Not just money

People who are curious about China's spending on the Olympic Games have various quotations. Every quotation may sound like an astronomical number. But all of them miss the picture.

According to some wild guesswork, the Beijing Olympics is the most expensive one in history, with a total cost reaching almost 300 billion yuan ($43 billion). What a lavish budget, it seems to suggest.

The Olympics is a big project. No country's investment can be small. It is only with the rapid economic development in the last three decades can the nation afford it. But critics seeing it as wasteful have failed to see from the point of view of average Chinese citizens.