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| Sunday, 31 March 2002 |
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Beijing to spend 22 billion dollars on preparations for 2008 Olympics by Jonathan Ansfield BEIJING, March 29 (Reuters) - Mayor Liu Qi unveiled Beijing's clearest vision yet of what people will see at the 2008 Olympics, pledging on Thursday a city free of choking sandstorms and traffic and open to all prospective builders. At the same time Liu, outlining Beijing's "action plan" for the Games, tried to quell concerns that the Chinese capital's sweeping Olympic makeover would spell the demise of the cherished old city. "In the course of building a modern city, the cultural relics and preserved areas provided for in the plans will be effectively preserved and other places will be modernised to better people's lives," Liu told a news conference. By 2007, green space would cover 45 percent of the notoriously dusty and smoggy city centre and forests would blanket 50 percent of Beijing municipality's total area after three green belts are planted in outlying mountains, said Liu, also the president of Beijing's Organising Committee for the Olympic Games (BOCOG). He vowed the city would rein in sandstorms related to drought and overgrazing further north, just a week after a dust storm tagged the region's worst in a decade turned the skies over Beijing a macabre orange. "Before 2005, we will basically eliminate sandstorms originating in local areas. By 2007, we basically bring the desert land under control," said Liu. He added that polluting factories would all be relocated outside the fourth ring road or shut down in Beijing, where many smokestacks trumpeted as a paragon of Maoism have already been overshadowed or replaced by luxury high-rises. Many state-owned plants in the urban core are due to close anyway, like a car factory where retirees have clamoured for long overdue pension payments in protests this week. New image Beijing's self-billed "Green Olympics, High-tech Olympics and People's Olympics" aimed to "build up a new image of reform and opening-up for the capital", said Liu. He called "unliveable", "old and dangerous" housing in Beijing's rustic but ramshackle courtyard neighbourhoods, where stepped up bulldozing levelled more than 70,000 households in 2001, 10 times the number in 1990. Congested, sprawling Beijing would see a new age of "easy, swift and safe transportation" with the building of live rail lines, an express rail to the airport, and an intelligence system to direct traffic, said Liu. Beijing has said it would spend some $22 billion on preparations for the Summer Games. "Frugality will be kept in mind throughout the preparations," said Liu. Vice-mayor Liu Jingmin told the news conference the city would invest $1.44 billion on 19 new venues for the Games, six of them temporary, and another $1.94 billion to retool and expand existing facilities. He said Beijing, reportedly pondering a special bond issue among its plans to "marketise" the Olympics, would find ways to make the venues profitable in the long term -- perhaps even a swimming centre with an artificial beach for patrons to tan. City officials made assurances of transparent, open bidding and investment for every project, including the commission to design the Olympic park, which could be given to an architect abroad. The mayor said the park in north Beijing would not be crowned by the twin towers presented in a model by Beijing's bid committee a year ago -- an idea rumoured to have been abandoned after September 11. "We hope the structure will be symbolic, but we don't know what it will be," he said. "It definitely will not be the twin towers." |
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