BEIJING — When China kicks off the Summer Olympics with an elaborate opening ceremony at 8:08 p.m. local time Friday, it will pay homage not only to luck but meticulous planning.

Eight is considered auspicious by the Chinese partly because in Mandarin it sounds like a word for wealth, a fact not lost on organizers when they chose Friday's date: 8/8/08. But with officials working to control everything from what information journalists see to where it rains, the organizers of the Beijing Olympics aren't counting on good fortune to make their games a success.

Ng Han Guan/AP (ENLARGE)

Chinese workers wire up fireworks a day before testing them Friday on Tiananmen Square in Beijing.

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Last week, Beijing officials released a flurry of new regulations. On Wednesday, an Olympic organizing committee spokesman announced the government would block some Web sites in Olympic venues despite earlier promises to provide foreign journalists with unfettered access.

Among sites placed off limits were pages for the human-rights group Amnesty International, the official home page of the Dalai Lama, the exiled spiritual leader of Tibetans, and the Epoch Times, a publication supported by the Falun Gong, a spiritual movement that Beijing has banned as an "evil cult." An attempt to open a Web site about Beijing's violent suppression of pro-democracy protests in 1989 resulted in a message that the "connection to the server was reset."

China's Ministry of Environmental Protection also announced that "emergency measures" could be taken to improve air quality during the Olympics by forcing hundreds of factories to halt production and supplementing existing restrictions on driving in Beijing and nearby cities.

The major difference between the Beijing Olympics and previous games is that most Olympic organizing committees are restrained by strong legal systems, civic groups and tight budgets. But in Beijing "everything is controlled by the Communist Party," said David Wallechinsky, an American writer and vice president of the International Society of Olympic Historians.

"It's a whole other story," he said. "You don't normally get a government running everything."

The rapid-fire rules can be astoundingly meticulous. The China Daily, a mouthpiece newspaper for the Communist Party, reported last week that 337 women who will present medals during the Games trained for two months to perfect a wide range of skills, including "to smile with only eight teeth exposed and look at flashing cameras without blinking."

Nature is not exempt. To keep Beijing dry during the opening ceremony, the government will deploy 32,000 workers manning artillery and aircraft to seed clouds with rain-inducing chemicals before they reach the city, the China Daily said. In previous Olympics, "the closest you can come" to Beijing's efforts to manage the weather was the use of 20,000 ice blocks to build a bobsled run during an unusually warm Winter Games in 1964 in Austria, Wallechinsky said.

For Beijing residents, the prohibitions and admonishments have come in a flood of forms. The city has banned most outdoor restaurant seating, presumably to make things look neater, and has recruited hundreds of thousands of citizens to patrol streets and report illegal or suspicious behavior.

One Beijing district government posted signs last month instructing residents to refrain from asking foreigners personal questions about their ages, salaries and political views.

"The government is trying to achieve perfection in every way," said Zheng Xiaojiu, a philosopher at Beijing's People's University. "Chinese care a lot about being praised by others."

And, apparently, not being criticized by members of their own citizenry. At Tiananmen Square, the vast space at the city's political heart where pro-democracy demonstrators centered their protests in 1989, everyone entering the square will be screened for "goods that may harm public security," the China Daily reported.

At the same time, Beijing has increased monitoring of people officials consider likely to protest during the Olympics. Several Beijing residents who have challenged the city over what they consider illegal land seizures said they had been put under police surveillance.

Wu Tianli, who gave up running a book store to petition the government several years ago, said security officers had followed her since July 17.

"The local government is afraid that I might talk with foreigners and people might find out that they broke the law," she said during a meeting in a rundown part of the city. "The officials are always watching me now."

Nicholas Bequelin, a Hong Kong-based researcher for activist group Human Rights Watch, said the government had increased surveillance of "beggars, petitioners, mental health patients, dissidents and former prisoners" ahead of the Games.

"I think (the increased monitoring) reflects how worried the Communist Party is about social unrest," Bequelin said.

Wallechinsky said the last time an Olympic host tightened restrictions in a similar way was during the 1980 Summer Games in Moscow, when the then-Soviet capital "went through a whole procedure of clearing out anybody who could remotely be considered a dissident."

The United States and dozens of other nations boycotted the 1980 Games to protest the Soviet Union's invading Afghanistan in 1979.

If the Beijing Games are unusual for their level of planning and control, they also stand out for the attention Beijing has paid to superstitions. The number eight has resonated through Chinese culture for millennia. Chinese Buddhism, for example, uses eight holy objects, while imperial-era scholars referred to eight directions, eight winds and eight mountains to determine auspicious locations.

Today, some Chinese pay exorbitant fees to have eights in their phone numbers and license plates. In recent years, a businessman in China's southern Guangzhou city paid $10,000 for a license plate ending with two eights while a Chinese airline paid some $300,000 for the telephone number 8888-8888, according to Chinese media reports.

"Many Chinese do not understand science so they are superstitious," said Liu Junning, a researcher at China's Ministry of Culture. "Belief in lucky numbers is very widespread."