HONOLULU (AP) — Now that China is prosperous and powerful it is suffering from a major headache less than a year before the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing.
The headache is polluted air.
The problem isn't new for the ancient and sprawling Chinese capital of 11 million people now daily afflicted by the effluvia from hundreds of coal-burning industries and the exhausts of its 3 million vehicles.
Natural air pollution has existed in Beijing since the beginning of time in the form of thousands of tons of fine particles of sand blowing in from the Gobi desert.
When I lived in Beijing in 1947, and later between 1979 and 1980, the yellow particles piled up in layers on the window sills, turned drying laundry dirty again, settled uncomfortably on face and eyebrows and crept irritatingly into the lungs.
Many of the communist leaders who later took over this vast and populous country came down with Gobi-provoked and chain-smoking breathing problems, a hacking cough they shared with the masses and me. I remember vividly Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping, the supreme rulers of their day, puffing Great Wall brand cigarettes, and noisily hawking into silver-coated spittoons during long smoky interviews.
The Gobi dust storms continue to plague Beijing along with man-made pollution. It's safe to predict that the more than 10,000 healthy, highly trained athletes from around the globe will not be enchanted by what they breathe in Beijing. It is the world's worst air, so much so that Olympic chief Jacques Rogge talks of rescheduling some events, such as the marathon and bicycling.
Still, air pollution is hardly new to the Olympic Games. Athens (2004), Los Angeles (1984) and Mexico City (1968) all suffered from this brownish-yellow plague.
Visitors to those cities invariably complain of the poor quality of the air they breathe. I have done so.
China alone, proud of its sponsorship, has made public promises to do something about pollution, to stage a Green Olympics. It proposes to do so by shutting down the city's largest steel mill and other smokestack industries in the city, planting millions of trees to reduce the force of the sandstorms and filtering industrial smoke. Skeptics wonder how much China can do in the 11 months that remain before the Summer Games open on Aug.8, 2008.
Foolishly or not, China has accepted a challenge which, if realized, will clear the air during the two weeks of the Olympics. To do so, the city will have to enact contingency measures — giving businesses long holidays and imposing strict traffic controls. What happens after that is anyone's guess. No one is betting that the skies will turn blue.
Three decades of remarkable economic accomplishment sowed the seeds of Beijing's present problem: man-made dirty air. It also has left a half dozen other Chinese cities among the world's most polluted.
All of this is a historically curious contrast to the postwar experience of Japan, host of the 1964 games, which I helped cover for the AP.
World War II had left Japan a wasteland of destroyed buildings, flattened industries and discouraged people. When I first got to Japan in 1954, it seemed to be going nowhere, slowly dying on the vine, a fate many of its enemies thought only right after the human and material devastation it had created, first on the American fleet in Hawaii, then all over Asia in the countries it subdued and occupied.
Ironically, it was Mao's conquest of China in 1949, and his initial loyalty to Moscow, that began Japan's economic recovery. With it, the American dream of alliance with a friendly China against the Soviet Union in the unraveling Cold War vanished into thin air.
President Harry Truman decided instead to put America's eggs in Japan's basket, encouraging it to begin the slow, then rapid, climb back to industrialization.
The 1964 Olympic Games in Tokyo gave the recovery effort a morale-building shot in the arm. To prepare for the games, and convince the world it was now friend not foe, Japan spent billions to build new highways, factories, apartment buildings, high-speed railway lines and subway systems. Armies of workers labored above and below ground to put Japan's best face forward to a doubting world.
The Olympics were an enormous success, praised by friends and former foes alike. But still in its early stages, Japan's massive recovery effort had not yet gotten off the ground. The air over the Olympic stadium was still pure and clear.
One man, Prime Minister Hayato Ikeda, who shared the host's box with stiff-backed old Emperor Hirohito as the Olympic athletes marched past, changed all that. Soon after the Olympics he announced a plan to double the national income in 10 years, setting in motion what an astonished world later described as an "economic miracle."
Cary Grant had barely finished making his last film, a 1966 comedy about the Olympic walking race set in Tokyo, when a now highly motivated Japan jumped into action, throwing up thousands of new factories, workplaces and industries, rejoining the frenetic race for profit and prestige in the international market place.
Reassured by the success of the Olympics, and sweeping political reforms, that it was finally accepted back into the family of nations, the gratified and chastened Japanese took off like a rocket.
But like their old enemy China, nearly half a century later, the Japanese soon began to reap the consequences of industrial success: widespread and deadly pollution.
Smoke from the newly built factories darkened the skies with filthy air, poisoned the earth with noxious chemicals and killed millions of fish in the rivers and ocean. Many people died, painfully, of mercury poison from the fish they ate.
What the 1964 Tokyo Olympics had begun in a surge of hope and confidence became the despair of a nation. Before it got too late, Japan took Herculean measures to reduce the pollution that had started to take an alarming toll on its people.
Its efforts paid off. The air over Tokyo, once darkened in mid-afternoon, cleared and the sun again shines through. Fish have returned to the dinner table. Factories are forbidden to dump noxious chemicals on the soil or in the rivers and streams. The overall quality of life has markedly improved.
The Japan experience is a cautionary tale for the communist rulers of China as the Beijing Games approach. Though economic progress takes a human toll in widespread pollution, it can, like an Olympic record, be beaten.
AP Special Correspondent John Roderick covered China and Japan, among other countries, from 1945 to 1984.
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