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China hones game for Olympics
(Washington Post)
Updated: 2006-08-17 14:36

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08/16/AR200608160
1722.html?nav=rss_world

BEIJING -- For a brief moment, China's top weather forecasters put away
their computer models and formulas for temperature, wind speed and
barometric pressure. Instead, they gathered around a conference table
last week for a video conference, as colleagues from a southern province
and Hong Kong appeared on a giant screen to predict the paths of three
typhoons, all threatening China's coast.

"We always do it like this, but for the Olympics we will do it more
often. Maybe every hour or eight times a day," said Yang Guiming, senior
engineer for the Central Meteorological Bureau, adding that it has been
suggested there be a separate forecast for every street in Beijing when
the Summer Games open in 2008.

In ways large and small, the city and its people are already preparing
for unprecedented changes when the Olympics open here. Two years ahead of
the event, officials have shifted into high gear with improvements and
upgrades, developing an advanced infrastructure for forecasting weather,
planning extra security measures and tightening health standards.

An estimated 2.5 million visitors -- including 500,000 foreigners -- are
expected to descend on the Chinese capital for the Games, widely seen as
a defining moment for a country whose growth continues to dazzle but
whose Communist government still crushes dissent.

"China is on a fast track of development toward modernization, and the
Olympic Games will act as a catalyst," Wang Wei, vice president and
secretary general of the Beijing Olympic Committee, said at a briefing
last week. The Games will also speed up government reforms, he said,
citing a slew of new laws on issues that in the past would have been
handled by administrative fiat.

"For the whole society, the Olympic Games will speed up reform and
opening up," he said.

Critics are not so sure, arguing instead that the Games will mask
continued repression and that the media will not be permitted access to
adequately cover the news. For its part, China promises otherwise. While
officials refuse to lift rules forbidding journalists to travel outside
Beijing without permission, they have drawn up new policies exempting
accredited journalists from having to obtain visas and allowing them to
drive in Beijing.

Journalists aside, officials across the city are trying to show that
their capital will be ready, with a characteristic emphasis on
presentation.

To ease traffic, they are considering temporarily banning cars with odd
or even license plate numbers from driving at certain times. And the
executive vice president of the Beijing Olympic Committee, Jiang Xiaoyu,
said dedicated Olympic lanes will be used during the event. Jiang also
said that at least 20,000 police officers will be deployed to maintain
security during the Olympics.

Security might be beefed up in other ways, as well. Olympic officials
have said they are considering facial recognition technology to spot
criminals and terrorists, and have already visited a biometrics research
center that has pioneered systems that work at a distance of 20 feet, in
sunlight and in darkness.

Stan Z. Li, director of the center at the Chinese Academy of Sciences'
Institute of Automation, said efforts to catch terrorists and criminals
through intelligent surveillance still have a long way to go, "but
China's technology is becoming the world's best."

To forecast the weather as precisely as possible, authorities said, China
has purchased extra radar equipment, added monitoring stations and
promised a forecast for every stadium in Beijing and each Chinese city
hosting an event. To satisfy the International Olympic Committee, there
will be a report every three hours that predicts weather for a three-day
period, a tougher standard than at the Sydney Games in 2000.

Authorities also said they're working on a project that could delay or
push away rain clouds that might otherwise disrupt the Games.

"For the bicycle competition, they need to know about heavy rain and
strong wind. For volleyball, they worry about thunder and lightning. For
the marathon, high temperature and humidity," said the director of
planning for the Olympic Weather Service Committee, Wang Yubin, who is in
charge of disseminating forecasts for 31 venues in 15 neighborhoods via
fax, phone, Web sites and face-to-face contact. "In Qingdao, for the
sailing, we will be afraid if there is not enough wind."

China would make progress without the Olympics, Wang said, but it might
not get the specialized help that the Olympic spotlight brings. The World
Meteorological Organization is providing a forecast demonstration
project, for example, and Australia, Canada, Hong Kong and the United
States are all helping with a more advanced early-warning system for big
storms, he said.

Also among the major concerns for China's Olympic planners are health
standards. At the Beijing Municipal Health Bureau, the most important
task for Deng Xiaohong, deputy director, is to control and prevent the
spread of infectious diseases, even though she will get no additional
resources. After that, the bureau must guarantee the security of food and
inspect Olympic venues to make sure that restaurants, swimming pools and
other sources of food and water are free from disease.

Officials have outlined plans to ensure that restaurants and food stalls
are up to international standards, a difficult feat considering that
there were only 1,583 health inspectors for 36,000 restaurants last year
and that smaller eateries and food stalls often go unchecked.

Last week, the deputy head of the Health Bureau's first inspection team,
Xu Yadong, made what he said was a surprise appearance at Shun Feng
Seafood World, an enormous Cantonese-style restaurant with 51 gleaming
tanks of fish, lobster and baby turtles. Along with two other inspectors,
Xu made sure the seafood was alive and the restaurant was clean. In the
end, the team wrote up the restaurant for having cooked food in the cold
food preparation area, having too much chemical cleaner in the
dishwashing liquid and having a can of pineapple slices that appeared to
be exposed to botulism -- all relatively minor violations.

"Preparing a safe Beijing for the Olympics is not a problem that can only
be solved by inspection," Xu said. "It's a complicated system that
includes the sanitation of the street, plants and special areas where the
city meets the villages. The idea of environmental protection, English
training, smooth traffic, safe weather -- all of this has to combine to
raise the level of Beijing's living conditions."

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