Beijing goes to extremes for its Olympic face-lift

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Migrant workers, beggars and many masseuses and fortune tellershave been sent packing for the Olympic season along with othersdeemed undesirable by the government.

Since May, restaurants have been required to have no-smokingsections, and this month Beijing's food safety administrationordered restaurants to remove dog meat from their menus lest itoffend 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 Cultureand Ideological Progress recently distributed 50,000 packages oftissues along with a warning that those caught spitting in publicwere subject to a $7 fine.

Almost all Olympics have been a springboard for host cities toreinvent themselves. Barcelona, Spain, redeveloped its waterfrontfor 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 thesame 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 werespecially bred for the Olympics. To improve air quality, officialscreated a forest twice the size of New York's Central Park next tothe Olympic stadiums. Factories hundreds of miles away have beenclosed.

"This is an extreme, extreme version of what has happened at otherOlympics," 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 mostexpensive in Olympic history. Beijing's futuristic new airportterminal designed by British architect Norman Foster cost about $3billion and is said to be one of the largest buildings in theworld.

"It's not just the buildings, it is the emotional change in thecity that is so profound," said Jeff Ruffolo, an Olympic veteranfrom Los Angeles who is serving as an advisor to the BeijingOlympic Organizing Committee.

Since 2001, when the Chinese capital won the rights to this year'sGames, 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 trainingprogram. The city has cleaned up its English-language signage,removing some of the more notorious clunkers -- for example, thosenear the Olympic stadium that directed visitors to "Racist Park,"now properly referred to as the Ethnic Minorities Culture Park.

Etiquette training has been all the rage. More than 17 millionpeople participated in an online program that offered advice onsuch fine points as what color socks to wear with a business suit(dark ones). During a competition televised this month onstate-owned CCTV, contestants had to demonstrate how to greetvisitors of various nationalities as judges held up cards gradingtheir performance.

"May I kiss your hand?" the winning contestant asked someoneplaying a married Italian woman before kneeling to do so. AnAmerican male was received with a hearty clasping of the hands anda "Hey, man, what's up?"

Not all the measures are popular. The Geneva-based Center for Housing Rights and Evictions estimates that 1.5 million people have been moved to make way forOlympics-related projects.

Critics see parallels to the 1980 Olympics, when anybody who couldremotely be considered a dissident was banished from Moscow.

One Beijing family attracted much publicity in recent weeks bybedecking its house with Olympic and Chinese flags, along withportraits of leaders dating back to Mao Tse-tung, in a colorfulprotest against the government's plans to demolish the property.

The house was demolished anyway Friday.

But public protest has been relatively minimal, in part because ofthe Chinese government's intolerance of dissent, but also becauseof genuine pride in the Olympics.