At around 10 pm on Sunday, barely minutes after the spectacular closing ceremony of the Beijing Olympics drew to a close, a fist-fight broke out at The Den, one of Beijing’s oldest bars.
HONG KONG: At around 10 pm on Sunday, barely minutes after the spectacular closing ceremony of the Beijing Olympics drew to a close, a fist-fight broke out at The Den, one of the Beijing’s oldest bars, over some typically trivial incident that makes bar patrons anywhere in the world combustible.
Just another meaningless drunken fight in just another gin joint in a world city, you might think. But in Beijing, which had been put on its best behaviour for the 17 days of the Olympics, “it was the surest sign that the city was getting back to what you might call normal,” jests a regular patron.
After seven years of preparation, during which Beijing’s residents were given a crash course in everything from speaking better English to minding their manners when an estimated 500,000 overseas visitors came for the Games, the Olympics party is over.
But unlike what you might expect after a boisterous party, many of Beijing’s residents are not reeling in the gutters or nursing a colossal hangover; they are, if anything, heady with excitement and full of verve and optimism for the future.
In fact, Chinese spectators watching Sunday’s spectacular ceremony from Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, who had cried themselves hoarse chanting the mind-numbing ‘official Olympics chant’–“Zhong-guo jia you” (Go China!)–for the best part of a fortnight, gave themselves a new turn of phrase that sums up the mood of a China on the ascendant: “Zhong-guo qi lai” (China is Rising).
“This is the just the beginning of what China can show the world,” says Fiona Chan, a 23-year-old executive who was with friends at Tiananmen Square on Sunday.
Elsewhere, say Beijing residents, there were signs that the city was getting back into business, but that there is little evidence of any sense of anti-climax as Olympics visitors depart from Beijing. "One lane on the roads, which had been set aside for Olympic vehicles, was opened to traffic again, and there were no traffic jams on the road," says Wu. "I went past the Bird's Nest today, and the whole place was deserted except for cleaners."
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