Old rituals die hard as dazzling pageant unfolds

SIDELINE CUT:PERHAPS IN 1,000 years' time, when the Olympics have either gone intergalactic or ceased to exist, the surviving images of the Beijing Games will be seen as the high point of 21st-century imagination and folly.

It was stifling in the city yesterday. From noon the locals began trooping out to the stadium, and the highways, never quiet, were manic with the blaring of car horns.

It has become almost obligatory to treat these Olympic opening nights as a sham grotesquery of patriotic fervour, to adopt the kind of amused, superior tone that has served Terry Wogan so well through countless Eurovision nights. And it is true the phoney language and earnest symbolism favoured by the Olympic movement, a bizarre concoction of hippy idealism and hard-nosed commercialism, leaves it open to mockery.

Still, as the crowds began to gather outside Huixinxijibeikou Subway station (when a helpful Finn tried to pronounce this station for our benefit, a colleague, fearing the poor guy was choking on a fish bone, executed the Heimlich manoeuvre), you could - like Phil Collins - feel it coming in the air tonight.

There were hundreds of children with parents, most in red T-shirts, their faces painted in striped red with the five yellow stars and their eyes lit. As with most things in life, the anticipation was bound to exceed the actual event. However technically brilliant or breathtaking the three-hour ceremony, how could it hope to better the sense of excitement charging through the back streets and fast avenues of this teeming city?

The official line on these Olympics is that the Beijingers, as China's official representatives for this fortnight, are beside themselves with excitement and a collective eagerness to please the outside world. The reality is, of course, somewhat different.

People have jobs to do and lives to lead. On the tourist trail around the Ho-Hi river on Thursday evening, taxi drivers bickered, street merchants roasted skewered meats of dubious origin, and old men sat on stone steps, lazing and smoking in the late-night heat.

The older generation of Chinese people have a wonderfully unimpressed air about them, a kind of good-natured curmudgeonly look that says the fact Bush and Putin and the rest are in town won't ease their bad back or make them any younger. And in the ribbon of bars along the river, all lit with red lanterns and the water busy with pleasure boats, the younger generation of Beijingers partied as though it was any busy summer night.

Three years ago this was just a communal park with a lone bar. Now, it is an attraction that would be the envy of any major city. And it must have made a strange sight for visitors who came to Beijing expecting precious little manifestation of joy. More than once, Western visitors must have asked themselves, "If these people are Communists, how come they're having such a good time?"

For Chinese people who have lived in this city for the last 60 or 70 years, the changes of the past two decades must be more dizzying to behold than the miraculous rise of the Bird's Nest stadium or the wait for the arrival of these Olympics. For local people who lived most of their lives in more straitened times, the emergence of a more liberal city, with pristine shopping malls and uber-cool bars, must require dramatic adaptation.

China is no country for old men right now. You try to imagine the scale of Beijing and then read of the many Chinese cities of six-million people you had never even heard of and you get some inkling of the monstrous size - and potential - of the China nation.

You read statistics that make you blink. For instance, because yesterday, August 8th, 2008, was such an auspicious date for China, 16,000 couples were married in Beijing (come to think of it, maybe that's what all the beeping was about).

There has been a typically blase and arrogant assumption among so many opinion formers in the West that these Olympics are all about the absolute eagerness of the Chinese to portray themselves in a good light. For sure, they are being disarmingly polite - it's hard to go through the hotel door without getting into a bowing ceremony with the porter that could conceivably last for hours - and for such a vast city, it feels incredibly safe.

There is no doubt the people of Beijing are conscious of their role as host city, but for all the smiles and ceremony, the suspicion here is that the people of the city - and perhaps the rest across the vast interior - do not really give a damn what the world thinks. The Games are first and foremost a celebration of China.

After all the street protests that followed the torch on its journey through the hemispheres and all the calls for boycotts, the power of the Olympics won out. There must be something of a genius actor about the IOC president, Jacques Rogge, who can repeatedly and blithely declare sport and politics do not mix. And yet of the 1,300 planes that landed in Peking airport on Thursday, 300 were for Olympic guests and 80 carried heads of state. No other show on earth can attract such a gathering; at no other time in the next four years will the leaders of Russia, the US, Argentina and elsewhere breathe the same hazy air and listen to the same music as the tens of thousands of ordinary Beijingers lucky enough to get a ticket.

At around seven o'clock last night, the Olympic stadium was already full, and as we walked across the pavilion the place felt oddly empty, except for the lines of soldiers standing to attention in the baking heat, oblivious to the last few tourists pausing to have photographs taken beside them.

The haze was at its heaviest and with the Bird's Nest lit up and the swimming arena a blue, spectral cube, the atmosphere was half eerie and magical. It is hard to believe Olympiads can ever hope to match the imagination and planning and money that have created this futuristic pleasure dome on the Beijing Olympic Green.

The Beijing Olympics are, of course, simply the gleaming front-of-house lobby of contemporary China.The vast interior is another matter entirely. But how far they have travelled and how fast! The nation that won its first Olympic gold a mere 24 years ago now has the future of the Games in the palm of its hands.