BEIJING — If you build it, he will come,” Ray Kinsella, the farmer in the 1989 film “Field of Dreams,” hears, mystically, as he walks through his cornfield. So at seemingly ruinous cost, he razes the cornfield and builds a ball field, and is rewarded with an endless stream of ticket buyers stretching to the rural Iowa horizon.

In 2008, the Chinese built a ball field — boy, what a ball field — known worldwide for its lattice-like architecture as the Bird’s Nest. Alas, after the 2008 Olympics, the ticket buyers haven’t come. Right now, the Bird’s Nest serves as a winter amusement park known as the Happy Ice and Snow Season. In April, a promoter may stage a celebrity rock concert to “establish China as a world leader for global peace and a healthier planet.” Or not.

After that, the government says it may build a shopping center there.

The accompanying photographs, shot at locales for the 2008 Beijing Olympics, succinctly depict the loneliness of where the long-distance runner once strode. In a week when the United States contemplates how long its future will be spent deep in debt, they also hint at how much its greatest creditor is pinning its own hopes of building wealth on dreams.