Houston Community News >> China Calls for Clean and Green Games

1/30/2008 Beijing-- Beijing must make sure this summer's Olympic Games are environmentally friendly and untainted by corruption, China's top decision-making body, the Politburo, has said.

With the eyes of the world fixed upon China, the government is sparing no effort to ensure its people do no embarrass the nation, either through "uncivilized" behavior, such as spitting or protesting in the streets.

"The holding of the Olympics is the common aspiration of all our country's peoples and it is what the Chinese nation has been waiting for for a century," the official Xinhua news agency said in a summary of the meeting, chaired by President Hu Jintao.

"It is also our solemn responsibility and obligation towards international society. Uphold the guiding principle of holding an energy-saving, thrifty, honest and upright Olympics, soundly go about every work project," Xinhua said, using typically stilted Chinese laced with Communist slogans.

Xinhua said those at Tuesday's meeting discussed the importance of "culture, etiquette, friendliness and being hospitable".

"Show off the results of our country's reforms and opening up and construction of modernization and socialism, show off the flourishing of our people reaching ever higher," it added.

(Contributed by International Herald Tribune)