With more and more cities locking down, and no sign that its zero Covid stance will be discarded, the prospect of a trip to China in 2022 looks bleak. Overseas travellers have been barred since March 2020, and the gates stayed shut for the Winter Olympics, an event intended to showcase the country to the world. A few optimistic China watchers venture that the first glimmer of light might appear after the National Party Congress in November. For now, even those with valid residence permits, like me, are largely prevented from entering. Casual travellers hoping for a Great Wall jaunt, a peek at the Forbidden City and some truly authentic Peking duck – don’t start packing any time soon.
When tourists do return – and in the event of a new variant, that could even be years away – it will be to a very different place than I encountered when I first arrived, back in that other Olympic year of 2008. I had come to Beijing for a six-month language course, trudging through arrivals at T3, Norman Foster’s showpiece Olympic terminal, in time to watch wheelchairs whizz around the track where Usain Bolt had broken the 100m World Record a few weeks earlier. I was so taken with the city I stayed on. Just before Covid struck, I wrote the 12th edition of the Beijing Lonely Planet.
My own Beijing life, as it were, is neatly bookended by the city’s two Olympics, a period of constant flux where just about the only thing that didn’t change is the Olympic site itself, that vast concrete void five miles due north of the Forbidden City. In those intervening years, I’ve been a bystander to Beijing’s evolution, and come to realise that things haven’t turned out quite like I once thought they would.
