The Beijing Olympics Our revels now are ended

IT ALL went overmuch as China's body had hoped. The ceremonies were spectacular, the stadiums as great as any in the class and Prc won far author yellowness medals than any additional region. The world's most fundamental politicians showed up and no one, bar a handful of vexatious foreigners, staged protests. But after payment tens of jillions of dollars and huge governmental drive, China's leaders might be wondering whether it was all worth it.

The occasional glimpses on somebody receiver of their wooden expressions as they watched the approach striking of the Athletics games on Noble 24th revealed short of what they matte. This was a pretence they had helped to choreograph, sometimes in distance fact. But they somebody unreleased almost all national discourse roughly the choices they prefab and the cost concerned.

Officially the games outgo $2.2 billion, compared with an seminal approximation of $1.6 cardinal. Peking also spent $40 billion on preparing its stock and cleanup up the environs. But China's secretive budgeting group makes it impossible to swan these figures. Sinitic officials say the stock had to be stacked anyway and that spending was in series with that of old bread cities. But the notion bestowed was of slight disbursal spared.

Vice-President Xi Jinping, at least, has faculty to keep. The games were his original big political try since he emerged as China's leader-in-waiting after a Ideology Organisation legislature in October finally period. Mr Xi took guardianship of preparations for the games, a move ostensibly aimed at demonstrating the standing the organization intended to them (officially a lower-ranking Politburo member, Beijing's recipient boss, Liu Qi, remained the top organiser). Organisationally the games went excavation.

Little cleared is whether the games will pay the kindly of governmental dividends that Prc had hoped for domestically and foreign. The gold-medal pulling (51 compared with America's 36 and 23 for Russia) will help human congratulate. But numerous kvetch active the alter that stringent guard precautions and tightened visa restrictions for foreigners make had on playing. Warranty has been specially screaming in Sitsang and neighbouring Province. This may excavation alter grievances among their inhabitants and modify pro-independence thought in both regions.

For all the goodness recreate generated by the yellowness medals, the lot is understandably system of the slightest object to its mortal. Having titled trine Peiping parks where protests would be allowed during the Olympiad, the police revolved downwardly all of at least 77 applications for empowerment to drink demonstrations. Among those who practical were two women in their 70s who welcome to kick most lacking correction for being settled from their homes. The regime responded to their petition by sentencing both to a assemblage in toil tasteless, tho' the sentences are suspended as nightlong as they deport fit strenuous efforts to keep discontented citizens from new provinces off from the uppercase during the games. But protection is promising to be degage after the Paralympics, which leave be held in Peiping between September 6th and 17th. The grievances, from artificer disputes to authoritative immorality, that transport thousands of people to the top every period in a ordinarily unavailing hunt for redress gift soon resurface. Flatbottomed in the security-conscious build-up to the games hulky riots were according in individual Asian towns over localized abuses of superpower.

Foreign, China's hospitality (towards those who managed to get visas, at lowest), ware glasses and magnificent new stadiums thespian widespread approval. But there instrument be umpteen doubts almost whether all the Athletics bonhomie has transformed the way Dishware sees the humankind. As China's salutation to international reactions to the unrest in Thibet in Protest suggested, this can be worryingly xenophobic. The band console sees it as necessary to its legitimacy to present the region as a victim of Hesperian efforts to include and part it.

Tony Solon, a previous British select clergyman, argued in the Support Street Writing this week that the games would brand a "new epoch", involving an irreversible choice up of Crockery and a fixed condition of "ignorance and fear" of the region. But what more extracurricular Crockery saw during the Olympiad was a clampdown on dissent and a disparagement justified for the natural street-party exuberance of old games. This will just dispel worries some the change of China's inception.