Chinanews, Beijing, Nov. 8 ¨C Judging from various factors, it can be concluded that the economy in Beijing will not witness big fluctuations and the valley effect will not occur during the post-Olympic era, said Song Yu, an official at the Beijing Municipal Development and Reform Commission, on Monday.

He made the statement when delivering a report at the Eleventh Beijing-Hong Kong Economic Cooperation Symposium.

Compared with the other Olympic Games host cities, Beijing has a different developmental status. Its urbanization process, special features and external environment are all very different from the other cities, Song said.

In Beijing, the Olympic construction fits well with the city’s own urbanization process. The city’s consumption structure shift and the industrial structure upgrade have provided a solid basis to ensure that the city’s economy will grow steadily in future. Judging from its internal economic structure, it can be seen that in 2007, 80% of the investment in Beijing came from society and investment in Olympic construction accounted for less than 10% of the total investment. After the Olympic Games, the city’s economic construction will be shifted to its city infrastructure construction, environmental protection and rural construction, Song said.

From a larger point of view, the Circum-Bohai Bay area near Beijing is making a fast economic progress at present. This will also act as a strong boost for the capital’s economy, Song noted.

In recent years, Beijing has outlined a comprehensive program for the city’s construction during and after the Olympic Games. According to this program, Beijing will balance the development between urban and rural areas and make efforts to build some new towns and townships in the city’s downtown area. The Beijing municipal government plans to develop the capital into six major functional zones. All these plans are aimed to make sure that the city’s economic construction will remain robust after the Olympic Games, Song said.

Chinanews, Beijing, November 7 ¨C According to Liu Jingmin, deputy mayor of Beijing and vice chairman of BOCOG, the detailed innovation and technical plans for both the opening and closing ceremonies of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games have been endorsed, and are now in the course of implementation.

The theme for both ceremonies will be harmony and civilization, particularly the evolution of the Chinese civilization and its fusion with world civilization.

The torch tower of the Games is also under construction.

¡°By now, 27 of the 37 Olympic stadiums and gyms have been completed, and the rest will be completed before next February,¡± said Liu.

Liu also admitted that the enthusiasm of the Chinese people for the Olympic Games had been underestimated, which had led to the paralysis of the online ticketing office. The rest tickets will be sold according to the result of ballot, so that no such problems will occur again, said Liu.

(Source: China Daily)Nov.6 - The second stage of Olympic ticket sales will revert to a lottery draw, the Games organizers said Monday.

The announcement comes days after sales - meant to be on a first-come, first-served basis - were suspended last Tuesday when the booking system crashed as a result of overwhelming demand on the first day.

The change aims to reflect a people-oriented policy and to adhere to “the principles of fairness, impartiality, and convenience to the public”, the Beijing Organizing Committee for the Games of the XXIX Olympiad (BOCOG) said on its official website.

Ticket applications will be accepted from December 10 to 30.

But BOCOG stressed that those who registered last Tuesday at designated Bank of China branches and through the BOCOG Ticketing Call Center still have priority in purchasing tickets.

The purchase guidelines for those buyers will be announced later. About 43,000 tickets were sold before the service was suspended at 6 pm last Tuesday and BOCOG had promised that those tickets orders remain valid.

The cap for the number of tickets in the lottery will also be modified - the original limit was 50 each. The new ticket limit and the date for the lottery draw will be announced later.

The 1.6 million tickets sold during the first stage between April and August were allocated by lottery, including 63,000 for the opening and closing ceremonies at the National Stadium.

The second stage of the sales had about 1.85 million tickets on sale through websites, a hotline and designated Bank of China branches.

According to the Beijing Olympic Ticketing Center, the official ticketing website (www.tickets.beijing2008.cn) saw 8 million hits in the first hour starting 9 am, while the ticketing hotline received 3.8 million calls.

Rong Jun, director of the ticketing center, said organizers “underestimated the situation and enthusiasm of people, and did not prepare fully and have a good contingency plan” after the suspension and apologized to the public.

BOCOG officials said they have held a series of discussions on the technical problems and taken suitable measures.

A total of 7 million tickets are available for the Beijing Games, with some 75 percent reserved for domestic sales. In the third phase - from April to August next year - tickets will be released on a first-come, first-served basis.

Chinanews, Beijing, November 6 ¨C According to a report by CCTV International, the building of the Laos National Sports Park was started on November 1, 2007, in Vientiane, the capital of the country. The State Development Bank of China, Suzhou Industrial Park, and Yunnan Engineering Construction Group are responsible for the project.

The park will be the biggest comprehensive sport facility in Laos, with an indoor swimming pool, a tennis court, a shooting range and a large stadium that can hold 20,000 spectators at a time. The park will be used as a major venue for the 25th Southeast Asian Games in 2009.

Most parts of Laos remain untouched by human hands, and 30% of Vientiane is covered by forest. The builders of the park well appreciate the good eco-environment of the country and they have promised to build an eco-friendly park, particularly to preserve a 4-hectare primary forest in the park.

(Source: China Daily)Nov.5 - Beijing’s first government data pool and emergency command center has commenced operations.

The center will operate during and after the Olympics.

The Digital Beijing Building, located a few hundred meters northwest of the National Stadium, the main stadium for the Games, will be the central powerhouse of all statistical, visual and audio information from all 37 venues nationwide during the Olympics.

The center will be able to receive live images from spectator stands at all venues, sources told China Daily.

The center, 11 storeys high and two levels below ground, will continue to be the government’s command headquarters in the event of an emergency after the Games.

“Here we have access to the cell phone network, the land phone network, the government’s network and the police network, either cable or wireless networks. That’s why we are able to respond as the command headquarters in times of an emergency,” an official from the municipality’s IT office, who requested anonymity, said.

“Because we have been working with five telecom and Internet service providers, we are basically a telecom headquarters.”

Experts said that with such a network, the city would be able to track phone and Internet communications in the event of a terrorist attack.

“Unlike the US where reportedly 100 percent of phone communications and 80 percent of Web communications are monitored, our country has not obtained advanced technologies like that,” said Liu Jianwei, an electronics information expert from Beijing-based Beihang University.

“At the moment, problems like web communication filtering have not been solved. But I believe both citizens and the technical personnel should conduct themselves under the framework of the law.”

What’s in a name is more than just the Games

The Beijing Olympics has become so embedded in the national psyche that nearly 3,500 children have been named after the Games by their parents, a newspaper reported Sunday.

Most of the 3,491 people with the name “Aoyun,” meaning Olympics, were born around the year 2000, when Beijing was bidding to host the 2008 Summer Games, the Beijing Daily reported, citing information from China’s national identity card database.

The vast majority of people named Aoyun are male, the newspaper said. Only six live in Beijing, though the report didn’t say where the others live.

Names related to the Olympics don’t just stop with “Olympics.” More than 4,000 Chinese share their names with the Beijing Games mascots, the Fuwa.

The names are Bei Bei (880 people), Jing Jing (1,240), Huan Huan (1,063), Ying Ying (624) and Ni Ni (642). When put together, the phrase translates to “Beijing welcomes you!”

Chinese have increasingly turned to unique names as a way to express a child’s individuality.

In a country with a population of 1.3 billion, 87 percent share the same 129 family names. That’s why 5,598 people have the same name as basketball player Yao Ming and 18,462 share a moniker with star hurdler Liu Xiang, according to the Beijing Daily report.

(Source: China Daily)Nov.2 - They come from eight different countries but have one thing in common: A love for China.

Their understanding of the country is profound; their commitment, uplifting; their vision, inspiring; and passion, contagious.

And they moved many as they articulated why they deserve to be the eight foreigners privileged to carry the Olympic torch in China.

Thursday, they were unveiled by computer maker Lenovo as the eight expats nominated after a month-long online campaign.

Applicants were asked to submit a profile justifying their candidacy, then frogmarched through a public online vote. After that, a selection panel made up of Lenovo Group officials and China Daily executives had the final say.

In a bid to restrict the winners to one per country, and keep the program as cosmopolitan as possible, two Americans were axed from the final list despite garnering enough votes to secure a place.

The eight foreign residents who will each carry the torch for 200 meters on Chinese soil next year are, in order of winning votes: Jenny Bowen of the US, Marcos Torres of the Philippines, Werner Ebel of Germany, Meena Barot of India, Yoshitoshi Mizuya of Japan, Luis Hong-Sanchez of Colombia, Yury Ilyakhin of Russia and British-Venezuelan Deirdre Smyth.

The campaign was organized by Lenovo Group, the worldwide partner of the Olympic torch relay, with the help of China Daily, the country’s only national English-language newspaper.

Some 262 people from 47 countries and regions vied for the eight available slots and another 245,000 voted with their mouse. Altogether, 1.5 million people comprising 156 nationalities visited the campaign webpage.

Applicants, votes and comments poured in from all around the world after the online campaign began on September 7, said Alice Li, vice-president, Olympic Marketing of Lenovo.

“This demonstration of enthusiasm, creativity and sense of international community is consistent with the Olympic spirit, which cherishes the participation and unification of different cultures and peoples,” she said. “It greatly helped Lenovo increase its brand influence.”

The winners were chosen by a vote, but in order to be shortlisted they had to demonstrate their appreciation of Chinese culture and history and their devotion to communicating information about “the real China” to the rest of the world.

The oldest contestant was 88-year-old Eleanor Liu and the youngest was four-year-old Serena Gao. Both were born in the United States.

Although Gao ranked sixth according to the number of votes, she was disqualified for not meeting the minimum age requirement of 14.

Many prominent political figures, including the ambassadors of Greece and the Seychelles, could not make it to the final eight, as did leading business figures like the presidents of Bayer Healthcare and Chang’an Ford Mazda Automobile Co.

In the campaign, as in the Olympics, contestants entered a very level playing field and performed according to their own merit.

In addition to the required campaign stories, themed “China and I”, which were published on the China Daily website along with the candidates’ photos, some applicants engaged a variety of mass media to promote themselves.

Some cooperated with newspapers, television and radio station in China or in their home country to solicit votes, others opted for personal blogs.

Some formed groups on popular social networking websites like FaceBook, while others uploaded campaign videos on websites like Youtube.

The organizers of the Beijing Olympic Games began recruiting 21,880 torchbearers from around the world on June 23 through various organizations and entities.

Exactly 19,400 people will be picked to run in China.