By the way, my friends in the know say many Beijing establishments -- at least in the expat-rich area of Chaoyang where I live, and where the 2008 Games will take place -- have run out of Guinness. While this isn't as serious a crisis as, say, running out of flu vaccine, it's causing  consternation and angst.

Rumor has it the Guinness imports are held up due to newly stringent government requirements for product-safety testing, using sophisticated gas chromatography which costs importers something in the neighborhood of five figures (in greenbacks, that is) and can take weeks or even months to complete. My last blog described the highly coincidental timing in which last week's important international food-safety conference in Beijing was preceded by a high-profile media visit -- pulled together by the city's Olympics organizers -- to a number of quality-control sites.

Included was a quality inspection site in Chaoyang with a display room showing various imported goods that've been tested for elements such as heavy metals. I saw some well-known labels there, including Revlon hair coloring, Del Monte ketchup, Ballantine's and Perrier.  Is the sudden dearth of Guinness related to Beijing's recent surge of interest in product safety inspections? If so, it means China and the EU are beginning to hit where it hurts in their tiff over quality control.

The recent meltdown of Beijing's online ticket-sales system for the 2008 Games came as a surprise to many -- and as a huge frustration to millions of unsuccessful ticket purchasers. Beijing after all has been so forward-leaning in erecting Olympics venues that at one point China's leaders -- all nine of the top guys were trained as engineers -- were politely advised to slow down construction to avoid completing some buildings too soon. So well you might ask how organizers could have fumbled the ball so badly on Oct. 30, when 1.85 million tickets went on sale -- and the official sales website crashed after attracting more than 8 million hits from eager buyers? Manuela Zonensein in Beijing explains:

It seems Chinese authorities weren’t quite ready to serve the people. Tuesday Wei Jizhong, a consultant to the Beijing Games organizing committee, was quoted by the state-run Beijing News as saying the vast potential size of the local audience means "first-come, first-served doesn't fit China". When sales resume Dec. 10, organizers will revert to a lottery system – similar to that used in the first phase of sales last April--to determine who’ll be allowed to purchase tickets. The organizing committee says this approach will adhere more closely to “principles of fairness, impartiality, and convenience to the public." And that’s about the only explanation the public has received regarding last week's disastrous launch.

It’s still unclear how authorities could have underestimated – by eight times – local demand for Olympics tickets. They hinted that demand was inflated due to ticket hoarding and speculators; indeed shortly after the first phase of ticket sales kicked off, Chinese websites featured scalped tickets selling for as high as RMB 150,000 (more than USD 20,000).

Part of authorities’ explanation was that, with 1.3 billion people, China has more aspiring buyers than Sydney or Athens, but around the same number of tickets will be sold. Therefore the ticket-selling mechanisms that served those two cities’ Olympics proved inadequate for the task in China. Haven’t we learned by now that size matters? “What was driving their expectations?” wondered David Wolf, President and CEO of Wolf Group Asia, a technology communications firm, “That you're not going to have more people [wanting tickets] than Sydney, Atlanta, Sarajevo, Los Angeles?"