Restrain The Riffraff.(World View)(Wang Qishan's plan for Beijing, China)

Byline: Melinda Liu; With Jonathan Ansfield in Beijing

Beijing's rising-star mayor clamps down on public displays of excess ahead of the 2008 Olympics.

Nobody can pinpoint just when conspicuous consumption took over Beijing; in the course of the past decade, high-end boutiques sprang up along the avenues, German sedans started prowling the streets, and billboards have appeared flaunting "ultra-exclusive" "luxury" goods fit for "tycoons." INDULGE IN A SMALL VILLA, read one; BECOME A FOREIGN DIPLOMAT'S LANDLORD, exclaimed another. But if that trend was slow to take shape, everyone knows when the tide turned and elitism suddenly went out of official fashion. In May 2007, Beijing's no-nonsense Mayor Wang Qishan publicly blasted the bling-bling billboards. In an interview with China's official Xinhua news agency, Wang complained that the gaudy signs "encourage luxury and self-indulgence which are beyond the reach of low-income groups, and [are] therefore not conducive to harmony in the capital." Since then, hundreds of the offending advertisements have disappeared.

Call him the anti-Rudy. As mayor, New York's Rudolph Giuliani won great notoriety by cracking down on panhandlers, porn shops and squeegee men as part of a "broken windows" policing strategy. That theory -- which soon inspired copycats from Arlington, Virginia, to Florence, Italy -- posits that cleaning up disorder, decay and other symptoms of the low life can boost civic pride and revive a limping metropolis.

Beijing has the opposite problem. It's a city on the rise, now frantically preparing for the 2008 Summer Olympics. Neighborhood decay -- along with entire neighborhoods -- is disappearing to make way for new parks, swooping highways and glittering construction. So rich and exclusive has the city's image become -- and so expensive its real estate -- that Wang is now struggling anxiously to bring it back down to earth. The last thing he and China's leaders want when the world comes calling next summer is to look brash or uncaring about the country's less-fortunate citizens. China's income disparity, measured by its Gini coefficient, is already worse than the United States'.

Beijing is eager to turn that around -- part of President Hu Jintao's goal to turn China into a "harmonious society" where the haves help the have-nots. Deng Xiaoping helped sell his market reforms in the '80s ...