barely sweating in the 95° heat. The first gold medal of the 2008 Olympics was about to be won, and a Chinese woman was favored. "I have hope," Yin said. "It'll be better if we win."

That wasn't always the Chinese expectation. When the People's Republic of China made its first Summer Olympics appearance, at the Los Angeles Games in 1984, it had no hope of competing with the U.S. in the medal count. Even in 2004, when Liu Xiang won the 110-meter hurdles in Athens, he looked stunned. This year? China's vaunted seven-year Project 119 has transformed the country into a sporting power, and even the U.S. is running scared (POINT AFTER, page 90). "With the sports infrastructure, the facilities, the coaches who are being developed here, and the young people who will be inspired by these Games, we think this will be a formidable system that we'll have to contend with for a very, very long time," USOC chief Jim Scherr said in Beijing. "And political or economic shifts won't affect this system the way that dislocation in the late '80s affected the Soviet Union's. This system is here to stay."

That doesn't surprise Yin. He's had faith in the Chinese authorities, he said, since he was allowed to regain his teaching post after months of "self-criticism"; he even went on to become dean of his university's petrology department. China's rush to embrace market economics? "Too fast a few years ago," Yin said. "We were changing too fast, and there were a lot of negatives." The experts tinkered, self-criticized, adjusted. "I feel it's going at the right pace now," said Yin.

The same could be said about the sports program, built as it is to displace the U.S. as the Olympics' dominant power—perhaps as soon as these Games. A Chinese liquor company took the very capitalistic step of promising the national shooting team a $1.4 million prize if any of its athletes won the first gold medal at these Games, and Du Li, the defending Olympic champion in the 10-meter air rifle, had first crack. Chinese reporters had dogged her training for weeks. After finishing second in the qualifying round, Du sprayed enough shots to fall to a fifth-place finish. For a few moments after, as she smiled through three TV interviews, Du nearly had everyone convinced that she hadn't felt the weight of an entire nation's expectations. Then someone handed her a cellphone with her first coach on the other end. When Du heard his voice, she broke down in tears and rushed out of the room.

But every hero is replaceable. Less than an hour later, at the weightlifting venue, Chen Xiexia, the women's 48-kg favorite, appeared for her final lift in an imperial-yellow robe, looking for all the world like the heavyweight champ. The crowd of 6,000 roared at the sight of her, and Chen roared back nonsense, words she'd invented to give herself strength. She snapped the 117-kg bar easily to her chest, jerked it overhead, held it. Then she flung the weight down, knowing she had won. Later, Chen grinned and sang along with the national anthem, but there was nothing giddy in her manner. She didn't cry. What about the honor of winning China's first medal at its own Olympics, of being the answer to the question that for months had obsessed the nation? "I don't think I was under great pressure," Chen said. "The first gold won is gold, the last gold won is also gold. It's not especially significant to me."