Olympic Trials for Polluted Beijing

BEIJING -- Less than a decade ago, this city was an industrial wasteland. The sky could be seen from Beijing's ancient monuments less than a third of the year. Nearby lakes were so contaminated that they couldn't be used to water crops. And children were warned not to play outside in the noxious air.

So when China applied to host the 2008 Olympics, it encountered deep skepticism about its ability to pull off the feat in one of the world's most populous and polluted cities. There was real concern about athletes choking on chemical-laden air as they ran the 100-meter dash.

Seven years and $40 billion later, the Chinese have had remarkable success on many fronts. Practically every construction project is running ahead of schedule. The Chinese can brag of heroic feats of logistics and engineering: the "bird's nest" latticework of the 91,000-seat Olympic Stadium, the shimmering blue skin of the Water Cube aquatics center, a 70-mile high-speed railway, four new subway lines, an energy-efficient airport terminal.

But Beijing still has not conquered its pollution. Nearly 50 years after Mao Zedong's "war on nature" felled trees to make room for steel plants in the administrative capital and reversed rivers to provide irrigation, the Chinese government is finding that undoing the environmental damage and turning Beijing into a green showcase in time for the Olympics is no small task. China has only 16 months before 550,000 overseas visitors pile into a city of more than 15 million.

"Beijing has made significant progress compared to a few years ago, but just by looking outside you can see the pollution is still very bad," said Lo Sze Ping, campaign director for Greenpeace China. As he spoke, an acrid gray haze hung over the city.

Air pollution was greatly reduced in the initial years of Beijing's cleanup campaign, and by 2002 the number of "blue sky days" nearly doubled, to more than 200. Now, levels of ozone and other pollutants meet international norms. But for the past two years, fine soot in the air has failed to dissipate and still hasn't reached acceptable levels.

Several hundred million trees were planted in the capital, but moths descended on them, stripping much of the foliage that was supposed to absorb carbon dioxide emissions. And despite efforts to conserve water and process sewage more thoroughly, the most recent tests of nearby rivers and lakes showed that many are still badly polluted.

Chinese environmental officers say they are proud of their progress and that Beijing should be judged not by international standards but by how much it has improved.

"People who come here for the first time feel that the environment and the air is not good," said Yu Xiaoxuan, deputy director for construction and environment for the Beijing Organizing Committee for the Games. "But they do not know how bad the pollution was several years ago."

Longtime Beijing residents say the change is striking. Bo Guoping, 60, a retired factory worker who on a recent weekend was flying a kite in one of the city's new parks with her grandson, remarked: "These days, we can see the sky. Before, it was all gray."

Members of the International Olympic Committee have repeatedly said how impressed they are with China's progress but have singled out air pollution as a challenge. Just this month on a visit to Beijing, IOC Vice Chairman Ludmilla Linberg urged city officials to further improve air quality.

Beijing is a 65-square-mile expanse of flatland surrounded by a desert that is fast encroaching because of massive deforestation. It wasn't until 2000, when the city was applying to host the Olympics, that the government began to take seriously the environmental consequences of its actions. That summer, a series of ferocious sandstorms hit, turning the sky yellow, closing the airport and filling hospitals with people who couldn't breathe. Even the state-run media lambasted the government for failing to anticipate the problem.