America is "big", but Beijing is bigger and growing faster

East Third-ring road. Beijing is today a grandiose city in every sense of the word: the buildings, roads, parks, forbidden city, great wall, the Olympic banners you see here .... Although Beijing is not representative of a typical Chinese city yet, an American from New York visiting Beijing or Shanghai today maybe analogous to an European from London visiting New York around 1900....where by that time even tho UK was still the superpower, New York's modernity was quickly making London an "ancient" European city stuck in the past. The American athletes/Olympic staff were partially shocked by Beijing's modernity. They had the impression that China was like Russia, where . Granted rural China and even lots of buildings in Bejing housing rural migrants are considered shanty towns in America, the enormous growth and construction of futuristic Chinese cities is only the beginning and an unstoppable trend. The Olympics exactly feeds into the nowaday ubiquitous Chinese mentality of creating "visual excessiveness" to show off to the world the rise of the China.