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Manipulating weather on opening day

-By Shanshan Lu-  Snowstorm having paralyzed southeast China raised some concerns about the dramatic weather change during the Olympics. (click…

By Shanshan Lu , in 2008 Beijing Olympics Blogs , on February 3, 2008

-By Shanshan Lu- 

Snowstorm having paralyzed southeast China raised some concerns about the dramatic weather change during the Olympics. (click here to see more on snowstorms in South China…)

On Jan. 30th ‘s Olympic preparation press conference, Jianjie Wang, the Bureau Chief of Beijing Weather Bureau concluded that success experiment on controlling the chance of rain at the opening day has been achieved.
According to the China News Agency, the preparation on weather conditions during the Beijing Olympics has been done successfully.

The weather Bureau analyzed Beijing’s weather conditions of the past thirty years and concluded that the chance of rain at the opening day is 47 per cent, while the chance of storm rain is very slow.

When I deliver the news to some of my foreign friends, they are literally shocked and take it more as a joke—“manipulating the weather?”

China is known for constantly manipulating the weather. I still remember in middle-school science book, there is a chapter called artificial rain. I thought it was universal by then. Only after I came to North America did I find out people never used it here. I wonder why. They don’t have the technology?…Or they simply don’t need it?

Again, it dawned on me that the answer all came to the population. Geographically, China has huge land—the third largest in the world. But once divided by its population, each individual’s property is small. Artificial rain fertilizes the exhausted land so to make full use of it. (more on the population in China…)

On the other hand, it is also the huge population that helps to achieve the impossible—to fight the flood of year 98, to control SARS of year 03, and to keep functioning during the ever-massive snowstorm of this year.

Will Olympics be the nation’s next achievement?