http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08/16/AR2006081601722.html?nav=rss_world

BEIJING -- For a brief moment, China's top weather forecasters put away their computer models and formulas for temperature, wind speed and barometric pressure. Instead, they gathered around a conference table last week for a video conference, as colleagues from a southern province and Hong Kong appeared on a giant screen to predict the paths of three typhoons, all threatening China's coast.

"We always do it like this, but for the Olympics we will do it more often. Maybe every hour or eight times a day," said Yang Guiming, senior engineer for the Central Meteorological Bureau, adding that it has been suggested there be a separate forecast for every street in Beijing when the Summer Games open in 2008.

In ways large and small, the city and its people are already preparing for unprecedented changes when the Olympics open here. Two years ahead of the event, officials have shifted into high gear with improvements and upgrades, developing an advanced infrastructure for forecasting weather, planning extra security measures and tightening health standards.

An estimated 2.5 million visitors -- including 500,000 foreigners -- are expected to descend on the Chinese capital for the Games, widely seen as a defining moment for a country whose growth continues to dazzle but whose Communist government still crushes dissent.

"China is on a fast track of development toward modernization, and the Olympic Games will act as a catalyst," Wang Wei, vice president and secretary general of the Beijing Olympic Committee, said at a briefing last week. The Games will also speed up government reforms, he said, citing a slew of new laws on issues that in the past would have been handled by administrative fiat.

"For the whole society, the Olympic Games will speed up reform and opening up," he said.

Critics are not so sure, arguing instead that the Games will mask continued repression and that the media will not be permitted access to adequately cover the news. For its part, China promises otherwise. While officials refuse to lift rules forbidding journalists to travel outside Beijing without permission, they have drawn up new policies exempting accredited journalists from having to obtain visas and allowing them to drive in Beijing.

Journalists aside, officials across the city are trying to show that their capital will be ready, with a characteristic emphasis on presentation.

To ease traffic, they are considering temporarily banning cars with odd or even license plate numbers from driving at certain times. And the executive vice president of the Beijing Olympic Committee, Jiang Xiaoyu, said dedicated Olympic lanes will be used during the event. Jiang also said that at least 20,000 police officers will be deployed to maintain security during the Olympics.

Security might be beefed up in other ways, as well. Olympic officials have said they are considering facial recognition technology to spot criminals and terrorists, and have already visited a biometrics research center that has pioneered systems that work at a distance of 20 feet, in sunlight and in darkness.

Stan Z. Li, director of the center at the Chinese Academy of Sciences' Institute of Automation, said efforts to catch terrorists and criminals through intelligent surveillance still have a long way to go, "but China's technology is becoming the world's best."

To forecast the weather as precisely as possible, authorities said, China has purchased extra radar equipment, added monitoring stations and promised a forecast for every stadium in Beijing and each Chinese city hosting an event. To satisfy the International Olympic Committee, there will be a report every three hours that predicts weather for a three-day period, a tougher standard than at the Sydney Games in 2000.

Authorities also said they're working on a project that could delay or push away rain clouds that might otherwise disrupt the Games.

"For the bicycle competition, they need to know about heavy rain and strong wind. For volleyball, they worry about thunder and lightning. For the marathon, high temperature and humidity," said the director of planning for the Olympic Weather Service Committee, Wang Yubin, who is in charge of disseminating forecasts for 31 venues in 15 neighborhoods via fax, phone, Web sites and face-to-face contact. "In Qingdao, for the sailing, we will be afraid if there is not enough wind."

China would make progress without the Olympics, Wang said, but it might not get the specialized help that the Olympic spotlight brings. The World Meteorological Organization is providing a forecast demonstration project, for example, and Australia, Canada, Hong Kong and the United States are all helping with a more advanced early-warning system for big storms, he said.

Also among the major concerns for China's Olympic planners are health standards. At the Beijing Municipal Health Bureau, the most important task for Deng Xiaohong, deputy director, is to control and prevent the spread of infectious diseases, even though she will get no additional resources. After that, the bureau must guarantee the security of food and inspect Olympic venues to make sure that restaurants, swimming pools and other sources of food and water are free from disease.

Officials have outlined plans to ensure that restaurants and food stalls are up to international standards, a difficult feat considering that there were only 1,583 health inspectors for 36,000 restaurants last year and that smaller eateries and food stalls often go unchecked.

Last week, the deputy head of the Health Bureau's first inspection team, Xu Yadong, made what he said was a surprise appearance at Shun Feng Seafood World, an enormous Cantonese-style restaurant with 51 gleaming tanks of fish, lobster and baby turtles. Along with two other inspectors, Xu made sure the seafood was alive and the restaurant was clean. In the end, the team wrote up the restaurant for having cooked food in the cold food preparation area, having too much chemical cleaner in the dishwashing liquid and having a can of pineapple slices that appeared to be exposed to botulism -- all relatively minor violations.

"Preparing a safe Beijing for the Olympics is not a problem that can only be solved by inspection," Xu said. "It's a complicated system that includes the sanitation of the street, plants and special areas where the city meets the villages. The idea of environmental protection, English training, smooth traffic, safe weather -- all of this has to combine to raise the level of Beijing's living conditions."