All Beijingers support the hosting of the 2008 summer Olympics. There is the national pride factor but there is also a practical side to the support. The Olympics have set a deadline for the government to make the city a better place to live in.

Encouraging changes have taken place since the late 1990s, when Beijing was bidding for Games honour. Huge money has been spent, and is still being spent, on building public infrastructure and improving the environment.

Despite the pollutant fog, and the dusty winds that will perhaps keep revisiting it every early spring the city's air quality is better than in 1999, when I first came to work in the capital.

The scene of tricycles loaded with black coal bricks waiting to deliver their cargo to hutong homes is already part of the history. Coal burning for neighbourhood central heating systems, something of luxury until the 1980s, has been almost completely replaced by cleaner systems powered by natural gas.

Water quality has also improved. In 2000, I moved into BDA, a new investment area in the city's southeast. The housing prices were relatively low and it was blessed with a quiet environment. However, I was dismayed by a nearby heavily polluted, stinking river, which weaved all the way down from the western part of the city. The river was only two kilometres from the beautifully planned satellite town, and facilities of such well-known international corporations as Nokia, Coca-Cola, Bayer Pharmaceutical and Shiseidou were located on its banks.

The river has been now virtually rebuilt thanks to international finance and three major water treatment projects.

Last week, municipal environmental authorities pledged even more improvements beyond 2008, reporting a plan to reduce the capital city's atmospheric pollution by 40 per cent from now to 2010. Environmental measures include removing the production activities of the Capital Iron and Steel Co, equipping all thermal power plants with better pollution control technologies, further lowering the motor vehicle emission standards, and tightening dust control on all building sites.

There will be more water projects, most noticeably 200 kilometres of river treatment and 11 more facilities to raise Beijing's sewage treatment level to cover more than 90 per cent for the city proper.

Of course, every part of the plan will be hugely costly, and will combine to claim nearly 73 billion yuan (US$9 billion). But with that amount of money, Beijing is certain to reap healthy financial returns by attracting more international businesses and also more private buyers of its housing assets.

If Beijing had remained as it was in the mid-1990s, the Olympics would have found its way elsewhere and many companies and residents would also have moved to other places.

It is obvious the government funding of these environmental projects is legitimate and hugely beneficial, unlike the indulgence of some officials who go on tax payer-funded spending sprees on banquets and leisure trips under the disguise of conferences.

Quite the contrary, as seen amply clearly in Beijing's case, it is an important investment that lends value to everything, and every aspect of life in a city.

Officials from the nation's provinces enjoy coming to Beijing for conferences, and they all envy Beijing municipal government's speed in improving its environment with money from its own coffers and from the central government. However many of these officials still do not realize how important and significant these green improvements really are.

Such officials need to change their ideas, or their cities will not wait for them.

(China Daily 12/04/2006 page4)