Tom Scocca brings up an arresting fact on the very first page of his new book, Beijing Welcomes You (Riverhead). China’s population is generally described as 1 billion, but it is, in fact, 1.3 billion. And the insignificant-seeming 0.3 billion, rounded off for convenience, constitutes a number of Chinese citizens roughly equal to the entire population of the United States. This nugget of information conveys both the unfathomable scale of the country and the misapprehension that many Westerners still hold toward an emerging superpower. A Baltimore native and former City Paper staffer who’s now managing editor of the sports web site Deadspin, Scocca landed in Beijing in 2004 and found a city preparing for its role as host of the 2008 Olympic games, and doing so on a suitably massive scale. Beijing Welcomes You is an account of those preparations, but it is a book about neither development nor sports, really. What emerges most clearly is a gimlet-eyed, intimate, often amusing portrait of what the book’s subtitle dubs “the capital city of the future,” tracking life for the city’s 20 million residents—including, for a time, Scocca and his growing family—as they navigate traffic, construction, bureaucracy, and smog. There are also scorpions for lunch, rainmaking, and kind of a lot of cheerleading (by cheerleaders, not by the author). In advance of an Aug. 5 reading at Atomic Books, he spoke with City Paper from his office in New York, a conversation edited and condensed here.

City Paper: You first came to Beijing because your wife was working there. When did your visits there turn into a book?

Tom Scocca: At first I was just going over to see what it was like, and seeing this city that was changing so quickly, as all of China was changing. In the course of extended visits through 2004 and 2005, I realized that the story of what was going on in Beijing, this transformation to put on a show of what the new China was all about on the occasion of the Olympics in 2008, this process was sort of a piece of the story of 21st-century China as a world power that was going to be possible to witness, and it could sort of be comprehensible to a reporter, or I hoped it would be.

It was already an inherently interesting thing that sparked curiosity, but then to see the pace of change that was going on there . . . the sidewalk you walked on would literally disappear from one day to the next. Brand-new buildings would be gutted and turned into newer buildings. In every direction there were cranes building something. This whole sense of really rapid change and transformation, it was a rare opportunity and it made me want to write about the city.

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