Beijing goes to extremes for its Olympic face-lift
The transformation goes beyond the architecture, which help inflate the Games' price tag to a record-smashing $43 billion. The government is also trying to create a new, improved population.
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 in Beijing next month are the most expensive in Olympic 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 and beggars, masseuses and fortune tellers have all 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 a springboard for host cities to reinvent themselves. Barcelona, Spain, redeveloped its waterfront for the 1992 Games. Athens, site of the most recent Summer Games, built a new airport, highway and mass-transit system. Like Beijing, Seoul used the 1988 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 up 40 million pots of flowers. Some varieties were specially bred 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 this weekend cars are restricted to driving on odd or even days, depending on their license plates.
"This is an extreme, extreme version of what has happened at other Olympics," said David Wallechinsky, an Olympic historian.
Costs are running three times those of the 2004 Games in Athens, which, at $15 billion, were at the time reported to be the most expensive in Olympic history. Beijing's futuristic new airport terminal designed by British architect Norman Foster cost $3.5 billion and is said to be one of the largest buildings in the world.
