Besides the stadiums, including Bird's Nest and Water Cube that have been opened to visitors and for business shows, what else did the "truly exceptional" Olympics leave to the city -- and the whole country -- as the first anniversary of the Beijing Olympics approaches?

Chen Ye is working on a report at consulting firm KPMG China in the Oriental Plaza in downtown Wangfujing Street. The former employee with the Beijing Organizing Committee for the Games of the XXIX Olympiad (BOCOG) is now a management consultant.

Chen had been working with the International Relations Department of BOCOG since she graduated from Peking University in 2006. She was in charge of the liaison work with Olympic committees of 13 Asian countries, including Japan, the Republic of Korea and Kuwait.

"It was very exciting and challenging. I don't think I can come across that kind of job again in my life," said the 27-year-old.

She got several offers after the Games, including working with other international sporting event organizing committees, civil service sectors and some big state-owned companies, after months' of job hunting as BOCOG ceased operation after the Games. But She eventually chose the management consulting sector -- with which she was not familiar. She had to start from the ground level.

"I need an international environment. I don't think I can get accustomed again to the domestic ways of dealing things after two years' experience with the highly internationalized BOCOG," she said.

She said the society still goes the same way as before the Games.

"In China, I have to consider my gender, age and some other realistic things when mapping out my career," she said.

She gave up the opportunity to work in Singapore with a sporting event organizing committee because she feels the pressure from her parents and society, which doesn't allow her to live a flexible, nontraditional lifestyle.

About 8,000 former employers with BOCOG employees have found other new jobs. Some chose to stay with sporting events for the upcoming 16th Guangzhou Asian Games, some took government posts, and many more found jobs in state-owned or big multinational companies.

Wang Wei, executive vice president and secretary general of BOCOG, was elected vice chairman of a high-level political advisory body, the Beijing municipal committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) in January.

Deng Yaping, the Olympic Village spokeswoman and four-time Olympic gold medal winner of table tennis, was assigned in April as deputy secretary of China Communist Youth League Beijing Committee.

Chen Ye said most of her former colleagues chose "stable" jobs. Although the new sector she stepped into does not have much to do with her past experience, she plans to put what she learned from the Olympics into practice in her future.

"I'm just waiting for a better position to give play to my experience," she said.

Chen Ye is one of the several million subway commuters in Beijing. "It's more convenient than road traffic during the peak time," she said.

Beijing had three new subways lines in service before the Games. Another nine lines are under construction.

Chen has to go through security checks every time.

Beijing applied security measures right before the Games, strengthened the measures during the Games and kept them after the Olympics.

As a team leader of 60 security checkers at Dongdan Subway Station, Wang Pengfei, 20, started his job after receiving two-year vocational training as a security checker last February.

"I heard that people tried to go to other stations in order to avoid security checks as they thought it was troublesome," Wang said.

He also came across passengers who refused to accept the checks. However, as time went by, and thanks to the media publicity, more passengers understood the importance of security inspections, Wang said.

According to the security check guiding brigade, since June 2008, more than 55,000 suspected items, including explosives, banned cutting tools, tinders, and hazardous things, have been discovered. More than 20,000 people carrying prohibited items have been declined entry to the subway.

"I think it's definitely necessary to continue the measures after the Games because Beijing has become an international city and many big events will be held here," he said.

Not only have more subway lines have been built or planned, the public traffic on road has also been improved since 2006 -- bus stations have been better organized, new bus routes have been opened for linking new residential communities with the rest of the city, and original lines for more than 600 communities have been improved.

The daily number of passengers increased from 9.65 million to 14.57 and more than one-third of people in Beijing take bus to go out, an increase of seven percentages point, according to Beijing public transport company.

Beijing also extended its post-Olympic vehicle restrictions for another year in April to ease traffic congestion and reduce air pollution.

The restrictions, based on license plate numbers, take about one-fifth of the city's 3.61 million vehicles off roads each weekday.

During the Olympics and Paralympics last summer, Beijing imposed a traffic ban based on an odd-even license plate system. The initiative took 45 percent of the cars off the roads and helped clear the skies, but as soon as the ban was lifted in September, traffic jams returned.

Figures released by the Beijing Transportation Research Center show that traffic jams were reduced by five hours and 15 minutes a day during the six months since the post-Olympics restrictions have been in effect. Vehicular emissions were reduced by 375 tonnes, or 10 percent, every day.

And changes also took place in people's minds.

Chen Changfeng, professor in the School of Journalism and Communication of Tsinghua University, felt another change that the Olympics brought to China.

Chen said that the Olympics, which put the country under spotlight, have helped strengthen the capability of the government and its people to receive negative information.

"People have become more active in supervising the society and their peers," she said, citing the "hide-and-seek" incident, in which an inmate in Yunnan, who allegedly died during a "hide-and-seek" game on Feb. 8, was later proved to have been beaten to death by another three inmates, and "Deng Yujiao" case in which a waitress stabbed a local official to death who tried to force her to provide "special services". Both incidents drew national attention and debate.

"Chinese people are surely more open to the outside world," said the professor, when talking about the rising nationalism among the younger generation, which generated mainly from the torch-relay process last year before the Games, and their negative attitude toward the western media.

"However, we may not expect the changes to happen overnight," she said, "It takes time."

Source: Xinhua