What’s in a stadium? Apparently, the hopes of a nation.

It is very hard to stay unimpressed visiting the spectacular Bird’s Nest and Water Cube for the first time – they are gloriously titanic, and have stayed relatively polished even two years after the Games. The national stadium’s lattice structure and aquatic center’s bubble-wrap exterior stand out tremendously, and it takes awhile to walk around and do them full justice. But maybe these are the very reasons that the two buildings feel more like statements than stadiums.

Small television screens across the awe-inspiring stadium continuously play clips of the opening ceremony, brandishing China’s moment of glory on the world stage in visiting vacationers’ faces and reminding that China showed the world that it could. Unlike the distinctive grand halls of the Forbidden City which speaks for itself, secure in its own magnificence, the country seems to be making a special effort not to let the grandeur from the Games fade.

Beyond just pragmatic, financial considerations – the Bird’s Nest construction cost of US$43 billion will likely never be recouped – China wants to avoid the shame of its prized stadium sitting unused. While it keeps tourists entertained, China has been scrambling to fill the arena with events to keep it from becoming a white elephant after the Olympics. It has run the whole gamut of options ranging from popular to odd, including Formula One races, football matches, a Chinese-directed Italian opera, public skiing with fake snow and a tightrope walker who stayed in the air for two months.

The other thing about the two stadiums is that they are new masterpieces. Both broke ground on Christmas Eve only seven years ago and opened in January and June just two years ago. Unlike other famous sights in Beijing that are centuries old, and some other Olympics sites in other host cities such as London’s Hyde Park, what is fascinating about these two structures stems from their future rather than a weighty past full of monarchs, wars and culture.

China seems keen to write a new history for itself with the iconic buildings created for the Olympics, and officials seem to be trying their best to reconcile their contradictions. The stadiums are big but sustainable. A lot of money has been pumped into them, yet they can keep making more. They can attract foreign tourists, while still keeping locals coming back for more. If it succeeds in keeping them vibrant, China will have every right to boast, but it will be a blow to national pride if they fail.

charyong@sph.com.sg

ON STILL, dry days, Beijing has neither wind nor rain to disperse the smoke accumulated from its traffic jams and factories, lowering the air quality of China’s capital city and earning it the tongue-in-cheek moniker "Greyjing".

Smog turns Beijing into "Greyjing". PHOTO: AP

Buildings only blocks away become hazy silhouettes and streets are mostly devoid of any joggers.

Yet despite Beijing’s omnipresent smog – the "great pall of China" as some tourist guidebooks have said – and contrary to popular belief, the Chinese government is already doing much to tackle its widespread pollution problem, says Mr Jonathan Watts.

He is the author of When a Billion Chinese Jump: How China Will Save the World — or Destroy It, a travelogue on environmental concerns, that was published in June.

Mr Watts, who has reported extensively on Asia's environmental issues as a correspondent with Britain's The Guardian, was speaking in a talk organised by the Foreign Correspondents' Club of China and held at the Romanian Embassy in China last Monday.

He believes that China's getting it half-right. Supply-wise, the leadership is "engineering its way out of current environmental problems by finding new ways to feed consumption".

It engages in ambitious scientific projects to address its resource shortages, such as the controversial Three Gorges Dam for hydroelectricity and exploring the conversion of coal to diesel for cars.

Mr Watts says there is a real concern in the national leadership – seated in thriving but grey Beijing – to address the environmental crisis the country faces.

It's the demand for resources that China needs to work on: something much harder, if not politically impossible, to do.

"Consumption worries me more than pollution," he admits. "Pollution is a recognised problem you can do your best to deal with using money and technology. Consumption isn't seen as a problem, but rather a solution to the world's problems."

He says China's ever-increasing level of consumption is unsustainable and taking its toll on the environment, individual lives and even the social fabric of communities.

He sees alarming signs that China is already hitting ecological limits in many areas: for instance, the Urumqi No. 1 Glacier has shrunk by more than 20 per cent since 1963 due to a temperature increase of more than one degree Celsius.

Logging is being halted in one area of north-eastern Heilongjiang province because there are no more trees left to fell – one of the "thirty-odd" resource depleted areas in China.

When a Billion Chinese Jump tells more tragic stories about how China's punishing level of consumption is taking its toll on its people.

Nearly 20,000 peasants in Zhejiang province fought off 1,000 riot police in 2005, protesting against pollution from a chemical plant in their village which they blamed for ruined crops and birth defects.

In "cancer villages", rural towns located near chemical plants where industrial pollution is blamed for abnormally incidences of cancer, more and more youth and adults battle cancer in their short lifetimes and fewer and fewer children are born every year.

The timing of China's development is unfortunate. Since developed nations have already consumed so much of the world's finite resources in their own industrialisation, current developing countries are left with smaller slices of the global pie with which to do the same.

This was an oft-repeated line at last December’s Copenhagen climate talks, which made little progress in resolving arguments about global fairness.

But because China's development has come later, it needs to speed up public awareness of pollution, meaning Chinese citizens need to realise the pollution problems for themselves.

Mr Watts is clear that more efforts need to come from the individual and grassroots level to complement top-down policies in China, but he believes China faces an uphill struggle.

Like the smog in Beijing, the battle has to be won but it is unclear how that can be done.

charyong@sph.com.sg