The 2008 Beijing Olympics was a business bust

"As the last strains of the kind of spectacular only authoritarian governments can throw filled architecturally “challenging” new structures, the Chinese are toting up the costs of an effort to prove to the world they have arrived. But whatever the bill for the government — it may have come close to $50 billion — the cash registers didn’t ring for the Chinese business community.

The flood of foreign visitors never arrived: Beijing had not many more than the 420,000 visitors it got last year, according to trade associations. A clampdown on visas for young foreigners — part of the intensive and extensive security arrangements — gave China Air, the national carrier about...."

[Read more at the World Tribune]