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Editor's Note

Beijing is increasingly falling under the sway of the 2008 Olympic Games.

From grannies in red arm bands inspecting their neighbourhoods to eliminate trash, stray animals and bad electrical wiring to school children and university-age Olympic volunteers to the highest of high-tech assaults on the capital’s housing, air quality and water problems, millions of people are at work preparing Beijing to greet the world in the summer of 2008 and to make their guests as happy and comfortable as possible during their stays.

Many silly things have been said about Beijing’s preparation for the Games, because too few understand the nature of Beijing’s modernization drive and the motives behind it. Hopefully, it will suffice to say that Beijing’s modernization was planned and began long before the city stepped into its Olympic dream on July 13, 2001. Yet, there is little doubt that winning the right to host the 2008 Games breathed additional life and an added sense of purpose into a deliberate and well-considered plan.

The importance of the Olympic and Paralympic Games can hardly be overemphasized. Yet, it is overemphasized when people do not take the time to consider that the Olympic Games is just part of a larger and even more important programme, spelled out in innumerable policy statements that guide the sustainable development of Beijing, referred to in slogans such as “New Beijing, Great Olympics” or “Green Olympics, High-Tech Olympics, People’s Olympics.”

These slogans may seem arcane to some, but make no mistake: these ideas represent the most rapid programme for positive change in the real socio-economic lives of more people than anywhere else on earth or in human history. People who take the time to visit China and Beijing and who view what has transpired under the inspiration of the 2008 Games know these changes are real, that they will be lasting, that they will benefit the entire Chinese population and the people of the world.

The VISION BEIJING film project, organized by the Beijing Foreign Cultural Exchanges Center, with the support of Beijing This Month Publications, on behalf of the Information Office of the Beijing Municipal Government, the Beijing Foreign Cultural Exchanges Association and the Beijing Tourism Administration and the people of Beijing, represents just one of many attempts being made to inform the world about the positive changes taking place in Beijing and China that the city has invited the world to come and see and feel as they also participate in the greatest sporting event in the world.

The short films of VISION BEIJING (see story on page 12) reveal the authentic enthusiasm of the ordinary people of Beijing for the 2008 Games and capture a sense of this important moment in the life of this booming international metropolis and centre of global business activity.

Join us in this adventure; you will not be disappointed, but you will be amazed.