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An Olympic makeover for Beijing

Pallavi Aiyar

It will be a coming out party of mammoth proportions for China, with Beijing debuting as the belle of the ball.

— PHOTO: AP

Workers near China's National Stadium in Beijing in this December 7, 2006, file photo. The stadium, dubbed the "Bird's Nest" for its elaborate network of steel girders, will host the athletics competition and the opening and closing ceremonies at the 2008 Olympic Games.

STOCK MARKET analysts, anti-tobacco lobbyists, intellectual property rights lawyers, tourist officials, foreign journalists, and Mongolian peasants. Prima facie this amorphous group has little in common with each other and even less with track and field competitions. But, in fact, they are all linked by virtue of having pinned their hopes on a single international sporting event: the Beijing 2008 Olympics.

When this correspondent first moved to China in 2002, she was puzzled at all the fuss being made about Beijing's successful bid to host the 2008 Games. Of course, the Olympics spelt big bucks for sponsors and prestige for the host city but, nonetheless, the extent of the hype was baffling.

Beijing was acting like a city possessed. The Chinese capital was quite literally on Olympic time, with dozens of gigantic clocks counting down the days to the Games adorning all the major street corners. Weekend music concerts with Olympic themes were a common feature as were more general Olympic cultural festivals. Olympic merchandise flooded shops and high schools held regular Games-related quiz competitions.

For China, a country that had lost a previous bid for the Olympics after concerns about its human rights record were voiced, the opportunity to host the 2008 Games was seen as a chance to pull off the public relations coup of the century.

In 2008, tens of thousands of foreign visitors will throng the capital city's streets and millions of others will watch televised footage of Olympic events beamed across the world, live from Beijing. It will be a coming out party of mammoth proportions for China, with Beijing debuting as the belle of the ball.

While none of this came as much of a surprise, what did catch attention was the dizzying array of unconnected causes that have all hitched their wagon to the Beijing Olympics carriage. For a journalist based in Beijing, the Olympics crop up while working on virtually every story on any issue.

Talking to animal rights activists about changing attitudes to dogs in China elicited the hope that the Olympics would raise awareness among ordinary Chinese about why dogs shouldn't be considered food.

A month later this correspondent was at the Beijing offices of the World Health Organisation working on a story on China's tobacco-related health crisis. China has more than 350 million smokers, about a third of the world's smoking population, and each year 700,000-odd people die from smoking-related diseases.

Predictably by then, barely a few minutes had passed before the "O" word made an appearance. Henk Bekedam, the WHO's China head, opined that the Olympics would provide the Chinese government with the incentive to seriously start clamping down on smoking, pointing out the fact that the authorities have christened the 2008 Games the "Smoke-free Olympics."

But the Games have also been named the "People's Olympics," the "Green Olympics," and the "High-tech Olympics." This surfeit of monikers only serves to underline how the Games seem to have become all things to all people.

A quick Google search for the terms Olympics and China turned up a surfeit of newspaper stories written over the last month. Many focussed on stock market analysts predicting that the Shanghai stock exchange's dream performance in 2006 will continue in the coming year due to a general Olympics-inspired buoyancy. Another featured peasants in a little known Inner Mongolian small town dreaming of Olympics-generated tourist dollars after their town appeared on a list of tourist sites recommended by the Beijing Organising Committee for the Games of the XXIX Olympiad (BOCOG).

Still other articles had intellectual property rights advocates urging the Chinese authorities to use the Olympics to demonstrate to the world their serious intent in cracking down on IPR violations.

Within China, the Olympics are regularly portrayed as a major opportunity for Beijing to clean up its environment, modernise its public transportation system, and "civilise" its citizens. An opportunity the city appears to have taken seriously so far.

According to official media, $5.5 billion are being spent by Beijing on environmental projects. Dozens of polluting factories in central parts of the capital have already been relocated to the city's outskirts. Forest cover in the capital is also set to increase by 50 per cent and, according to BOCOG, by the time of the Olympics, 90 per cent of all buses and 70 per cent of taxis will use clean fuel.

In addition, hundreds of public toilets are being transformed from the foul into the fragrant. According to Beijing municipal authorities, more than $10 million a year will be spent till 2008 on building these new "luxurious lavatories" complete with granite floors, flushes, toilet paper, hand dryers, and easy access for the disabled. Drainage systems and garbage disposal mechanisms are also being improved. Even the animals in Beijing zoo have cause to cheer the Games, as plans to upgrade their living conditions are being devised, all in the name of the Olympics.

The capital city is, in short, getting a makeover of Olympic proportions including new subway lines, highways, bus routes, and the world's largest airport designed by architecture superstar Norman Foster.

But Beijing is not just changing physically. The local government has also been trying its best to transfigure Beijingers themselves into smiling, service-oriented folk with elevated "civilisational standards." Spitting, rudeness, and littering have been the primary targets of the improved behaviour campaigns that the authorities are busy organising. From the beginning of February, Beijing shopkeepers who are rude to their customers will, in fact, be in violation of a new law aimed at ensuring friendly service at virtually any cost.

Among this host of Olympics-related improvements, the one that has foreign journalists most enthusiastic is a new set of regulations announced last month that promise far more freedom to reporters than before. From January 1 this year until the end of the Games, foreign journalists have in theory been given unfettered leave to travel around the country and conduct interviews without the need to ask prior permission.

Despite initial Olympic-agnosticism, this correspondent has gradually been converted into a believer. The Olympics are patently about far more than sports and sponsors. They, in fact, provide an umbrella under which to rally support for a broad range of causes that taken together have the power to affect far-reaching changes.

These changes may, of course, remain incomplete. It will be foolish to imagine that the Olympics will cause China's millions of smokers to quit. Beijing's skies remain acutely polluted in spite of the efforts to meet a strict BOCOG-stipulated quota of "blue-sky" days. Foreign journalists remain sceptical that the new media regulations will be implemented in the provinces, in the manner proclaimed by the Centre.

And Beijingers certainly continue to swear with style and spit with vigour despite the campaigns to improve their etiquette.

Nonetheless, the Olympics have helped give a certain impetus to solving these diverse challenges, serving at the minimum to spotlight issues and raise awareness. For the city of Beijing, which now sports a brand new Olympic-look, they have meant even more.

Could the Commonwealth Games that Delhi will host in 2010 do the same for the Indian capital's fortunes?

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