Beijing 2008 Update

[mr.x]

^ well, it needs some major scrubbing before they do anything with it.

[deasine]

From Various Members of SSC

[Jacques]

Deasine, these are truly AWESOME photos, I enjoyed the FOU Drummers very much and it is incredible how the columns raised knowing they weighed in at 3 tonne each, China has surpass any opening ceremony performance in the history of the Olympiad ever, BRAVO for sharing, cheer

[mr.x]

Opening ceremony director praises team performance
www.chinaview.cn 2008-08-09 22:07:45

by Xinhua writer Zhu Yifan

BEIJING, Aug. 9 (Xinhua) -- "I regret many things, many details of this performance, many things that I could have done better," said Zhang Yimou, director of the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympic Games, at a press conference here on Saturday.

After planning and carrying out a spectacular event that reflected the ancient and modern images of China to the world, Zhang remained humble and reflective.

"For example, there are performers who were injured. I blame myself for that. It might well have been avoided if I had given more detailed instructions," he said.

"We had many difficulties. I do not like complaining, but sometimes there are obstacles you can not overcome, that you and your team have to face," he said. "What everyone cares about is the final result. We all know this, so we don't explain."

Contrary to the harsh criticism he reserved for himself, the acclaimed film director gave unreserved acclaim to the team as a whole. "I would give our whole team a '100' in the performance of the opening ceremony," Zhang said.

A multimedia, three-dimensional display on such a large scale is very complicated and demands the utmost of each member of the team, he said.

About 22,000 people took part in the gala, in which 15,000 costumes were used and 43,000 fireworks lit.

With all the technical complexities involved, the opening ceremony was 100 times more difficult than making a movie, he said, adding that such a performance was unprecedented in the world.

Despite the complexity and spectacular nature of the event, Friday's ceremony wasn't as costly as it might have looked. According to Zhang, the total cost for the opening and closing ceremonies of both the Olympics and the Paralympics would not exceed that of the Doha Asian Games Opening ceremony alone. That extravaganza in the Gulf reportedly cost 180 million U.S. dollars.

"We encouraged economic use of resources in preparing for the Olympic Games," Zhang said.

When asked whether Beijing's ceremony would put pressure on London, the next host city of the Games, Zhang laughed: "I think they would feel pressured.

"A large-scale performance like this is really hard, so we also did our research on previous ceremonies. At least in the use of multimedia, I assume London could not surpass our level such a short time [from now]. They might not be able to make it in several years," Zhang said.

"But London might have other creative ideas. We can each have our own tour de force. I wish the London Olympics a success," Zhang said.

After a moving opening, the closing ceremony, Zhang revealed, would focus on presenting a cheerful atmosphere and would have many jubilant scenes. The crucial issue was to extinguish the Olympic flame.

"I wish I could get a good night's sleep, free of worries, but coming are the closing ceremony and the Paralympics. Our team never rested, we always kept moving," he said.

[mr.x]

Of the 26 Canadian medalists so far:

15 are from BC.
11 are from Victoria.
19 live and train in Victoria.

[mr.x]

Beijing returns to congested normal after Olympics

Nick Mulvenney, Reuters
Published: Saturday, September 20, 2008

BEIJING (Reuters) - Beijing began returning to its congested normal on Saturday after two months of traffic restrictions and factory closures which kept the city's notorious pollution at bay for the Olympics and Paralympics.

The Chinese capital is one of the world's most polluted cities and there has been widespread debate about whether the traffic control measures should be retained.

On Saturday morning, the increased traffic in central Beijing still flowed freely, but congestion and frustration are likely to return with the resumption of the working week on Monday.

The ban on vehicles on alternate days according to whether their registrations ended in odd or even numbers - aimed at taking 45 percent of cars off the roads - was not only successful in clearing the skies but also eased congestion.

"If there are no restrictions in the street, maybe the Beijing roads will become big parking lots some day," an Internet surfer called Dao Madan wrote on www.tianya.cn.

Car owners in the main opposed controls, citing the lack of sufficient public transport.

"If you do not allow me to drive, make sure you can provide enough seats on buses and subways," Xiao Pao wrote on the same forum. "Don't force me into that sauna."

Restrictions on government-owned cars, which make up some 10 percent of Beijing's more than 3 million vehicles, will continue, the city said this week, in a move some experts see as a necessary pre-requisite to imposing wider controls.

Worse pollution than normal might be expected this autumn as factories and power plants in Beijing and six surrounding provinces strive to reach their annual production targets despite the two months when they were forced to reduce emissions.

Dust can also be expected to add to the pollution from the hundreds of building sites around the city that had to suspend operations from July 20.

And prostitutes have returned to the streets in areas of the city where bars and night clubs abound, while shops are now openly selling pirated DVDs again.

Security checks at the city's 11 municipal parks, including the Temple of Heaven and the Summer Palace, will also cease from Saturday, local media reported this week.

Beijing saw high levels of security for the Aug. 8-24 Olympics and Sept. 6-17 Paralympics to deter terrorist attacks which the government perceived to be the biggest threat to the successful hosting of the two sporting events.

The Olympic media regulations put in to place in January, which allowed foreign journalists more freedom to report around China, expire next month.

[deasine]

Great article, not sure how that's related to Metro Vancouver's transit other than the fact that perhaps that we will have that same problem...

Moving to Beijing Olympic Update...

[Hong Kongese]

Chinese newspaper says Olympic success shows Communist rule works

Reuters
Published: Friday, September 26, 2008

BEIJING (Reuters) - The United States' economic woes show the bankruptcy of Western-style democracy while China's Olympic Games triumph shows the growing "superiority" of its Communist Party rule, China's top newspaper said on Friday.
The commentary in the People's Daily appeared a day after China launched its third manned space flight, which state media also celebrated as a display of the ruling Party's power to marshal economic growth for greater national purposes.

The strikingly long essay dwelt on the Beijing Olympic Games in August as proving that China should stick to Party control and avoid the temptations of Western democracy.

"China's unprecedented success in presenting the world with an extraordinary Olympic Games has stunned the West," says the essay by Mei Ninghua, the chief publisher of another major Party newspaper, the Beijing Daily.

"Throughout the Olympics, the Chinese government and people demonstrated their powerful organisational strength and unsurpassed ability to mobilise society ... fully embodying the superiority of China's political system."

Chinese officials repeatedly said the Olympics should have nothing to do with politics, and should not be used as a platform to criticise their restrictions on political life.

But there was no such modesty in this latest survey of the Olympics' lessons, which made no mention of a milk-powder scandal that has made thousands of infants ill and killed at least four, and was covered up for months up until the end of the Games.

Late this year, the Communist Party will mark 30 years since China launched market-driven economic reforms under Deng Xiaoping. Some Party scholars have said the anniversary should be the starting point for liberalising political reforms.

But the republishing of the lengthy comment in Chinese by the Party's top paper - it first appeared in the Beijing Daily - suggested China's leaders have no appetite for big political experiments.

Instead, the Party paper argues that the contrast between China in the Games and the United States in its financial mess offers a lesson for the world on what political system works best.

"Western countries are mired in low growth, and the United States' recent severe financial crisis is a manifestation of the dead-end of liberalism and the destruction of the myth of American institutions," it says.

"Western electoral democracy fosters corrupt, divisive and inept policy-making, it says. "Hitler came to power through an election, but that did not make the Third Reich a modern state," it adds.
On the other hand, China's ability to foster economic growth and channel the benefits into Olympic Games and other nation-building feats shows it is "superior to the capitalist political system ... and its advantages are increasingly evident."

[Metro-One]

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH
AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA I love propaganda! For we all know there is nooooo corruption in the Chinese Communist party My two favorite propaganda producing nations are China and the United States. Both great for a laugh.

[osirisboy]

that government is fucked up

[Hong Kongese]

China to name and shame lip-synching performers

Reuters


Published: Thursday, November 13, 2008


BEIJING - China will name and shame artists who lip-synch or engage in other "fake" acts at commercial concerts, with repeat offenders getting their performing licenses revoked, local media reported on Thursday, citing the Ministry of Culture.

China's Olympic organizers were lambasted by Internet users and in media reports after they admitted a nine-year-old girl lip-synched during the opening ceremony of the Beijing Games, in place of the real singer who was rejected because of her appearance.

The Culture Ministry was seeking public opinion on a draft amendment to existing legislation on commercial performances that would ban lip-synching, the Beijing News said.

Seven-year-old Yang Peiyi was the real voice that sung the patriotic song 'Ode to the Motherland' allegedly performed during the opening ceremonies by a pigtailed Lin Miaoke, who was selected to appear because of her cute appearance. China said it is cracking down on fakery.

In China, amendments to legislation that reach the stage of seeking public opinion are generally already fixed, and are usually passed by China's rubber-stamp parliament with little or no change.

"Performers must not cheat audiences by lip-synching, and concert organizers must not arrange for performers to lip-synch," a draft amendment posted on the ministry's website (www.ccnt.gov.cn) said.

The names of performers caught lip-synching would be released to the public, and those caught twice in a year would have their performing licenses cancelled, the paper said.

The draft also placed the onus on concert organizers to "despatch personnel for supervision, to guard against lip-synching from happening."

A public outrage over lip-synching swept up Chinese actress Zhang Ziyi, who in February was accused of doing a shabby job of miming on the country's annual top-rating TV gala show screened on Chinese New Year's Eve.




© Reuters 2008

[Cypherus]

Oh brother...

[Hourglass]

Originally Posted by Metro-One

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH
AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA I love propaganda! For we all know there is nooooo corruption in the Chinese Communist party My two favorite propaganda producing nations are China and the United States. Both great for a laugh.

Two sides of the same coin...

Although pulling 300 million people out of poverty in 25 years isn't a bad act. Of course, one could argue it was the Communist Party with its "Great Leap Forward" and the Cultural Revolution that put them there in the first place...

[Smooth]

This was an interesting story that was in the Vancouver Sun today. For some reason they didn't have it on their website so I had to get it off the Los Angeles Times website...

Beijing's Olympic building boom becomes a bust
Many buildings in the city's impressive skyline are empty.

By Barbara Demick

February 22, 2009

Reporting from Beijing — "Empty," says Jack Rodman, an expert in distressed real estate, as he points from the window of his 40th-floor office toward a silver-skinned prism rising out of the Beijing skyline.

"Beautiful building, but not a single tenant.

"Completely empty.

"Empty."

So goes the refrain as his finger skips from building to building, each flashier than the next, and few of them more than barely occupied.

Beijing went through a building boom before the 2008 Summer Olympics that filled a staid communist capital with angular architectural feats that grace the covers of glossy design magazines.

Now, six months after the Games ended, the city continues to dazzle by night, with neon and floodlights dancing across the skyline. By day, though, it is obvious that many are "see-through" buildings, to use the term coined during the Texas real estate bust of the 1980s.

By Rodman's calculations, 500 million square feet of commercial real estate has been developed in Beijing since 2006, more than all the office space in Manhattan. And that doesn't include huge projects developed by the government. He says 100 million square feet of office space is vacant -- a 14-year supply if it filled up at the same rate as in the best years, 2004 through '06, when about 7 million square feet a year was leased.

"The scale of development was unprecedented anywhere in the world," said Rodman, a Los Angeles native who lives in Beijing, running a firm called Global Distressed Solutions. "It defied logic. It just doesn't make sense."

Construction cranes jut into the skyline, but increasingly they are fixed in place, awaiting fresh financing before work resumes.

Boarded fences advertise coming attractions -- "an iconic landmark" or "international wonderland" -- that are in varying states of half-completion. A retail strip in one development advertised as "La Vibrant shopping street" is empty.

In a country where protests are rare, migrant workers stand in front of several construction projects, voicing their grievances.

"Our boss ran away with the money and he is nowhere to be found," said Li Zirong, a migrant worker from Shaanxi province, who was a supervisor on a stunning building with windows shaped like portholes.

What makes this boom-and-bust cycle different from those in the West is that there is no private ownership of land in China, making local governments de facto partners in the real estate industry, which earn huge fees from leasing and transferring land.

Huang Yasheng, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, traces the blame for the bust to the Chinese Communist Party and its reluctance to allow a true market economy.

"The lack of land reform fed into the real estate bubble and now it's coming back to haunt them," said Huang, author of "Capitalism With Chinese Characteristics," published last year. "There should have been more checks and balances on the ability of the government to acquire land."

The government spent $43 billion for the Olympics, nearly three times as much as any other host city. But many of the venues proved too big, too expensive and more photogenic than practical.

The National Stadium, known as the Bird's Nest, has only one event scheduled for this year: a performance of the opera "Turandot" on Aug. 8, the one-year anniversary of the Olympic opening ceremony. China's leading soccer club backed out of a deal to play there, saying it would be an embarrassment to use a 91,000-seat stadium for games that ordinarily attract only 10,000 spectators.

The venue, which costs $9 million a year to maintain, is expected to be turned into a shopping mall in several years, its owners announced last month.

A baseball stadium that opened last spring with an exhibition game between the Dodgers and the San Diego Padres, is being demolished. Its owner says it also will use the land for a shopping mall.

Among the major Olympic venues, only the National Aquatics Center, nicknamed the Water Cube, has had a productive afterlife. It's used for sound-and-light shows, with dancing fountains in the swimming lanes where Michael Phelps won his gold medals.

All around the Olympic complex, there are cavernous empty buildings, such as the main press center for the Games, that still await tenants.

A shopping arcade that stretches for a quarter of a mile across the street from the complex is empty, the storefronts papered over with signs reading "famous stores corridor."

"They wanted to build 'the world's biggest this' and 'the world's biggest that,' but these buildings have almost zero long-term economic benefit," economist Huang said.

Moreover, the makeover of Beijing for the Olympics led to an estimated 1.5 million residents being evicted from their homes, according to the Geneva-based Center on Housing Rights and Evictions.

In this vibrant capital city of 17 million, there is an insatiable demand for housing, yet prices remain far out of reach of most residents. American-style free-standing homes are being advertised for more than $1 million in gated communities with names like Versailles, Provence, Arcadia and Riviera. Within the Fourth Ring Road, a beltway that defines the central part of the city, two- and three-bedroom apartments are offered for $800,000 in compounds named Central Park and Riverside.

"These are like New York prices, but we are Chinese. We don't have that kind of money," said Zhang Huizhan, a 55-year-old businessman who owns a Chinese furniture factory. He has been looking for five years for an apartment for him and his wife within their budget of $150,000.

The average salary in Beijing is less than $6,000 a year.

Louis Kuijs, a senior economist at the World Bank in Beijing, said a lack of government supervision of the real estate industry tempted developers to build only for the luxury market and to ignore the mass market.

"If you think demand is endless for anything you build and you have just 200 square meters of land, you will build high-end apartments to make the highest profit," Kuijs said.

To its credit, the government recognized in 2007 that the real estate market was headed toward a bubble, economists say. In an attempt to make real estate more affordable, restrictions were introduced on ownership of second homes and on foreign home buyers. But the measures came too late, accelerating the crash of an already weakening market.

The Beijing Municipal Bureau of Statistics reported this month that housing sales in the city dropped 40% last year. Chinese economists have predicted that housing prices will drop 15% to 20% in Beijing this year. Shanghai has experienced a similar decline.

"You can look at this perhaps as a healthy correction in the market," Kuijs said.

In the longer term, he said, "China's urbanization and overall development is going to lead to a very large additional demand for housing in the city."

Before that happens, the situation could get worse. Most of the real estate has been financed by Chinese banks, which have avoided writing down the loans. Eventually, they will be forced to, and that probably will have a ripple effect throughout the economy.

"At the end, somebody is going to have to pay the piper," real estate expert Rodman said.

[email protected]

Nicole Liu and Eliot Gao of The Times' Beijing Bureau contributed to this report.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-beijing-bust22-2009feb22,0,5564951.story