Beijing hopes to flush away toilet stigma

Beijing’s notoriously foul-smelling and poorly tended public toilets will feature some rarely seen luxuries during the Olympics—toilet paper and soap, state media reported on Friday.

The city has made a special effort to clean up and adequately stock more than 4 000 public toilets as part of a campaign to make bathroom breaks a “pleasant experience” during next month’s Olympic Games, the China Daily said.

“Beijing is working hard to make every public toilet a pleasant experience for the millions who visit the city for the Games,” Yu Debin, deputy director of the Beijing tourism bureau, was quoted as saying.

Chinese public restrooms have long been a source of fear and dread for many visitors to the city. Besides being famously smelly, they typically lack toilet paper and soap, fail to flush, or feature Asian-style squat toilets that are anathema to many foreigners.

But in 2005 the city launched a campaign to upgrade its more than 5 000 toilets for the August 8 to 24 Olympics and the subsequent Paralympics in September.

The capital has installed a large number of Western-style toilets to cater to foreigners, the physically challenged and elderly, the paper quoted Guo Weidong, a Beijing municipal administration commission spokesperson, as saying.

About 8 000 workers have been trained to keep public toilets clean, he said, adding: “Public toilets reflect the living and hygiene standards of a society.”

The toilet clean-up is one of series of “civility” drives under way to smooth some of the city’s rough edges during the Games.

Campaigns also have been launched to coach the city’s sometimes uncouth citizens on avoiding social faux pas such as spitting and queue-jumping.—AFP