WHEN the Beijing Olympics begin on Aug 8, there will be few doubts as to why this is the most expensive Games ever staged. Glittering images of a state-of-the-art airport, sci-fi looking stadiums, spanking new subway stations, towering corporate headquarters, and a freshly-painted city of 17 million will showcase the results of the Chinese capital's unprecedented US$40 billion (S$55 billion) makeover.

But even this staggering price tag - more than twice the combined costs of the two previous Games in Athens and Sydney - will not reflect the intangible costs and personal sacrifices many ordinary Chinese have had to make in the name of a successful Olympics.

Old neighbourhoods in the capital, some of them historic ones, have been bulldozed to make way for broader roads and tourist-friendly malls and hotels. Dozens of night markets and small factories on the fringe of the city have been shut down in recent months due to concerns about security and pollution. From late July, all construction work in Beijing would be halted to reduce air and noise pollution. At least four neighbouring provinces - Hebei, Inner Mongolia, Shandong and Shanxi - and Tianjin municipality have been ordered to shut down or suspend polluting factories and steel plants to reduce air pollution.

And to meet Beijing's need for more water during the Games, villages in Hebei have to put up with smaller harvests and dried-up wells as massive pipes pump nearly 300 million cubic metres of water from their already parched land to the capital. The list of such sacrifices is a long one.

But nowhere is the "hidden cost" of the Beijing Olympics more dramatic than at Shougang Iron and Steel Group, an 89-year-old industrial giant located on the western edge of the Chinese capital. In its heyday in the 1980s and early 1990s, Shougang was the country's top steel producer and had the political clout to match.

Every environmental and city planning official who tried to take the polluting steel plant to task inevitably failed, the San Lian weekly magazine reported in a recent issue. Things came to a head in 2001 when Beijing won the bid to host the 2008 Games. Among the many promises in its winning bid was one pledging to deliver 256 "blue sky days" in 2008, up from just 100 in 1998.

The dilemma, as San Lian put it, was this: "Should we relocate Shougang or capital Beijing?" The choice was not as simple as it seemed on first sight. Shougang then employed nearly 120,000 workers, many of them Beijingers. The amount of taxes and arrears it paid to the Beijing government also came up to about 2 billion yuan (S$400 million) a year.

It was only in 2003 that the defiant senior management in Shougang finally indicated a willingness to move out of the Shijingshan district in western Beijing. The official order from the central government came two years later: Shougang would be relocated 250km eastwards to a new industrial park at a cost of 67.7 billion yuan, state media said.

Tens of thousands of Shougang workers went into early retirement or switched jobs. Others like Mr Chen Yubiao, a native Beijinger and Shougang employee of 27 years, opted to part with their families in Beijing and relocate to Shougang's new premises. In February this year, the 48-year-old packed his bags and hopped on a four-hour bus ride to the Caofeidian Industrial Park in Hebei province. [continues next page]