Allowing more access for foreign reporters has emerged as a key legacy of the Beijing Olympics, a top Games official said as China prepares to celebrate the sport gala’s first anniversary that falls on Saturday.

“Compared to the Lhasa riot last year, I personally think we’ve done shown a lot more openness and tolerance after the Xinjiang riot broke out last month,” Jiang Xiaoyu, executive vice chairman of the Beijing Organizing Committee for the Games of the XXIX Olympiad (BOCOG), told China Daily.

“Giving foreign reporters immediate access to the scene was a sign of our country’s growing confidence in the wake of the Games… I think it has had a good impact on our image and in dealing with riots like this,” Jiang said.

Officials cited security reasons for disallowing foreign media to enter Tibet for months after a riot broke out, killing 18 and injuring 623 in the autonomous region’s capital city of Lhasa on March 14, 2008.

This year, however, Xinjiang’s chairman Nur Bekri made a televised speech on the very evening of the bloody riot in Urumqi, the regional capital, on July 5. Press conferences were held the next morning, when foreign reporters were welcomed to enter the Uygur autonomous region.

More than 400 reporters, about half of them from overseas, had gone to Urumqi for on-site interviews as of late July, local publicity officers said. At least 197 people died and some 1,600 were injured in the violence, the most brutal in decades.

The Xinjiang government’s media friendliness in the wake of the latest tragedy came as a surprise to many, according to Steven Dong Guanpeng, a media strategy adviser to the State Council.

“The Games taught senior officials that timely and transparent communication is the best recipe for crisis management. Not only do they not restrain reporting, they now offer access during major public events,” said Dong, director of the global journalism institute with Tsinghua University.

In January 2007, China implemented a temporary regulation for the Olympics that allowed foreign reporters unprecedented access on conducting interviews.

When the regulation expired after the Games, a large part of it was incorporated into another liberalizing press regulation in October. Jiang calls the extension “a result of both the Olympics and the reform and opening up”.

China’s grandest coming-out party yet, the Beijing Olympics and Paralympics attracted nearly 40,000 reporters from home and abroad, heads of state and government and royal family members from more than 80 countries and some 500,000 foreigners to the country’s capital.

Jiang says that unique experience has “enabled the Chinese people to develop new understandings of the world”, which in turn helped “further open up the Chinese society, made it more tolerant and its people more mature”.

The Games’ first anniversary will be marked by the playing of Italian soccer’s Super Cup at the Bird’s Nest national stadium, in Jiang calls a sign that China has become more open to the world since a year ago.

“The Olympics facilitated China’s reform and opening up… through preparing and hosting the event, we have bettered ourselves in playing by international rules,” he said.

Aside from the regulation on foreign press, China implemented a series of other temporary measures and regulations in line with its Olympic commitments prior to the Games. Many of them have since been renewed or made permanent.

Traffic bans, for instance, pulled off nearly two million cars off the streets in Beijing during the Games. Officials have been inspired to extend the bans, known locally as the odd-even number plate restriction, indefinitely.

That legacy and other anti-pollution efforts have helped consistently improve Beijing’s air quality, municipal authorities say. Official figures show 146 clear-sky days of a total of 186 days in the city during the first half of this year. Beijing only had 100 clear-sky days in all of 1998.

Meanwhile, Jiang revealed that BOCOG is expected to dissolve in about two weeks.

“The announcement may come around the 20^th if we don’t receive a written circular from the State Council (that says otherwise) in the next few days,” he said.

An internal flag lowering ceremony will be held at the BOCOG building, where only 20-odd staff now work, when the committee dissolves, Jiang said.

At the height of the Olympics, BOCOG had as many as 4,000 staff members.

The Beijing Olympic city development and promotion association, a social group officially founded yesterday with BOCOG President Liu Qi as its chief, will seek to inherit the committee’s legacies, consolidate on Games achievements and further promote the Olympic spirit, according to Jiang.

Recently promoted to a deputy director of the committee of education, Science, Culture, Health and Sports under the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, Jiang, 61, is one of the association’s deputy heads.

The association is expected to set up an Olympic Development Foundation, Jiang said, adding that a bureau-level secretariat under the Beijing municipal government has been established to manage its daily affairs.