New China? Bird's Nest replaces Mao on yuan

Tiananmen Square has been spruced up to include a large flower decoration and a 55-foot-tall Beijing 2008 Olympic symbol.

While a few short protests by foreigners were held there early in the games — and were quickly ended by a heavy police presence — a more common sight has been dancing and other activities on a government-sanctioned cultural program.

For foreigners too, the government “wants people to shift their responses beyond the man standing in front of the tank,” said Anne-Marie Brady, a political scientists at New Zealand’s University of Canterbury.

For many, the makeover appears to have worked.

“I am impressed by the cosmopolitan atmosphere. I didn’t think it would be so urban and so advanced,” said Skate April, 39, a computer consultant from Park City, Utah, who came to Beijing for some games events. “That was a preconceived notion — now that’s shattered.”

Randy Lynch, the president of Kipling & Clark, a Chicago-based agency that organizers high-end travel to China, bookings for next year have jumped 40 percent since the games began — many of them by people who before the Olympics never would have considered traveling to China.

“The one thing the Olympics has shown Americans is that China has a very well-developed and successful infrastructure, and it’s easy to get around,” he said. “It’s almost like they’ve thrown the Communist Manifesto out of the window.”

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