Beijing starts countdown to 2008 Games

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Beijing, Aug 8: More than a million Beijingers gathered in city parks on Wednesday morning for the first of more than 60 events around China to mark the start of the one-year countdown to the 2008 Olympic Games.

The most heavily scrutinised preparations for any Games in Olympic history has brought forth a barrage of criticism for China this week on issues such as human rights abuses, press freedom, pollution, food safety and Tibet.

But, starting with a mass display of morning exercises, the Chinese people, waking up to a sunny but hazy day, finally got their chance to express their enthusiasm for the most important sporting and cultural event ever held in the country.

With no sign of any serious dent in the 95 per cent approval rating of the Games revealed by a 2001 Gallup poll, Beijingers are expected came out in force to display their support for what is being described as China's coming-out party.

''Holding the Olympic Games has been the common aspiration of all our country's peoples, something the Chinese have been waiting for 00 years,'' the Communist Party's newspaper, the People's Daily, quoted top government officials as saying.

''In a year's time .... the century-long dream of the Chinese people will come true.'' But the China Daily cautioned against too much early optimism and said there remained a lot of work to do, especially after recent rain storms flooded streets and brought traffic to a standstill, showing the inadequacy of Beijing's drainage.

''Without major operations on the current network, there is no guarantee such incidents will not be repeated next summer,'' it said in an editorial.

Gala Celebration

The next stage of preparations for the Games begins in earnest later in the day when the first heats of the world junior rowing championships take place at the Shunyi venue.

This is the first of 26 Olympic test events taking place this year.

The main event of the day will be the gala celebration in front of 10,000 people on Tiananmen Square, where troops put down the 1989 pro-democracy demonstrations with huge loss of life.

Olympic chief Jacques Rogge will be on hand with Chinese political leaders to watch a countdown clock run down to exactly 366 days to go 2008 is a leap year at 0538 hrs on the eighth day of the eighth month, an auspicious date and time.

The International Olympic Committee president will also host a ceremony in which more than 200 countries and regions will be formally invited to take part in next year's Games.

The government is taking no chances with the weather, either.

With afternoon showers forecast, the capital's meteorological bureau has placed its artificial cloud-bursting arsenal on alert, according to the Beijing News.

''The forecast for August 8 is not too good, but the weather should be fine for the evening ceremony,'' it said.

The paper quoted Song Lianchun, a meteorological official, as saying the weather manipulation bureau was prepared to conduct a ''rain prevention'' exercise using planes, cannon and rocket launchers to fire chemicals into threatening clouds.

While the 24-outlook was optimistic, ''there's no certainty that the forecast won't change in just a few hours'', Song said.

Reuters>