The 2008 Summer Olympics closed Sunday night in a display of tightly scripted merriment and lavish fireworks, a final burst of pomp ending 17 days of sports and celebration that Chinese authorities organized with flawless precision and an unbending security clampdown.
Over two hours, Chinese organizers dazzled the 90,000 in attendance at the National Stadium. Placido Domingo sang a duet with Song Zuying, a favorite songbird of Communist Party elders; acrobats bounced about on pogo sticks; drums and drummers floated through the air; and a joyful parade of athletes waved flags from around the world.
In its scope and its splendor, the pageant proved yet again that China's Communist Party, while clinging to its Leninist political system, has accumulated the wealth and know-how to pull off a glittering Olympics worthy of a world power. The nation also showed itself able to field a team of impressive athletes, who walked away with 51 gold medals, more than the contingent from any other country.
Shortly before the Olympic flame was extinguished, British rock music ricocheted through the National Stadium, and David Beckham, the British soccer star, kicked a ball into the crowd from atop a double-decker bus. The theatrics symbolized London's ascendancy as host of the 2012 Summer Games, an event that seems destined to focus more clearly on sports and entertainment than the Beijing Games, which from the beginning were interpreted as a test of China's leaders and a chance to showcase the country's progress over the last three decades.
"These were truly exceptional games," Jacques Rogge, president of the International Olympic Committee, said in a speech closing the 29th Olympiad.
Indeed, the 2008 Games seemed likely to go down as a political as well as an athletic victory for China, reinforcing the image of party leaders as adroit managers of the world's largest nation on a double-step march toward greater prosperity. In the view of the Chinese, the appearance of dozens of foreign leaders during the Games, including President Bush, meant the world had effectively endorsed the Communist Party's rule, despite its continued political repression.
"The party state was clearly a winner in the eyes of the people," said David Shambaugh, a George Washington University China specialist who was in Beijing for the Games and who wrote a recently published book on the Chinese Communist Party.
The emphasis on China's national achievements was intense, responding to guidance from the Central Propaganda Department as well as spontaneous pride. The U.S. lead in the overall medal count was nearly ignored, for instance, in favor of China's winning tally of gold. In another example of the tone, the headline over a story on the success of Australia's Matthew Mitcham in a diving competition Thursday read: "Mitcham Ruins China's Clean Sweep in Diving."
"We won 51 gold medals," exulted Cheng Xue, a 25-year-old Beijing woman who attended the Closing Ceremonies. "It is a total breakthrough. We did a perfect job on security and provided good services to all the athletes."
Fei Shuyu, 28, an office employee in the capital, also judged the Olympics a great success but said she feared that excessive bragging about the gold medal count could lead foreigners to worry about China's rise as an economic power. "China should not get a swollen head," she said.
The government, however, was quick to congratulate itself for the results, eager to see the Olympic enthusiasm at home and abroad translated into increased support for the cautious mix of economic liberalization and one-party dictatorship that President Hu Jintao and his lieutenants call socialism with Chinese characteristics.
"The hosting of these games has boosted the Chinese people's self-esteem, enhanced national cohesion and reinforced the country's faith in pursuing peaceful development," said a commentary on the official New China News Agency.
Vice President Xi Jinping, the senior official overseeing the Games and Hu's most likely successor, saw his position reinforced by the official interpretation that the Games were a success. The Games were the first major assignment for Xi since he joined the all-powerful Politburo Standing Committee last October.
Even the weather seemed to favor him. Fears of unbearable pollution and coughing athletes proved unfounded. With more than a million cars forced off the streets and rain-making rockets rising regularly into the sky, the air was remarkably clean for Beijing in August.
Perhaps most important, Xi and other party leaders seemed to have weathered a barrage of Olympics-season criticism from foreign human rights advocates and journalists over Tibet, Darfur, internal repression and censorship.
Some analysts suggested that the turnout by foreign leaders has encouraged Hu and other party leaders to believe they can safely ignore appeals for greater attention to human rights. In this view, the Beijing Games therefore not only failed to encourage respect for human rights in China, as promised, but even set them back.
"Not a single world leader who attended the Games or members of the International Olympic Committee seized the opportunity to challenge the Chinese government's behavior in any meaningful way," said Sophie Richardson, Asia advocacy director for the U.S.-based Human Rights Watch. "Will anyone wonder, after the games are over, why the Chinese government remains intransigent about human rights?"
Rogge, the IOC president, carefully avoided criticizing the Chinese government, for instance, when it emerged that journalists' Internet access was being restricted, despite assurances to the contrary, and that police were preventing reporters from covering some protests, despite rules stipulating that there should be no obstacles. His most noticeable display of irritation was reserved for Usain Bolt, the Jamaican sprinter whose crowd-pleasing exuberance Rogge felt was out of place.
Russell Leigh Moses, a Beijing-based analyst of Chinese politics, noted the sweeping security measures put into place for the Olympics -- involving 100,000 soldiers and police and more than 1 million volunteers -- boosted the budgets of China's security agencies and strengthened the hand of security hard-liners in the party in a way that is likely to endure long after the athletes go home.
"The hard-liners here drove the agenda before the Games, and they will have been strengthened by the absence of large-scale trouble," he added.
When Vice President Xi held a celebratory banquet for Rogge and other IOC officials Friday, for instance, the one other Politburo Standing Committee member in attendance was Zhou Yongkang, China's security czar, who usually is not called on to greet foreign visitors. Two days earlier, Zhou's subordinates had threatened two women in their 70s with labor camp for applying to hold a protest under Zhou's own recently announced regulations.
The heavy security precautions, which included a tightening in visa regulations, apparently played a role in the smaller-than-expected number of foreign visitors. Others may have been affected by a wave of bad publicity for China in the run-up to the event. Tibetans rioted in March, and protesters later disrupted Olympic Torch Relay parades in London, Paris and San Francisco, souring the atmosphere toward foreigners.
Despite Zhou's massive security measures, Uighur separatists in the far western Xinjiang province mounted three attacks in the Olympic period, killing more than 30 people. Foreign-based underground Uighur groups had threatened to mar the Olympics to draw attention to their cause, but the attacks were confined to their home territory, nearly 2,000 miles from Beijing.
Backers of the Falun Gong spiritual movement, who Chinese security officials feared would turn out to protest, were not heard from. Members told reporters that thousands of the movement's followers in China had been dumped into detention centers in the weeks leading up to the Games.
Tibet activists, mainly from the United States and Europe, managed to elude the visa restrictions and mount eight small protests. But even they were quickly rounded up.
Here in China, such demonstrations were drowned by the flood of good news about Chinese victories in Olympic events. Protests were fully reported in foreign media, however, adding to the impression abroad that Chinese authorities were unwilling to allow any dissent that could distract from a joyful Olympic Games.
