The Portrait of an Olympic Host -- City of Gold - Eyewitness: Blue sky
days in Beijing as it prepares to welcome the Olympics

City of Gold

Eyewitness: Blue sky days in Beijing as it prepares to welcome the Olympics

By Andrew McEwen

AVOID "ENGLAND". Always use "Britain" instead. "Is that correct?" he
asks. Answer duly noted, my taxi driver, Mr Wang, licks his fingertip
and flicks to page 228. "Hand up, palm facing outward, first and second
fingers apart: Means victory'", he smiles, and demonstrates.

"Two fingers up, palm facing inward, oh, that's a curse word. Is that
right?" he asks, and halts the demonstration just before it turns rude.
We both laugh.

There are still 311 pages left in the blue Beijing Olympic Taxi pocket
guidebook, published by the Beijing Municipal Transportation
Administration Bureau, a free gift to the city's drivers last week.
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Wang continues giving me examples, even as our vehicle sits motionless
on the East Second Ring Road. Constant jams have reduced the average
speed of cars here from about 28mph a decade ago to just 12mph today.
More than 1000 new cars are registered each day.

Congestion BRITISH runner Steve Ovett blamed pollution for his collapse
with respiratory problems after the 800m race in Los Angeles in 1984.
"Many suffered from the bad air, but hardly anyone said anything," Ovett
wrote in the scientific journal Nature.

A white-collar worker for a European car company in downtown Beijing is
unimpressed. "I'd call those athletes who blame the environment for
their failures wimps" says Su Bahong. "And I guess the government will
do as much as they can to fix it. They might take extreme measures,
which are not horribly uncommon in China."

Bahong is right. Hundreds of thousands of Beijingers have been relocated
and billions of pounds have been spent on moving industry out of town
and converting households from coal to natural gas. To clean the air and
ensure clear skies, the Beijing Weather Modification Office has even
pledged to make rain fall in the days before the Olympics through a
process known as cloud-seeding.

The city government issues periodic progress reports about the increased
number of "blue sky days" even as leaders of the International Olympic
Committee express concern and demand "contingency measures" to contain
the pollution threat.

In response, the city will ban at least one third of its projected 3.3
million vehicles from the roads at next year's Olympics, from August
8-24, as well as shutting down dust-spewing building sites and sooty
factories.

In a dust rehearsal scheduled for August 7-20, a million cars will be
banned from the streets while Beijing hosts 11 Olympic test events,
including cycling road races, wrestling, hockey and beach volleyball.

The beach volleyball tournament will not take place on Tiananmen Square,
despite the popular urban rumour to this effect that persisted for many
years after Beijing won the bid on July 13, 2001. The volleyball will
take place in a purpose-built stadium in Chaoyang Park, one of the
city's 31 Olympic venues: 12 new, 11 under renovation and eight built as
temporary structures.

Yang Shuan, executive vice-president of the Beijing Organising Committee
for the Olympic Games, told a news conference that 26 test events at
more than 20 of the Olympic venues would be held in total this year. A
further 14 test events will be held in 2008.

Last week, International Olympic Committee president Jacques Rogge
admitted some events might have to be postponed in Beijing next year,
should China's pollution problems continue to escalate. Rogge declared
himself content with the current preparations, but said certain outdoor
competitions might have to be moved if choking smog cannot be reduced.

"This is an option," said Rogge. "It would not be necessary for all
sports but definitely the endurance sports like the cycling race where
you have to compete for six hours. These are examples of competitions
that might be postponed or delayed to another day."

Organisers of the games refused to comment on Rogge's statement, but are
sure to be worried, with Beijing currently blanketed in smog, and local
traffic arteries also seriously congested.

Shiny venues It's a 25-minute drive into the bustling construction zone
on the north edge of the city proper for Wang to stare at ?20 billion
worth of almost-finished, brand new, gleaming infrastructure.

The Olympic Village is located at the far northern end of the Olympic
Green, a high-rise complex for 10,500 athletes. The Olympic Green area -
the site of half the competition venues - is about 10 times larger than
it was in Athens and four times that of Sydney.

The two showpiece venues - the Water Cube aquatic centre and Bird's Nest
national stadium - are due to host their first events in February and
April next year. "Ah, they look great," says Wang as we roll past in his
taxi.

The Bird's Nest seats 91,000 in an innovative bowl built with soaring
lattices of steel. Beside the big blue cube of the national aquatics
centre, migrant workers carrying cables and picks walk through choking
clouds of dust past bulldozers creating huge hillocks of displaced earth.

Every evening, these hard-hatted workers walk out wearing sandals,
shirtless or with their shirts rolled up to expose their stomachs. They
saunter down the streets in weary but cheerful groups to sit on the
kerbs, munch packed dinners and perhaps sup on 10p bottles of Yanjing beer.

For certain members of the urban bourgeoisie desperate to make a good
impression on an estimated 500,000 overseas visitors during the 29th
summer Olympiad, scruffy peasants represent a giant PR problem.

In an opinion piece for the Global Times, writer Ding Gang recently
argued that Beijingers should instead embrace the men and women who have
built their new-look city rather than worrying about foreign tourists
catching glimpses of imperfection.

"We must lose no opportunity to show the world the real China," he wrote.

Ding is deluded, believes blogger He Dong. "Ultimately there is no
chance of Ding Gang's notion of Beijing's real life ever appearing
during the time of the Beijing Olympics," he wrote. "Since hypocrisy has
long been a habit for us Chinese, being sincere for once is simply too
difficult."

Beijinger Chen Ying attended the Athens Olympics in 2004 and has just
returned from a six-month masters degree exchange programme in the US.
The 33-year-old is already bored by the saturated mainstream media
coverage of the Olympics.

"I tire of this phenomenon always being discussed from the angle of
nationalism. I'm pretty sure the same thing occurred when thousands of
workers were involved with infrastructure projects during Franklin D
Roosevelt's New Deal in the 1930s," says Ying. "I also believe this kind
of thing has happened in many other Western countries when they were
industrialising. I prefer to think of people as individuals. These
migrants are no shame to me. We should respect them for their hard work
and excellent performance. Unfortunately, some officials don't think so."

Beijing continues to deny any plans to shunt the unwashed masses back to
their home provinces, but the government is keeping mum about what
action, if any, will be taken.

Perhaps none. Migrant workers don't damage the city's image at all, says
26- year-old Rong Jiaojiao. "They are part of Beijing and they
contribute to Beijing's Olympic venue construction and GDP growth," says
the Beijing-based reporter after writing her latest Olympic article.

"They should be allowed to share in the excitement of the Olympics.
Proper instruction about civilised behaviour should be given to migrant
workers because, to be honest, many of them probably don't even know
that spitting is considered rude.

"There are people who ought to know better. I think the more important
thing affecting Beijing's image is any person spitting, yelling,
littering or cutting in line."

Spitting and sweating AS Wang reads out the next sentence, perhaps
there's a hint of embarrassment in his laughter. "Don't smoke or eat in
the cab. Don't spit out the window or throw rubbish out of window. Don't
eat spring onions, ginger or garlic before work. When washing your face,
don't forget to clean the ears and neck. Wipe off sweat in the hot
summer. Brush your teeth twice a day, morning and evening. Take showers,
change clothes, cut nails frequently. Don't smell."

These and other fragrant insights are all just the latest initiative in
a long line since the "Welcome the Olympics - Improve Manners and Foster
New Attitudes" campaign was launched last year. On top of monthly
"Queuing Awareness Day", the city has distributed 2.8 million pamphlets
about the perils of spitting, belching and soup-slurping to 4.3 million
households. Around 870,000 taxi drivers, waiters, waitresses and bus
conductors have now attended etiquette training.

Incidents of spitting dropped 3.5%% between 2005 and last year, according
to a Renmin University survey released in January. Littering was also
down by almost 4%% in 2006 and queue-jumping fell 3%%.

At an exhibition hall awash with red banners, Beijing Olympic chief Liu
Qi stepped up to the podium last week and issued another rallying call
at the "ceremony of mobilisation and pledging of the people from all
circles for Olympic one-year countdown".

"We must guarantee a safe and stable Beijing society and construct an
impregnable fortress to ensure safety and stability," added the
president of the Beijing Organising Committee for the Olympic Games.

Security and stability SECURITY is vital to hosting a good Games, Liu
said. Measures must be taken to avoid protests or confrontations with
the city authorities.

"Apparently worried about political stability, Beijing is tightening its
grip on domestic human rights defenders, grassroots activists and media
to choke off any possible expressions of dissent ahead of the games,"
New York-based Human Rights Watch declared recently, adding its voice to
more than a dozen other groups that in the past few weeks have accused
the Chinese government of cracking down on dissidents because of, not in
spite of, the Olympics.

Despite minor reforms such as the temporary loosening of control over
foreign media, human rights violations in China persist and in some
areas have worsened, according to the most recent Amnesty International
report.

"I wasn't formally detained, but they just control you," explained
veteran agency reporter Bill Smith, who recently made an attempt to
explore his new freedoms.

"What they do is they go after the Chinese instead and act against them
for talking to foreign reporters or, as happened in this recent case,
they had already detained two villagers and intimidated the third before
we even got there," he said.

The new freedoms don't apply to domestic media, of course, or Tibet,
according to the international group Reporters Without Borders.

Three months before Beijing succeeded in being awarded the games, the
vice-president of the city's Olympic bid committee said: "By allowing
Beijing to host the games, you will help the development of human rights."

Since then, tolerance of a few dissidents has been used to mask the
persecution of many others who try to report or campaign more widely on
human rights violations, according to Amnesty International. For
example, two veteran dissidents who were active in the 1989
pro-democracy movement were allowed to travel to Hong Kong for the first
time. Meanwhile, however, "many more activists face intimidation,
arbitrary detention and intrusive surveillance of family members".

As non-government organisations and foreign media continue to connect
the Olympics to stories about forced abortions, religious persecution,
jailed dissidents, Korean refugees, cultural clashes in Tibet or ethnic
conflict in Africa, most domestic Chinese simply have no idea, for
example, about film director Steven Spielberg's threat to pull out of
his role as artistic director of the games over what Hollywood actress
and human rights activist Mia Farrow is calling the "Genocide Games".

"The Olympics will bring more information about the outside world to the
Chinese people, but not more information about China to the Chinese
people. Still, on balance, it is a good thing," dissident Bao Tong
recently told the Washington Post.

Beijingers must instead rely on other reading material for their
information about the outside world beyond the "Great Firewall" of China.

"British prefer to be addressed by title, such as sir', madam' or your
excellency'", continues Wang, still reading from his Beijing Olympic
Taxi pocket guidebook.

"Avoid conversation about politics, religion or royal family rumours.

"And there's going to be a test later," he sighs.

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Add Comment
Posted by: Maddy, San Jose in Jolly Old California on 7:42pm Sat 11 Aug 07
Lets all hope that some time in the not too distant future, that
Beijingers will enjoy the same freedoms that were once denied to
Berliners, when all the walls come tumbling down. Cheers
Lets all hope that some time in the not too distant future, that
Beijingers will enjoy the same freedoms that were once denied to
Berliners, when all the walls come tumbling down.
Cheers
Quote | Report this post

Posted by: Swilly Tisher, Loch Maree on 7:08am Sun 12 Aug 07
Hoops , mon. Wouldn't it be just wonderful if Scotland could make a dash
for Independent Olympic freedom? Too late for China. Not too late for
London , though as Alex Salmond and Nicola Sturgeon try on their Saltire
running simmits.
Quote | Report this post

Posted by: donald, glasgow on 8:27am Sun 12 Aug 07
"Avoid Engerland". True. Did you tell him that if they had the Olympics
in London it would benefit China? Or, are they no' as daft as the North
Britons?

Quote | Report this post

Posted by: prof.T.Shivaji Rao, visakhapatnam.India on 7:02pm Sun 12 Aug 07

China will succeed in keeping clear skies during 2008 Olympics by cloud
seeding work.
********************
********************
*******
By overseeding the clouds with Silver iodide,the rain-bearing clouds can
be made to get dissipated.In fact we use about one gram of silver iodide
per cubic kilo-meter of cloud volume to coax the cloud to give optimal
rainfall because by nature they give only ten to twenty percent of their
moisture content as rainfall.But if we overseed the clouds by sprinkling
5 grams per cubic kilo-meter of cloud all the moisture will be shared by
trillions and trillions of Silver iodide nuclei and hence the cloud
droplets will not be able to grow into raindrops to be able to fall on
earth as rainfall or snowfall.
But Chinese must get the cooperation of other experts from
USA,India,Japan,Fran
ce,Texas,Russia and Israil to chalk out a grand research program even to
succeed when even a cyclone is likely to come over Bijing.Will Chinese
listen to others?
prof.T.Shivaji Rao.M.S.

Expert,cloud seeding project of Government of Andhra pradesh.India.profsh

ivajirao@hotmail.com

http://www.sundayherald.com/international/shinternational/display.var.1612268.0.0...