Jing Zhang is a 28-year-old researcher working in the Beijing bureau of The New York Times. She watched the opening ceremony and shared her thoughts.
(Reuters/Xinhua/Yang Lei)I didn’t have a very high expectation for the opening ceremony. For the residents of Beijing, including me, it has been a seven-year journey with everyone fighting very hard to be a good host, building venues, cleaning up the cities. The government has issued a lot of new regulations on regular people, which makes ordinary life a little more inconvenient. For example, the traffic control rules, rising rents because of landlords’ desire to make more money after the Olympics, and the close scrutiny of the Chinese by the world media. All of this made me a little sick of the Olympics. It became less a celebration and more of a test of my country and its people.
