Olympic smile training

Beijing hopes to win over Olympic audiences with ushers who have studied the art of learning to smile.

"Your smile is Beijing's best reputation" is the official motto for Beijing's Olympic volunteers.

Athletes aren't the only ones in training for this year's Olympics. Beijing locals are getting smiling lessons to prepare them for their part in the Games pageant.

For 16-year-old Li Miaomiao, sore feet from wearing high heels for hours at a time and an achy jaw from constant smiling are worth the chance of hanging a medal around an athlete's neck come the Beijing Olympics.

The willow-thin high school student is one of 34 Chinese girls "training" to be an Olympic medal presenter at the Beijing Foreign Affairs School, one of several state-run colleges charged with producing camera-friendly girls for awards ceremonies.

When not balancing books on her head to improve posture during medal presentation rehearsal sessions, Li and her classmates study English, cultural training and look at pictures of past medal presenters and their uniforms. Most important for Li, though, is the smile.

"I practise at home, and smile to the mirror for an hour every day," Li said, beaming radiantly in a red waistcoat and high heels on the sidelines of a class.

"I want to present my smile to the world, and let them know that the Chinese smile is the warmest."

Beijing has earmarked about $40billion to put on its best face for the Games, with Olympic venues accounting for only a small percentage.

Along with big-ticket items such as subways and roads, Beijing has spent billions more on a beautification campaign that has seen whole neighbourhoods razed and thousands of residents displaced.

But even as the paint dries on Olympic venues completed months ahead of schedule, officials remain concerned that Beijingers' manners may spoil the party. The fears have triggered a massive public relations campaign to eradicate rougher Chinese habits such as spitting, and have mobilised hundreds of "civilisation" volunteers to teach people to queue when boarding buses and subway carriages.

"Building the software for the Olympics is much harder than building the hardware," said Beijing Foreign Affairs School director Li Zhiqi.

"Personal qualities and mentality are firmly ingrained and therefore hard to change."

Li says her school, which will also produce staff to wait on International Olympic Committee officials at their hotel, is doing its bit to mould well-mannered, natural communicators to deal with foreign guests. "This is a huge opportunity for them. The Olympics will put them in front of the world's audience and lead to a lifetime of fortune," Li said.

That is, if they make the grade. Not unlike the more than 800,000 Chinese who have applied for only 100,000 Olympic volunteer positions on offer, the competition to become one of the coveted 380-odd medal presenters is cutthroat.

The 34 hopefuls at the school are up against specialist dance colleges, universities and possibly winners of regional contests across the country, Li said.

Applicants are also up against biological constraints.

"Girls must be at least 1.63 metres tall ... There are no real weight restrictions but they mustn't be too heavy," Li said, citing selection criteria from the Cultural Activities Department of Beijing's Organising Committee for the Games.

While Zhao Dongming, the department's director, said the guidelines were so applicants could "fit into the uniforms being provided", rights groups have cried discrimination.

"In planning the Olympics, officials at the highest levels of government should publicly condemn discrimination rather than reinforce harmful stereotypes and unfair hiring practices," Brad Adams, Asia executive director of Human Rights Watch said in a statement.

Further exacting standards are demanded from Beijing Foreign Affairs School's students, some of whom attended an intensive summer training camp in the city's northern outskirts, sleeping in dormitories and rising early to take classes in etiquette and deportment.

Apart from commonsense communication tips, such as looking directly at someone while talking to them, students are also informed the perfect smile consists of "only showing the eight top teeth", said 17-year-old student Li Bogeng, who wants to make cocktails for IOC officials.

For Li Miaomiao, who stands at 1.73 metres and unblinkingly rattles off her vital statistics when asked, the perfect smile comes naturally after having practiced for hours in the mirror. It no doubt helped Li become one of only seven girls chosen from dozens of applicants to present medals to winning boxers at an Olympic test event in Beijing in November.

In a similar course at a vocational college in the Beijing suburbs that began last year, the girls' parents have not been permitted to visit them.

On the day photojournalist Justin Jin goes to the college, the women are standing in line with books balanced on their heads and chopsticks between their teeth, learning to smile and stand up straight. They are not the only ones being taught new skills. At metro stations, youth league activists try to initiate a culture of orderly queueing. "Stand in line with me," say the large signs they carry along the platform.

A new arm of Government, the Ministry for the Promotion of a Spiritual Civilisation, is in charge of the effort to spread Western-style "good manners". Among their new sanctions is a 50 yuan ($8) fine for spitting on the street.

At a language class entitled "Crazy English", Jin is introduced to 600 petrochemical students eager to show off their grammar.

"Your resistance gives me strength," they shout as one, waving their red instruction pamphlets in the air. The teacher, Li Yang, was confident his students would show a welcoming face to Olympic competitors and spectators.

"In the past, foreigners were seen as monsters or extraterrestrials," he said. "But 2008 will be a turning point. Our country will become more open, more civilised and stronger."

Wang Xiaoshan, a journalist at the Chinese edition of Sports Illustrated, takes a more cynical view. "Anyone who comes to Beijing in August, 2008 will have a great impression of the place ... But I can tell you today: everything you see will be a deception. The traffic will flow because half of the cars will be barred from driving. The air will be fresh and clean because the factories will be temporarily closed. There won't be any beggars on the street because they'll all be behind bars. And the sun will shine, because any rain clouds approaching the city will be shot down."

Source: The Sun-Herald




Video Source: Reuters