Beijing: ‘The Sanitized City’?

As we’ve noted, China has been tidying up its restaurant menus—both in terms of ingredients and language—in the lead-up to the Olympics next month. But, says the Globe and Mail’s Geoffrey York, the clean-up is about more than food, and it’s going too far. “China’s capital city is being sanitized and sterilized to within an inch of its life,” he writes in a recent blog post. “It’s being cleaned and tidied and swept up to the point where it feels like an artificial replica of itself.”

I was especially interested to read his lament for the loss of Beijing’s more chaotic side, since I’ll be visiting the city for the start of the Games. I’ll be a first-timer in Beijing, and though I enjoyed York’s post, I hope he’s wrong when he writes: “If you happen to be visiting Beijing during the Olympics, you won’t really understand what this city is all about.”

Photo by Montrasio International via Flickr (Creative Commons).

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