In implementing the plan, Beijing made every effort to abide by international tendering standards and to avoid favoritism. Some of the projects in which China has invested to prepare for the games include the following:. China planned in some cases, with foreign architects and built the Olympic Park and the 37 stadiums and venues that will host Olympic events. These include 32 buildings in Beijing—19 new and 13 refurbished—and venues in five other Chinese cities—a sailing center in Qingdao and soccer stadiums in Tianjin, Qinhuangdao, Shenyang, and Shanghai.
China also constructed 59 training centers and infrastructure projects for the Paralympic Games, to be held in Beijing in September following the Olympics. The city has also built an enormous new airport terminal at the Beijing Capital International Airport and extended the toll road to the airport.
The number of tourists in Beijing has risen rapidly, a result of the increased visibility that the Olympics bring to the host country. Though estimates of the number of people who will visit China during the Olympics—or even the number of people who will visit China this year—vary significantly, it is clear that the games are a magnet for tourists.
Chen Jian, president of the Beijing Olympic Economic Research Association, estimated in the spring that Beijing will receive roughly , foreign visitors and 2. The number of hotels in Beijing has also jumped in recent years. Since China entered the WTO and won its Olympic bid, the country has reduced hotel ownership restrictions.
Starting in , foreign investors could own a majority stake in hotels, and in , wholly foreign-owned hotels were permitted. These moves cleared the way for an extensive expansion of foreign-owned hotels and other tourism facilities. Air quality, particularly in the summer, can be less than optimal, with particulate matter at alarmingly high levels. Though Beijing has taken steps to improve air quality, such as ordering coal-burning power plants to reduce emissions, construction projects to halt during the period around the Olympic games, and heavily polluting factories to move out of the city, air quality will remain a worry for the athletes who participate in the games.
The city has established new wastewater treatment plants, solid-waste processing facilities, and green belts and built a fleet of clean buses for the games.
Beijing has phased out ozone-depleting substances ahead of schedule, made use of water- or air-source heat pump systems to save energy in Olympic stadiums, replaced 47, old taxis and 7, diesel buses, and began requiring vehicles to meet EU emissions standards.
In addition, natural gas use of which is up tenfold , geothermal, and wind power are gradually replacing coal. The huge inflows of investment to support the Olympics and recreate Beijing have had an important ripple effect on economic growth, not simply in Beijing but in areas surrounding the capital.
The Beijing Statistical Bureau estimates that spending on the Olympics has added 2. Advertising spending in China, Though preparations for the Beijing Olympics have gone well, has been a difficult year for China so far, tarnishing the games in some instances and making the environment in which they will be held much more challenging.
Heavily critical foreign media coverage of the game preparations, including coverage of air pollution and tainted food, has also removed some of the shine from the image of the games. Beijing was the Games of records and superlatives.
Several hundred million watched worldwide on TV as more than 40 world records and over Olympic records were broken. Discover the lasting legacy that this edition of the Olympic Games created for its hosts. A record National Olympic Committees took part in the Games. Some 87 of them celebrated their medal-winning athletes.
Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Mauritius and Togo all experienced podium finishes for the first time. Tajikistan won its first medals thanks to Rasul Boqiev in judo and Yusup Abdusalomov in wrestling; Afghanistan stepped up on to the podium thanks to Rohullah Nikpai in taekwondo.
Badar-Uugan Enkhbat in boxing and Tuvshinbayar Naidan in judo were the first athletes from Mongolia to win a gold medal at the Olympic Games; just like Bahrain with Rachid Ramzy in athletics.
There were many memorable champions, but it was Michael Phelps and Usain Bolt who stole the headlines. Demonstrators brawled with police and security in London and Paris, where protesters succeeded in forcing the torch to be extinguished and its bearer hustled away. In San Francisco, officials shortened and changed the route to bypass angry crowds , and canceled a public ceremony.
He said they came after months of lobbying the International Olympic Committee IOC , various national and international sports associations, and Games sponsors, to raise longstanding concerns over human rights -- particularly amid Beijing's crackdown on religious and political freedoms in Chinese-controlled Tibet. Responding at the time, then-IOC president Jacques Rogge called the protests a "crisis" and said the torch relay was not "the joyous party that we wished it to be. But while they sparked fury in Beijing and caused considerable embarrassment to the IOC, the protests did not succeed in derailing the Games.
Organizers pulled out all the stops to ensure the Games were a public relations triumph, making compromises on issues such as press freedom and human rights, even promising to allow protests -- within strictly defined areas -- in the Chinese capital. Facing not just anger over the treatment of Tibetans, but outright claims of "genocide" against Uyghurs in Xinjiang , China's leaders may find it far harder to surf the wave of criticism this year than in The level of public concern about human rights abuses in China in dwarfs the outrage around the Games," she said.
Thirteen years ago, the Olympic slogan "One World, One Dream" sounded like the type of pablum typical of the Games anywhere. But now people may be a lot more wary of what exactly that Chinese "dream" might look like as China leans further into its authoritarian style of governance -- and after Xi himself adopted that phrase as one of his key slogans.
In , Beijing's hosting of the Games was seen as a potential step towards further opening up and political reform in China, but the opposite has proved to be the case. While China seems unlikely to even pay lip service to the idea of liberalization this time around, foreign governments will also be far more skeptical of any possible gains, after patting themselves on the back ahead of only to be embarrassed when few of the supposed concessions were realized. The IOC, for its part, is not pretending these Games stand a chance of influencing China's political philosophy.
Mueller, the Tibet activist, said this was typical of the IOC: "The narrative changes according to the circumstances. Back then, they said the Olympics would open the door to change More Videos Olympic Winter Games Is China ready? New challenge. While it made nominal concessions to critics ahead of , Beijing is unlikely to repeat this, said Jude Blanchette, an analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
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