Comets over Tiananmen

In the fifteen years that I have been living in China, the country has undergone radical changes. We have gone from the taxi without a meter to the geolocated bicycle of the circular economy, from taking seven hours to travel 300 kms. it takes just one, or from the fax to the payment with facial recognition (without going through email). Living in China is living readjusting to its constantly changing reality: new norms, new systems, new values, new expectations. Living in China today is living in a liquid, contradictory, volatile, demanding, uncertain, dynamic, highly competitive and very intense world. There are many adjectives in a row, I know, but they describe well the madness that means having lived the last three decades here. Heraclitus imagined this country where there is hardly any room for nostalgia. Here, nothing lasts too long, everything mutates without pause and the latest permanently displaces the recently less new. I fear that the 21st century has caught up with this rhythm.

I want to recall here one of many changes, perhaps the most insignificant and banal: the one that was banned in the heart of the country's capital, Beijing, something so popular in the rest of the squares and parks of Chinese cities, such as flying kites. This anecdote has to do with a symbolic date in the Chinese calendar: 080808, when at eight o'clock in the afternoon, on the 8th of the eighth month of 2008, the Beijing Olympics began with an outburst of fireworks. Blessed by an optimal date, auspicious of health and money, the opening ceremony began with strict punctuality. What followed, through special effects and massive choreography, was a full-blown display of force. Orchestrated under the direction of one of its best film directors - Zhang Yimou -, over four hours, mixing modernity and tradition, the Olympic host reviewed the main milestones of its 5,000 years of history, its contributions to humanity, its illustrious figures, their art and their culture. In the election of China as the host of an Olympic Games, the person who presided over the IOC for 21 years, the Spanish Juan Antonio Samaranch, had a lot to do with it. For this reason, even today, many Chinese, when I tell them that I am Spanish, gratefully remember our Catalan diplomat.

I remember that day well because I was in Beijing and because of the phenomenal security measures that shielded the city; but, above all, I remember well 08/08/2008 because, for me, in many ways, it represented a before and after in the recent history of China. From that moment - literally the next day - the Chinese had "transformed" in a way. The opening ceremony of the Olympic Games astonished the world both for its continent and for its content, but also symbolized for the Chinese themselves, the emergence of their country as a full-fledged actor on the international stage. After decades of slogans, five-year reform and opening-up plans, changes of all kinds in a country often self-conscious and victim of a certain historical paranoia, that day, in front of the entire international community and with a billion viewers watching the first A great international event held in their territory, ordinary Chinese became aware of their achievements and their future potential. The ordinary Chinese, in that display of light and sound, saw himself suddenly capable of anything and heir to a long tradition as a superpower.

The Chinese had spent seven long years, and nearly $ 40 billion, meticulously preparing for the Olympics, making it the most expensive in history. The preparations and the previous months had been marred by protests against the regime, riots in regions with significant ethnic minorities, boycotts of the international route of the Olympic flame and even several terrorist attacks. In addition, in anticipation that the hot Beijing summer would dampen the celebration with a rain or sand storm, the authorities had "bombarded" the clouds in the Beijing sky with silver iodide the previous days, to guarantee blue skies during the Olympics. So it was. China hung 48 gold medals and things changed.

I remember the first times I visited Beijing and how, on Sunday morning or at sunset, we would come to fly a kite to Tiananmen Square. It is a unique place: the square - an immense space the size of an airport - takes its name from the gate of the Forbidden City, to which it gives access. The gate (men) of Heavenly (an) peace (Tian). If there is a sacred place in China, the epicenter of its cosmogony, it is Tiananmen. There, everything that matters in the sinosphere is celebrated and declared. With the Olympics, that "epicenter" of the Kingdom of the Center, which is China, was shielded. Everything went perfectly and it did not rain. Nor did comets cross the Tiananmen skies again. Heavenly peace. And China was never the same again. The end.

Julio Ceballos Rodríguez