BEIJING - When the IOC granted Beijing the right to host the Olympic Games in 2001, sparking the mass wielding of little red flags here in China and groans elsewhere, it did so in part because the country’s managers had pledged to improve big things for the little people.

Things like cleaning up the noxious air and filthy waterways, and preventing or reducing the impact of other environmental holocausts. Yet, to point out just one example, yesterday’s API for Beijing was an alveoli-incinerating 253… and a got-to-be-off-the-scale 500 in the northeastern city of Harbin.

Things like press/speech freedom, or at least loosening the manacles placed thereon since 1949. Yet propaganda stalwarts such as China Daily’s Li Xing still chirp merrily about how it’s Time to Tell Them How the Chinese Feel (hurt, I presume?), while braver Chinese routinely get locked up or worse for daring to speak to Them’s biased media organizations. This despite more promises made in 2006 relating to improved access for Them’s journalists to the country and its citizens termsandconditionsapply/dontbelieveeverythingyouread.

And things like improving the lot of the country’s millions of migrant workers, yes, the same people who have been living in Beijing for years now, building the infrastructure, stadiums, and other non-Olympic-related projects. Yet they’re about to get turfed out of the city; sent packing with their yellow hats and now school-going kids. Apparently, these people are not as pleasing to the foreign eye as the “European-style” roofs they’ve been slapping on the city’s formerly flat-roofed apartments, or at least those visible along the central ring roads.

It was these and many other promises, the esteemed IOC members hoped, that would justify their decision to award the Olympics to the capital of the last great dictatorship on earth. It was these things (perhaps along with heavily stuffed envelopes) that influenced said decision. It was hoped that the results would be lasting, too, or at least realized. A slap on the wrist would have been dealt there, I’d say, if Rogge & Co. were not a bunch of eunuchs.

But fear not: Other bold measures have indeed been taken. One includes keeping a close, close eye on every laowai in the country for the duration of the Games. So close is that eye, it’ll even peer out of your ticket pouch. So close is that eye that you’ll not get a tourist visa without proof of a hotel booking, and a ticket out of here. There’s also supposed to be a moratorium on construction (though, as far as I can tell, the date keeps being pushed forward). And, for the duration of the games, the ever-increasing population of automobiles is to be reduced by half, via the ingenuity of the “Odd and Even Represents”.

But come October, business will resume as usual. Foreigners of all descriptions will be welcomed back to continue to rid the country’s businesses of Chinglish, to resume English classes with their eager students, to sell drugs and bodily orifices on the streets. Migrants will be allowed back to continue building the capital into a world-class city, hoping they’ll get paid at the end of their year’s toil. The API (if even still recorded) will be back to bursting point as the city’s cars and construction machinery once again open full throttle.

Of course, that all depends on whether the myriad potentialities fail to turn August upside down, anyway. Can’t wait to read Li Xing’s column if they do.