All Form, No People.(International Edition; ASIA)(city planning)

Byline: Melinda Liu

Why the architectural icons Beijing built for the Olympic Games stand empty.

China is a command economy run by engineers, a fact that served the nation well during the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games. Leaders cleaned up pollution in the city prior to the event by shutting down factories and ordering more than half of Beijing's vehicles off the road. Even better, visitors were wowed by a host of stunning new buildings--including the "Bird's Nest" National Stadium, the gravity-defying China Central Television (CCTV) headquarters complex and the surrealistic National Performing Arts Center--that NEWSWEEK feted as the most exciting and complete architectural transformation of a city since the 1865-1887 redesign of Paris by Baron Haussmann.

But Haussmann didn't produce an empty shell. Now Beijing's new icons are highlighting not so much a national genius for design and construction, but the country's utter lack of marketing savvy. The Bird's Nest, CCTV tower and arts center, which together cost more than $1.5 billion to build, have become commercial disasters, suffering from money and image problems thanks to a calamitous fire and a lack of forward planning on how to generate cash post-Games. Unlike cities such as Sydney, which used Olympic structures and publicity to create a longer-term flow of tourists and business traffic, Chinese leaders adopted a "build it and they will come" attitude, not giving much thought to exactly which folks might come to see what events after the Games. "As always in China, the software lags behind the hardware," says Beijing-based consultant James MacGregor, author of "One Billion Customers."

Consider the National Stadium, which alone took $450 million to build, and now requires $15 million in yearly maintenance. Yet the only steady revenue is from tourists who pay $9 a pop to take happy snaps of an empty bowl. The number of tourists visiting the stadium has declined from 80,000 daily in October to just 10,000 last week. At this rate, it's impossible for Beijing authorities to meet their eventual target of $30 million in annual revenue at the Nest.

Originally, there had been talk of making the stadium home to Beijing's football franchise. But leaders decided that because the team is less than stellar, it might "hurt the feelings of the Chinese people" to house it there. Unfortunately, the ideas being floated now seem even more humiliating--plans are afoot to build a theme park next to the stadium, and possibly even turn it into what managers call a "tourist products venue" (they deny rumors that this means a shopping mall).

Still, such headaches are nothing compared with the Feb. 9 calamity at the yet-unopened CCTV headquarters (construction price tag: more than $731 million). Illegal fireworks set off near the tower ignited an inferno that killed one firefighter and destroyed a 158-meter-high building in which a Mandarin Oriental hotel was due to open in May. To celebrate the Lantern Festival, CCTV's construction boss had ordered up heavy-duty pyrotechnics of the sort used during the Olympic opening ceremonies--but he didn't bother getting the required permit. Recently the Chinese media announced the formal arrests of a dozen people for violating controls on handling dangerous goods. The tower itself, which Beijing residents call "the giant underpants" ...