Lasting images

Unlike Athens, China’s architectural class of 2008 has stood clearly for crisp planning and worldly ambition. However you felt about Beijing’s human-rights record, you had to give the government credit for producing a tightly choreographed Olympic PR campaign with iconic architecture at its center.

Then came the Olympic torch relay. Beginning in Greece, where security officials had to wrestle with protesters just before the torch was lighted — among the picturesque ruins of a classical stadium in Olympia, no less — its journey has been a political and logistical disaster for the Chinese.

Perhaps most damaging has been the steady stream of images produced by its chaotic international tour. In the space of two weeks, the most powerful and widely distributed of those images — banners unfurled from the Golden Gate Bridge, a torch-bearer hiding inside a bus in Paris — have managed to make a more forceful impression than the work of a dozen superstar architects.

Another bizarre episode came Wednesday afternoon in San Francisco, where the torch and its entourage took refuge for nearly half an hour inside a warehouse on Pier 48, along the city’s waterfront. Local officials appeared to be debating whether to send it along its planned route down the Embarcadero, a road by the waterway, which was packed with protesters as well as flag-waving supporters of Beijing bused in by the Chinese consulate.

The pit stop turned out to be a bit of misdirection. While TV news helicopters hung in the air over the warehouse, organisers of the relay were sending a back-up torch from a hiding place inside a hotel on O’Farrell Street, a safe distance from the chaotic scene along the waterfront. There, the Olympic flame was escorted on a brief trip north by police on bikes and motorcycles and on foot, passing sidewalks that were mostly empty.

While the plan might have worked from a cloak-and-dagger point of view it also served to generate a fresh collection of architectural imagery that could not have pleased Beijing. For 30 minutes, the warehouse was the afternoon’s star attraction.

Reporters caught glimpses of Chinese and local officials in animated conversation in the dark interior but little else. “They’re inside, they’re inside this warehouse, behind what would have been the beginning of the torch route,” CNN’s Ted Rowlands said.

Most of the warehouses along the Embarcadero haven’t stored goods for decades, since the city’s port lost its place at the center of waterfront commerce. These days, many of them store ideas instead.

So what ideas did Pier 48 hold Wednesday? Muddled, whispered ones, mostly. It held the idea that what had been planned as a public gathering, full of protest and celebration, was being quickly reevaluated in private.

And think of all the symbolism conjured up — at least for American TV viewers — by this sort of cavernous warehouse building. It’s got clandestine written all over it. In the movies, it’s where the drug deals happen or where one character clicks open a case to show another machine-gun parts nestled in black foam. It’s where people go to do things they don’t want anybody else to see.

In policy circles, “transparency” has become a buzzword, verging on cliche, to describe how officials in the West want governments such as China’s to operate.

Two years ago, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice complained that the Chinese were secretly building up military spending and said Beijing should “undertake to be transparent” on the issue. The warehouse episode — a joint production by Newsom, Fong and the Chinese and largely improvised — was anything but transparent.

What the Chinese government is now realizing, to its growing frustration, is that controlling the visual symbolism of any event with global reach has become virtually impossible in a fully wired, YouTube world.

The athletic competition itself, on Chinese soil, will be easier to keep in check, and many of the venues might win praise as pieces of architecture. But sending the torch out into the world has meant letting extraneous images of all kinds — many of them architectural, as it’s turned out — attach themselves to the Beijing games. Like barnacles stuck to the bottom of a ship that’s gone around the world, they’ll be tough to scrape off completely.

The Boycott relay

Politics has always managed to get some space on the podium of the Olympics, arguably the biggest sporting spectacle. As cries for boycotting the Beijing Olympics—and in some cases, the opening ceremony—get louder, we look at who’s for and who’s against a boycott

For boycott

• Steven Spielberg was the first to give the boycott call when he quit his advisory role for the opening ceremony out of protest over China’s Darfur policy.

• UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown said he would not attend the opening ceremonies in Beijing, But he stopped short of calling his decision a boycott and said he would be there for the closing ceremony.

• Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor, had earlier made it clear she would not attend the opening. Ledaers of Poland and the Czech Republic also announced that they wouldn’t attend the opener

• US Democrat presidential candidate Hillary Clinton said President George Bush should boycott the opening ceremony over China’s clampdown in Tibet and its support of Sudan’s leadership. US Speaker Nancy Pelosi also urged Bush not to stay at home for the opening ceremony

• French Socialist leader Segolene Royal said in India that France should boycott the opening ceremony

• Wangari Maathai, a Kenyan Nobel Laureate winner, announced she had pulled out of joining the Tanzanian leg of the relay because of China’s human rights record. India’s football captain Baichung Bhutia too decided to pull out of the Indian leg but actor Aamir Khan said he would run “but with a prayer for Tibet”.

Against boycott

• The last person we assumed would be on this list: the Dalai Lama. The Tibetan spiritual leader said on Friday that he did not support a boycott of the Beijing Olympic Games but if world leaders wanted to boycott the opening ceremony in support of Tibet, it was “up to them.”

• US presidential candidate Barack Obama said he is “of two minds” on the issue, saying he was hesitant to use the Olympics to protest.

• Russia said it was against any kind of boycott and that “mixing politics and sports is unacceptable”.

• US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said a boycott would be an ineffective way to address China’s “troublesome policies” and said the US boycott of the 1980 games in Moscow was “feckless.”

• Dutch Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende said he would attend the opening ceremony, saying nobody was calling for an economic boycott of China, or a halt to tourist trips to the Asian country.

• Trinidad and Tobago says it will not boycott the Olympic Games in China later this year. The country has strong ties with China, which has several firms and hundreds of workers involved in a number of state construction projects.