Top overseas consultant to the Beijing Olympics - revealed!

Some feel that he may only have been brought in recently, perhaps as a replacement for Mr Spielberg; but I think he must have been working behind the scenes for some time now.

Consider these recent news stories about the preparations for this year's Olympic Games:

Jane Macartney of The Times tips us off that Beijing is beginning a massive pre-Olympic clean-up of the city's large population of stray cats, which may result in as many as 200,000 animals being put down. Offers from animal rights groups and shelters to provide alternative solutions, or to at least assist with the humane disposal of the condemned kitties have, of course, been spurned. (Likely result: A plague of rats! Do you think Dr E is just messing with Beijing, plotting to visit a string of Biblical calamities upon the city to punish it for its Olympic hubris??)

And then the Financial Times has this story on the lunatic escalation of Olympic Beijing's demands for additional water supplies from the provinces. Much of north central China is a horrendous dustbowl already, and if the capital's depradations continue on this scale (300 million cubic metres of water being demanded just to flush out the city's sewage-clogged public waterways?!), then large areas of the country could be plunged into catastrophic drought. An Qiyuan, a party official from hard-hit Shaanxi province, has had the temerity to speak out about this on the eve of the present National People's Congress session. I doubt he'll ever be heard from again.

It is, of course, somewhat old news (The Wall Street Journal was on the case a couple of months ago) that Beijing has been trying to cloak its disastrous Air Pollution Index figures by taking some of the most smog-dense downtown measuring stations out of the city average, but The Peking Duck blog last week published a letter recently circulated to members of the Foreign Correspondents' Club of China by an American environmental consultant offering detailed documentation of this petty subterfuge - a particularly embarassing revelation in view of the fact that one Du Shaozhong, an official of the Beijing Environmental Protection Agency, had recently issued a flat-out denial that this had been done. Ha!

And I think I have mentioned on here before (though I forget where) that the city's approach to clearing up the drug 'problem' is to periodically arrest (and/or beat the crap out of) every gentleman of colour caught on the streets of the Sanlitun bar district. There have been rumours (I haven't seen this written up anywhere yet, but give it time...) that the authorities here would like to rescind all visas issued to Africans (it does seem to be Africans that monopolize the drug dealing here, but this is hardly an appropriate response to that fact) and not grant any more - at least for the rest of this year. I suppose they might just possibly be willing to consider making a few exceptions for people who could prove that they were bona fide Olympic competitors. Then again..... it could be a useful way for China to improve its medal haul in the long-distance running events.

In fact, it seems increasingly as though the Beijing Visa Office is determined to hound as many of us laowai as possible - of whatever skin colour - out of the country before August, by making it next-to-impossible for us to renew our visas (more on this at a later date). What larks!

And of course, the classic 'evil villain' stratagem of manipulating the weather - well, Beijing's been doing that for years! Not content with raping the water supplies of the provinces to the west, the capital also 'steals' water from places further east, like Tianjin (and, er, Korea?), by manically shooting down every single cloud that hoves into view with barrages of rockets and artillery shells loaded with cloud-seeding silver iodide crystals. And annual quotas of 'blue sky' days are regularly met by the simple expedient of closing down all the factories for a couple of hundred kilometres upwind every once in a while. Only in a totalitarian country could you act on this scale - and keep on getting away with it. Dr Evil must be having the time of his life!

Measures like these not only score impressively on the EVIL-ness scale, but are also gob-smackingly misguided, unnecessary, self-harming, downright STUPID..... and an all-around PR disaster. And we're only a couple of months into the Olympic year: there will, I'm afraid, be much, much more of this sort of thing to come.

It is perhaps a little unfortunate that racist 'security' measures against blacks and Muslims, or looming environmental catastrophe, drought, and famine will probably raise fewer eyebrows in the West than the current gatticide. Oh, well - so long as people start taking notice, for whatever reason. If we can start with saving a few moggies, maybe we can then get the Beijing authorities to start behaving more sensibly on some of these other things.

EVIL must be stopped. Where's Austin Powers when you need him?