Travel Forum / Destinations / Asia / July 2008

http://www.boston.com/sports/other_sports/olympics/articles/2008/07/22/china_spa
res_no_effort_expense_in_olympics_makeover/
China spares no effort, expense in Olympics makeover
Seeks to improve city and populace

By Barbara Demick
Los Angeles Times

BEIJING - Everybody wants to make a good impression for important
guests, but it's almost like an episode of "Extreme Makeover" here
these days.

With a price tag of $43 billion, the Summer Games that will open Aug.
8 in Beijing are the most expensive in Olympics history. The
transformation, however, goes far beyond the eye-popping architecture.
The Chinese government also has been trying to create a new, improved
population to go along with its spiffed-up capital city.

Migrant workers, beggars, and many masseuses and fortune tellers have
been sent packing for the Olympic season. Since May, restaurants have
been required to have no-smoking sections, and this month Beijing's
food safety administration ordered restaurants to remove dog meat from
their menus lest it offend Western sensibilities.

DVD shops have pulled their stocks of pirated Hollywood films.
Western-style toilets have replaced squat models in many locations.
And a group calling itself the Capital Committee to Promote Culture
and Ideological Progress recently distributed 50,000 packages of
tissues along with a warning that those caught spitting in public were
subject to a $7 fine.

Almost all Olympics have been springboards for host cities to reinvent
themselves. Barcelona redeveloped its waterfront for the 1992 Games.
Athens built a new airport, highway, and mass transit system. Like
Beijing, Seoul used the 1988 Summer Olympics as a coming-out party and
took the same types of steps toward Westernizing.

But everything taking place in Beijing is, like China itself,
outsized. Beijing ordered 40 million pots of flowers. Some varieties
were bred specially for the Olympics. To improve air quality,
officials created a forest twice the size of New York's Central Park
next to the Olympic stadiums.

Factories hundreds of miles away have been closed, and beginning last
weekend, cars were restricted to driving on odd or even days,
depending on their license plate numbers.

Costs are running three times those of the last Summer Games in
Athens, which, at $15 billion, at the time were reported to be the
most expensive in Olympic history. The futuristic new airport terminal
designed by British architect Norman Foster alone cost $3.5 billion
and is said to be one of the largest buildings in the world.

"It's not just the buildings, it is the emotional change in the city
that is so profound," said Jeff Ruffolo, an Olympics veteran from Los
Angeles who is serving as an adviser to the Beijing Olympic Committee.

Since 2001, when they won the rights to the Olympics, Beijingers have
been honing their English skills. At least according to the official
website of the Olympic Games, 90,000 Beijing taxi drivers have gone
through a special training program. The city has cleaned up its
English-language signage, removing some of the more notorious clunkers
- for example, those near the Olympic stadium that directed visitors
to "Racist Park," now referred to as the Ethnic Minorities Culture
Park.

Etiquette training has been all the rage. More than 17 million people
participated in an online program that offered advice on such fine
points as what color socks to wear with a business suit (dark ones).

During a competition televised earlier this month on state-owned CCTV,
contestants had to demonstrate how to greet visitors of various
nationalities as judges held up cards grading their performance.

"May I kiss your hand?" the winning contestant asked someone playing a
married Italian woman. An American male was received with a hearty
clasping of the hands and a "Hey man, what's up?"