With the 2008 Olympic Games less than a month away, China seeks to shed his stern image. Gordon Rayner reports from Beijing. Only 27 days before the opening ceremony of the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games and do not go, but there is nothing left to chance. At the other professional schools, 380 Olympic hostesses are relentlessly drilled in such complex skills, how to smile.

 

 

 

So be good, they always show the teeth are 6:00 to 8:00, and be able to operate undisturbed smile for 10 minutes at a time. Those who run it can not be trapped in the hours between his teeth with a stick to train your facial muscles. Elsewhere, students will learn how to clap and cheer 800,000 with one voice, and even the weather will be strictly controlled, with “cloud seeding” technique, to ensure that rain, but in WA during the Games.

 

 

 

But the great irony of the Communist Party controls every aspect of the instinct of public behavior that China, not all people need a lesson on how to behave. Pay my first visit to China last week, before I had the impression that the Chinese, they are unfailingly charming, friendly and polite. Theyâ? Re smallest people I never met (even without the chopstick exercises) and they are the love of childlike enthusiasm for the Games and abroad, v & # xE4; listuristi, which makes them natural ambassadors in China.

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Walking down Beijing’s busiest thoroughfare, Chang’an Jie (a 30-mile long avenue thick with hooting traffic and whistling policemen) I made a point of stopping people in the street to ask them what they hoped the Games would achieve. There was, of course, a time when the only people allowed to speak to Westerners would have been communist party members primed with propaganda, but those days are gone, and I had no reason to doubt the motives of Ma Bin, a 32-year-old salesman for a coffee company, who said he hoped foreign visitors would discover “that China is a beautiful place where they will feel welcome”, or Sang Shigany, 25, a law student, who said tourists “might be surprised to find how cosmopolitan Beijing is”.

 

And there were some dissenting voices – one man told me about what he perceived to be corruption in the awarding of Olympics contracts, and suggested many Games venues would turn out to be white elephants. Alas, I can’t give you his name, because freedom of speech is still a distant dream in China, which locks up journalists, bloggers and dissidents, allegedly torturing some of them, and uses violence to crush independence rallies in Tibet. Yet China is changing fast, and changing for the better. It is worth pointing out that the man who told me about alleged corruption had travelled extensively and had lived abroad, including in Britain, but returned to China “because there are so many opportunities here. All countries have problems, but this is a great place to live. ”

Indeed, changes in China since the death of Mao in 1976 was so fast that anyone who has ever visited Beijing probably do not understand that 10 or 20 years have expired, it is on. Beijing is full of smart shopping malls, where wealthier citizens park their Out of Bounds and the VWS (there are surprisingly few bicycles), Max Mara, Burberry and Tiffany & only a short jalutusk # xE4; IGU kept away from the body of Mao in Tiananmen Square (shopping and clothes shop would be much less difficult in his time). And China’s booming economy, is the largest in the world has elevated the standard of living of those cities unimagined levels.

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Hi Xiao Long, a tour guide barely out of his teens, told me: “When I was a kid very few people had a television, and if they did, they would have 10 or 12 families coming around to watch it. Now everyone has three or four TV sets, people have cars and mobile phones. People here are happy with their lives. â??China is desperate to get this message across, hence my visit as a guest of the Beijing Organizing Committee of the Olympic Games (BOCOG), but after 60 years of communist rule, Chinese officials remain better at monologue than dialogue, lending a sometimes surreal twist to our meetings.

 

When visiting a new metro lines serving the Olympic Park, I had to do with the 52-page booklet, as the metro, including instructions that if you con ; ekott drop line (not the platform presented to them on bail or may cause electric shock or contusion, and trains) and used it as poison gas attack (handkerchief to cover your mouth, go away as soon as the gas). If not obeying the rules (which include “properly dressed up look”), the result is that you transition from “public security departments. Perhaps the foreign visitors would be better to walk.

 

The Chinese also love statistics – I was told the exact circumference of each of Beijing’s five concentric ring roads, the exact number of workstations in the press centre (971) the total mileage of the city’s subway system by 2015 (561km), the improvement in the carbon monoxide levels in the city since 1998 (39. 4 per cent)â?¦ anyway, you get the picture. I began to suspect the Chinese officials were bombarding us with numbers so there would be no time left for awkward questions about Tibet, Sudan, the disastrous torch relay or anything touching on human rights.

 

In fact, the top brass did let us ask questions about such prickly issues; Beijing’s deputy mayor, the sharp-suited Chen Gang, remained good-humored throughout repeated questioning about how pro-Tibetan demonstrators would be treated, though his answer wasn’t exactly candid. They would be dealt with, he said, in accordance with Chinese laws. Anyone wanting to demonstrate must have a permit (cue wry smiles) and, he said, “You will see during the Games how we will handle such situations. â? A rather unsettling answer. Yet it may come as a surprise that the question could be asked at all.

 

China is a country which, just four years ago, was so wary of the media that it blocked almost all foreign internet sites, yet I was able to call up the BBC and UK newspaper websites and even search those sites for articles on China’s human rights record. Beijing, of course, wants the world to behold the impressive Bird’s Nest stadium and the funky Water Cube in the Olympic Village, the showpieces of the Games.

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Sadly, visitors may struggle to find them through the unrelenting smog, which is so thick here that, on a bad day, it seems to cling to your face like a mask. Forget the blue-sky publicity shots of the Olympic venues you might have seen; when I visited the Bird’s Nest it was shrouded in a miasma and already appeared to have a thin film of grime coating its steel exoskeleton. The officials seem to be in denial about this, quoting endless statistics to prove how safe the air is. They don’t seem to realize that if the world sees this murk beamed into their homes every day, prospective tourists might choose to go elsewhere. And that would be a great shame, as they would miss out on a country which deserves to be seen first-hand.

 


Article Source:China Sourcing Blog

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