Welcoming the world to Beijing for the 2008 Olympics will give the Chinese a chance to re-engage with a culture that was discarded during the turmoil of the late 20th century, the head of a city think-tank said on Tuesday.

Jin Yuanpu, director of the Humanistic Olympics Studies Centre (HOSC), believes the 1966-1976 Cultural Revolution and the scramble for economic prosperity in the 1980s had also left the rest of the world with a view of China that needed correcting.

"There was a period of time when we completely negated our traditions, destroyed and forsook them, and afterwards for years we only concentrated on economic growth with high fever and great efforts," Jin told Reuters in an interview.

"But now, it's the time for us to revive and rethink our traditional philosophy and precious heritage. We have rediscovered our own culture, which is the origin of the nation, and that's the only thing that can represent China.

"The humanistic Olympics is based on the reconsideration and revival of our interrupted traditional culture and melding it with modern culture."

The HOSC was set up by the city government with the aim of providing research to help the city fulfil its goal of putting on a "Green Olympics, High-tech Olympics, People's Olympics".

The centre has also been given the task of compiling the Olympic Games Global Impact (OGGI) report to be delivered to the International Olympic Committee (IOC) in 2011.

ACCURATE PICTURE

The Games would also give China a chance to present the world with a more accurate picture of its people than the "preconceptions" fostered by the "distortions" of the foreign media in their coverage of the Communist-run state, Jin said.

"The world gives us 15 days, we will give it 5,000 years," he said.

"The Olympics is a platform for all cultures to exchange, we see it as going beyond race, class, religions and even politics. There's nothing like it.

"We do have some weak points but change in China is making progress," added Jin, a philosophy professor at Beijing's Renmin University.

"Westerners should come to China and see how the people can complain and criticise the government. For example, listen to the Beijing taxi drivers, every one of them is a politician."

Jin said he did not think concentrating on the long cultural history of the majority Han people would exclude China's ethnic minorities, and the centre had already done research into their sporting culture.

China's current obsession with winning gold medals was a characteristic more in keeping with the competitive west and a reaction to the miserable time China had experienced in the last century, Jin thought.

"The western world has to remember what the Chinese have been through in the last 100 years of misery. China used to be called the sick man of Asia and gold medals are a way of reconstructing our national confidence," he said.

"Our purpose is not to "win" the Olympics, what we want is for the Chinese people to improve ourselves spiritually, mentally and physically."