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Commentary: Striving for Success in Beijing's Olympic Bid
At the recent plenary session of the Executive Committee of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), after careful screening, Beijing, Paris and three others were decided to be the candidate cities for hosting the 2008 Olympic Games, thus raising the curtain for a new round of decisive rivalry.
The tremendous changes taken place over the past 20-odd years of reform and opening up in Beijing, a municipality of a developing country, have been acknowledged by the world and won universal praises. If Beijing can win the right to host the 2008 Olympic Games, it will not only facilitate the popularization and development of the Olympic sporting activities in a wider range, but will also be of special importance to promoting exchange and cooperation between China and the rest of the world, accelerating the pace of China's reform and opening up, propelling the economic development and scientific and technological progress of Beijing and the whole of China and raising the people's cultural and material living standards.
In less than one year's time, the IOC will decide the city to host the 2008 Olympic Games, so the tasks placed before Beijing people are heavy and arduous. As a candidate city, Beijing has possessed necessary conditions for holding the Olympics, however, a lot of work remains to be further improved. The pressing task at the moment is to "mobilize the resources of the whole city and pool the wisdom of all quarters", and do all fields of work of Beijing well in a down-to-earth manner. We should set high standards, uphold high quality and pursue high efficiency. While speeding up the pace of infrastructure construction and optimizing the urban ecological environment, we should pay attention to the portrayal of Beijing's image and foreign publicity, letting the world understand Beijing which is experiencing rapid economic development and witnessing flourishing urban construction; whose ancient and modern cultures add radiance and beauty to each other; and where the process of modernization is constantly accelerating and people's material and cultural level is rising with each passing day.
As the step of the Sydney Olympics is drawing near, Chinese top-notch athletes, with the will to "combat tenaciously to win honor for the motherland", will hurry to the venue of the Olympic Games, they will annotate the "higher, quicker and stronger" Olympic concept with their perseverance and strenuous efforts and express the Chinese people's confidence and sincerity in pursuing the Olympic ideals, participating in the Olympic affairs and their willingness to make contributions to the development of the Olympic Games.
As the lines of a poem go:
Idle boast the strong pass is a wall of iron,
With firm strides we are crossing its summit.
Beijing's becoming a candidate city is only an initial progress gained in the work of its Olympic bid, more arduous tasks and more intense trial of strength are yet to come. Our future work requires double efforts which admit of not the slightest slackening; Beijing people should create better conditions for eventually winning the right to host the 2008 Olympic Games and make a good start for an all-round development in the new century.
(This article, published on page 5, September 7 issue, of the People's Daily, is written by one of the paper's commentators)
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