China spares no effort, expense in Olympics makeover

Seeks to improve city and populace

A worker in Beijing cleaned a newly installed public toilet yesterday at the Olympic Green. Beijing has dispatched 8,000 toilet maintenance staff, each responsible for a city restroom. (Reuters)

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?"