Chinese unhappy with preparation for Asiad
Beijing, Oct. 20: Thousands of petitioners in southern China have aired their grievances about forced evictions and unpaid pensions ahead of next month’s Asian Games to be held in Guangzhou, state press said on Wednesday.
Nearly 4,000 people attended a meeting hosted by Guangzhou’s top Communist Party official and the city’s mayor to complain about alleged injustices in the run-up to the Games, which begin on November 12, the Global Times reported.
After seven years of painstaking preparations, Guangzhou — the southern city at the heart of China’s economic miracle — has reinvented itself for the Asiad, the biggest global sporting event after the Olympics.
Officials have admitted that Games preparations have been fraught with snags, including massive traffic jams during construction and the eviction of numerous unhappy residents to make room for scores of new building projects.
Just as Beijing did before the 2008 Olympics, Guangzhou has poured billions of dollars into infrastructure projects ahead of the Asiad, such as a new rail station, a trade centre, subway lines, housing projects, highways and bridges.
Some residents have also complained that the money poured into the Games could be better spent on social welfare programmes and well being.
Hundreds of the petitioners camped out the night before the Monday meeting in an effort to confront the leaders with their grievances, the paper said.
So many people attended the meeting that it ran two-and-a-half hours longer than planned, it said.
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