A golden sun shines on a proud nation

SIDELINE CUT:The daily acquisition of more gold medals, of Chinese success and brilliance played out for the world to see, is surely a means of helping to erase a subconscious state of feeling second-class.

THE SUN also rises, even in Beijing. For the first time since the Olympics began, the chemical haze lifted and the thousands of visitors wandering around the flabbergasting stadium or the Ming tombs got to see the city in all its sunlit glory. On a clear day, you can see forever, and in bright sunshine Beijing looks even more impressive and more disconcerting.

In this city, East is not quite East, and half the time you wonder if you are in China at all. Fu Manchu is nowhere to be seen. At night, riding along the honeycomb of motorways in a taxi, you look at the gleaming, high-rise monuments to commerce and you could imagine yourself in any big city in the West. Except that here you could ride all night in the back of any of the 67,000 (!) taxis that trawl the streets in platoons and it would cost you half nothing.

Given the European obsession with oil prices and the state of the American dollar, you wonder as you pay a cabbie 20 yuan - less than two dollars - for a half-hour trip, how he makes a living. How he can afford the fuel. And you want to tip three times the fare but think twice, because tipping is a new concept here and can just as easily be construed as an insult, another example of Western superiority.

And these Olympics are surely connected to the Chinese sense of being put down by the outside world, of that deep-down sense of humiliation and perhaps resentment that its stunning civilisation had somehow, in the 20th century, been reduced to the point where the Chinese were simply the nation that provided the world with cheap restaurants on every corner.

"You wanna swim by the Chink's and watch me eat?" super salesman Ricky Roma asks in Glengarry Glen Ross, the classic play/film by David Mamet about the savagery of sales culture and consumerism in the West. And later, the down-at-heel Dave Moss complains that everyone "wants to break your rice bowl".

For years, when the Motherland was closed off, the Chinatowns of London or New York were about as deep as most people ventured into the People's Republic. These Olympics have brought a huge infusion of Western visitors who probably came harbouring preconceptions and suspicions about the way of life in a country that, when the Olympic torch made its global tour, seemed to rank as number one in terms of unpopularity.

In Beijing, young volunteers are stationed at every corner of the city. These are the children of Mao's children's children, bright young things who smile at every foreign face and are impeccably polite. These young people represent the best of China's tomorrows, educated and optimistic and patriotic, filled with dashi, or the spirit of great enterprise that has energised the city. Some will spend this fortnight emptying plates of food into waste and recycle bins, or opening the doors of lavatories for China's guests from the West. After dark, you see them in hotel foyers or at outdoor volunteer stations, catching 40 winks on a chair, slumped over tables, exhausted.

Elsewhere, on the neon strip of Sanlitun you find that the new Chinese middle class like to drink imported spirits and belt out American and English pop classics in karaoke performances, or play the latest hip hop in the underground taverns that have opened up on the side streets. This is the generation of Chinese kids who are almost casually charming the guests from outside. This is the generation who have the confidence to be naturally friendly and curious, who make you forget about the subtle, all-seeing eyes of state.

Beijing is full of stories of the spooky knowledge and subtle surveillance visitors are under. There is the tale of a notebook left on the back seat of a taxi that had been, in a matter of hours, presented to officials and returned to its owner's hotel. The same was true of a cameraman who forgot a bag full of lenses.

The Party representatives are everywhere: the white-shirted security officers who patrol hotel corridors, the kid who writes down notes as every car enters and exits hotel driveways, the slender army officers who stand pristine and erect and unsmiling through the dog-day heat and in the sleek, black tower on the Olympic Green, which, the popular rumour goes, is where the nerve centre of party intelligence is located.

Expatriates will tell you "they" know everything you do. And perhaps they do - whoever "they" are.

For the state has played a background role. These Olympics have, as expected, become China's Olympics in the race between the superpowers on the gold-medal table. The sick man of Asia has been working out in the gym.

In 1932, China sent just one athlete to the Los Angeles Games, a sprinter who went at the last minute because of money problems. In 1948, the eve of Mao's reign, the Chinese team were so hard up that they stayed in a primary school and cooked their own food for the London Games. A year later, Mao addressed the people and declared: "Ours will no longer be a nation subject to insult and humiliation. We have stood up."

There is a phrase the Chinese use for this burning, deeply embedded sense of inferiority: wuwang guochi: "Never Forget Our National Humiliation."

The daily acquisition of more gold medals, of Chinese success and brilliance played out for the world to see, is surely a means of helping to erase that subconscious state of feeling second-class. Yesterday, the television was full of pictures of the shooter Du Lei weeping with relief after claiming the gold she had missed out on when the Olympics started on Saturday morning. The great motivation for the Chinese athletes is not so much the realisation of personal glory but the sense they have contributed to what is a critical few weeks in the evolution of the republic.

A few years ago on a radio programme, Vincent Browne asked the writer John McGahern about being famous and received a deft and unforgettable reply: "In Leitrim, there are so few of us that we are all famous."

That witticism seems relevant when you walk around cosmopolitan Beijing, teeming with people, and then try to comprehend the great interior, where the fabulous figure of 1.3 billion people are living real, flesh-and-blood lives.

How do you be famous in China? How do you single yourself out from that crowd? Athletics will surely be the spur for many.

So is the true face of Beijing to be found in the smiling, multilingual volunteer, or in the jaded eyes of the taximen, or in the impassive watchfulness of the security men, or in the unabashed, childish curiosity with which they look at foreign people?

It is probably all of those. But the predominant mode for these two weeks is of Chinese triumph and joy as they lead all the nations of the world in the gold-medal count. And now the sun has even come out for them like a rebuke to the jeering Westerners who bemoaned this city of fog.

There it is, bright and perfectly formed, like any of the Olympic gold medals that have become the new pride of the People.