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With the 2008 Olympics fast approaching, and China’s ambitiously green Beijing still invisible through the smog, the government is exploring radical options to ensure that the environment doesn’t spoil their pageant.

The city recently tested a partial ban on private cars, taking an estimated one million vehicles off the road for 4 days. Beijing’s streets were noticeably less gridlocked, but the success of the experiment in clearing the air is questionable. On August 20th, the final day of the ban, the city’s air pollution level remained unchanged. Yu Xiaoyuan, environmental director of the Beijing Olympic Organizing committee, declared the experiment a success: “If we had not had the traffic controls we could not have maintained this level because the temperature and humidity were very high. So we can see the restrictions worked.” Despite Mr. Xiaoyuan’s enthusiasm, at the time of writing, air quality data for August 20th was unavailable on China’s State Environmental Protection Administration website, the only day this year without statistics provided.

A ban on cars is only one of the drastic measures under consideration. China has ramped up its weather control program in order to prevent Beijing’s frequent summer downpours from disrupting the event, and perhaps to use nighttime showers to clear the air of dust and pollutants. The government has trained and recruited over 37,000 peasants to operate Mao-era artillery, firing exploding shells of silver iodide into clouds to accelerate their growth and induce rain. The weather controllers hope to intercept any cloud formations heading towards the city, dumping any rain safely out of sight of the Olympic dignitaries and press.

These experiments are nothing new- party bosses have long addressed symptoms of environmental problems rather than their cause.

Mao proposed in 1958 to connect the flood-prone Yangtze with the silt-choked Yellow River. In Mao’s vision, currently under construction, man-made channels stretch 1200 km to bring water to the parched North. However, environmentalists, including the State Environmental Protection Agency, doubt the plan’s potential. They propose water conservation as the solution to shortages in northern China, blaming artificially low water prices that encourage waste and make conservation technologies less economical. Environmentalists are also concerned that the plan could dry up the Yangtze River in 30 years.

The aridity of the North is a significant problem for China. Overgrazing, drought, and deforestation expand the Gobi desert by 950 square miles a year, and have led to sandstorms that reach Tokyo and are detectable even in the United States. China is responding by planting the Great Green Wall, a network of tree belts covering 9 million acres, to act as a windbreak and eventually to reclaim the desert. While hopes are high that this wall, the largest ecological project in history, will be a success, China continues to cut down 25 million trees a year for chopsticks alone.

The future aside, addressing the symptoms of environmental problems may be just the short-term fix that Olympic planners need. If a car ban and weather control are insufficient, China is reserving the option of pushing the big red button- shutting down all industry in Beijing. However, even bringing the city to a screeching halt may not work. For years Beijing has been coercing its heavy industry to relocate, but factories have settled nearby in the welcoming Hebei province, where summer wind conditions blow their pollution right back over Beijing.

This puts China’s government in the unenviable position of deciding between wielding their enormous influence and paralyzing the country’s industrial heartland or allowing Olympic athletes to arrive in Beijing wearing the activated charcoal masks issued by many teams. With the amount of international credibility China has staked on the games, it seems likely that some sort of shutdown will occur. What remains to be seen is how an increasingly liberalized Chinese market will react to command economy restrictions on a scale not used in years.