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In July 2001, the international Olympic Committee announced that Beijing had won its bid to host the 2008 summer Olympic Games. From that moment, the city began working on a major overhaul that would deeply transform both its social and physical landscapes, to construct and project a new image of China to the world. The Chinese government commissioned the world’s most renowned « starchitects » to build a series of iconic architectural projects that would reflects the leadership’s ambition to reclaim China’s position as a world leader. Beijing’s Olympic makeover recalls earlier cycles of intensive state-sponsored architectural production that periodically transformed its landscape throughout the 20th century in response to shifts in ideology, but one that departs radically from previous attempts to reinvent its image. Drawing upon technological prowess, incommensurable scale, and avant-garde design, these projects present a radically new world image of China and epitomize a new Chinese reality, where the monotonous equality of socialism has been replaced by the spectacular inequalities of capitalism. This paper examines the physical and rhetorical construction of this image through a study of Beijing’s pre-Olympic metamorphosis. It presents this last round of conspicuous construction as symptomatic of new changes taking place in Chinese society. By examining public debates surrounding this new phase of urban transformation, as well as global influences and grassroots resistance to this process, this paper suggests that this new image may be counterproductive as a long-term strategy of urban distinction because it annihilates the city’s competitive advantage by sacrificing its historical urban fabric, and disrupts the social landscape that had given Beijing its distinctive urban culture.

Pékin, ville spectacle: la construction controversée d’une métropole Olympique1