China nicely into its stride in preparation for Olympics

Letter from Beijing:As the green Beijing taxi with its orange band pulled up outside my office, I reached through the protective grille surrounding the driver to pay the 11 yuan, about €1, on the meter, thanking the driver in Chinese and bidding him farewell. As I did so, the driver pointed to the meter and said, in English: "Eleven." Then he said "Bye Bye", too, leaving me dumbstruck on the pavement.

"Please wait a moment," said the waitress in the tiny jiaozi (dumpling) restaurant not far from my home. This is a place where people barely speak Mandarin - instead, they speak a regional dialect difficult for Beijingers to understand. But now the staff are brushing up on their English.

We have just passed the point where there are 500 days to go until the Olympics open in Beijing, and the impending games have wrought innumerable changes to the city's landscape, but this use of English is evidence that something is also changing in people's minds. The attempt to transform Beijing into an Olympic city, a key point in the focusing of Chinese national pride for the past five or six years, is starting to become a reality.

English is not widely spoken in China - in nearly four years there I have never heard a taxi driver speak it. There are supposedly 120 million people learning English in China, but they are mostly shy about trying out their new language skills. Occasionally you will hear "Bye Bye", which is an import from Hong Kong, where this is the common way to say goodbye.

But to hear numbers in English was a surprise.

Anyone planning to travel from Ireland for the Olympic Games is strongly advised to bring a Mandarin phrasebook with them. There is a lot of goodwill around, but little competence to back it up. Most restaurants, hospitals and government buildings are generally staffed by people who do not speak English, or by people with a token grasp of the language. Hotels usually have one English speaker.

But China is a deeply pragmatic country, and things are changing, as the taxi driver's ability to count in English shows.

Back in 2002 the Beijing city government instituted the Beijing speaks foreign language programme to prepare the citizens to communicate with an expected 500,000 overseas visitors during the games. The programme includes lectures, songs and tapes and CDs designed to improve English language skills in the capital.

English is now a key part of China's education system and is compulsory in the schools from primary to university level.

The excitement level in advance of the games is rising all the time, with more and more Olympic symbols popping up. Huge construction projects are still being worked on, but there are fewer start-ups, and you can begin to get an idea of what the city will look like by next year, when much of the construction should be finished in areas such as the Central Business District.

Everyone wants to have at least a couple of words to say to the foreigners who will arrive for the games. Sometimes late at night you will find a taxi driver seated in his cab listening to a language tape and repeating "Greetings", "China welcomes you" and other phrases. But the bashful cabbies rarely make the leap of actually saying something in English. Taxi drivers are expected to attend "study sessions" at which they learn some basic English, although my driver's vocabulary went beyond the usual "Welcome to Beijing" which the cabbies are taught.

Serious efforts are also going into improving people's manners ahead of the games. Those queuing for buses are encouraged to be more orderly and spitting is frowned on, although not with the same conviction, it must be said, as in Hong Kong a few years back, which led to the territory becoming a phlegm-free zone in a very short time.

Taxi drivers are the focus of many of the Olympic changes. A delegate to China's annual parliament took aim at the odour of stale tobacco and garlic which pervades most taxis in the city. He said that about one-third of Beijing's 67,000 cabs were appallingly smelly and urged an end to cabbies sleeping in their vehicles. He also said that drivers should bathe more often to avoid giving a bad impression to Olympic visitors.

Some changes in Beijing ahead of the Olympics are more bizarre than others.

Retired restaurateur Guo Zhanqi is buying flies for two yuan each (about 20 cents) to help clean up the city for the games.

This campaign is a reminder of Chairman Mao Zedong's campaign against the "Four Harms" in the 1950s, which targeted rats, sparrows, flies and mosquitoes.

Mr Guo is giving cash to anyone who presents him with the dead insects and is trying to encourage a nationwide anti-fly campaign.

The Beijing organisers have taken advice from the security chiefs of the last two summer games, in Sydney and Athens, on how to keep the 2008 Olympics safe.

China has made much of relying on its own security forces and believes that it can deliver a secure games for a fraction of the €1.34 billion which Athens paid in 2004.