Looking Backwards: From 1989 to Han Times and from 2008 to 1964

There have been many efforts during the last month, on this site and elsewhere, to bring history into discussions of the twentieth anniversary of June 4th (particularly via allusions the May 4th Movement of 1919), just as a year ago there were many efforts to bring history into discussions of the Beijing Games (especially via allusions to the Berlin Olympics of 1936 and Seoul Olympics of 1988). But there's still room for this Top Five list of historically minded pieces on 1989 or 2008 that have just appeared and stand out as especially worth checking out, due to either how deeply they delve into parallels with earlier times or the novelty of their strategies for bringing together past and present.

1) On June 1, Alan Baumler of the estimable Frog-In-A-Well blog, which has separate sections devoted to the histories of different East Asian countries, offered up a very thoughtful look at a precedent for the 1989 student-led protests that pre-dated (by many centuries) the founding of the first modern Chinese university in 1898.

Here's a snippet that we hope will encourage you to make the jump to read all of his "Student Protests in Han China":

"Like most university students, [those of Later Han times, circa 160] were in an anomalous position in society. Imperial University students were members of the elite, but not elite enough to get government jobs just based on their family. Like later students they were also frustrated by their prospects. By the Later Han the curriculum at the University was considered hopelessly out of date and attending was no longer a reliable route to office. Students were deeply concerned with the problems of the state, which is not surprising, and they were particularly concerned with the problem of corruption and favoritism in official appointments, which is also not surprising, given that they were the ones most likely to be passed over if jobs were not given on merit. During this period the student’s enemies were not the Communist Party, but the eunuchs and their faction, who were rivals of the great aristocratic families."

2) On June 2, Duncan Hewitt, the Shanghai-based author of China: Getting Rich First: A Modern Social History, weighed in on the meaning of the twentieth anniversary of the Tiananmen protests on a Newsweek blog. He has many things of interest to say in this piece, which is well worth reading in its entirety, but one notable point is that the it is not just the details about 1989 but also those about the Democracy Wall Movement that preceded it by roughly a decade that have been fading.

3) On June 5, Evan Osnos ran an insightful piece on his "Letter from China" blog called "The Other Tiananmen Moment," which stressed the importance of thinking about the complex ties between the events of the mid-to-late 1960s and the late 1980s in the minds of some Chinese. (And for more about the Cultural Revolution-era photographs he discusses and shows, see this guest post by Jean Loh we ran in April.)

4) Regular readers of this site have seen many pieces by frequent contributor Susan Brownell exploring different aspects of the Beijing Games, including its parallels to and differences from past Olympics. (And material from those posts is also showcased in China in 2008: A Year of Great Significance.) But there's still much new to be learned from her latest publication on the topic, which she has just done for the excellent and wide-ranging Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus. She offers her most detailed and sophisticated look to date at the connections between the Beijing Olympics and both of the previous Asian Summer Games, those that took place in Tokyo in 1964 and Seoul in 1988.

5) The same online journal has two other good pieces about Asia and the Olympics. The one with the most historical bent is a fascinating essay on the Tokyo Games by Christian Tagsold, which though focusing on Japan should be of interest to many people more concerned with China. Called "The 1964 Tokyo Olympics as Political Games," it argues, as its title indicates, that the tendency to treat the Japanese Games as more "apolitical" than the Korean and Chinese ones that followed is misleading. (Those in a mood for looking forward rather than backward should be sure to check out as well William W. Kelly's smart companion piece on the prospects for the 2012 and 2016 Olympics, another essay that concentrates on Japan but has relevance for other parts of East Asia as well.)

FAQ#8: Was there a Master Plan to use the Olympic Games to Promote a Positive Image of China to the World ?

(And What was the Strategy for Dealing with the International Criticism on Human Rights)?

(This is a shortened version of a paper presented at the conference on ““The 2008 Beijing Olympic Games: Public Diplomacy Triumph or Public Relations Spectacle?” organized by the Center on Public Diplomacy, US-China Institute, and Center for International Studies at the University of Southern California, January 29-30, 2009.)

There was a common perception outside China that the Beijing Olympic Games involved a master plan to promote a positive image of China to the outside world and that this was one of the major goals of hosting the Olympic Games, if not the major goal. I want to argue that while there was widespread agreement in China that the Olympics were an excellent opportunity to promote an image of China to the world, the vast majority of the attention and effort was focused on the domestic audience; that there was never a concrete communication strategy for dealing with the human rights issue; and that in both instances, China’s ability to communicate a positive international image was hindered by the domestic political structure.

The People’s Olympics

Many Western journalists and Amnesty International accused China of failing to keep its promises with respect to its human rights record. But China had not made any such promises, and if journalists had read chapter five of my recent book, Beijing’s Games, they would have known that there was a big internal debate about even the one sentence about human rights that was made in China’s bid presentation in 2001.

However, in its bid China did make one promise that it arguably kept, and that was its promise to host a “people’s Olympics.” There were three main themes for the Olympic Games: the High-tech Olympics, the Green Olympics, and the renwen (人 文 奥 运 ) Olympics. Renwen is difficult to translate. It was sometimes translated as the “humanistic Olympics,” but after some debate, the preferred official translation was the “People’s Olympics.” This theme was originally intended as a response to the West’s criticism of China’s human rights, but this was never made explicit to the West.

One of the central concepts of the People’s Olympics was 以人为本 , “take people as the root,” or “people-orientation.” This phrase had appeared in political rhetoric when Hu Jintao named it in his address to the Third Plenum of the 16^th Party Congress in 2003. This preceded the inclusion of a passage on human rights in the revision to the Constitution in 2004. It is interesting that as early as 2001, 以人为本 had already been written into the guiding thought for the Beijing Olympic Games.

In 2000, Beijing Mayor Liu Qi began commissioning a number of groups with the task of developing the basic thought behind the 人 文 奥 运 because he felt that, unlike the other themes, it was unclear. The People’s University formed the Humanistic Olympic Studies Centre to study it. One of the non-Communist Parties, the Democratic League, was commissioned by Liu Qi and began developing working papers in 2001. Forums were held, dissertations and books were written on the topic, working papers were drafted, websites were created, and by the start of the Games it was estimated that at least ten thousand pages had been written on the topic of the “People’s Olympics.”

Faculty members of the Beijing Sport University and the Humanistic Olympic Studies Center of the People’s University were particularly involved with the relevant sport, educational, and cultural organs of the central and Beijing government. Although they had travelled abroad, these intellectuals were all largely focused on the domestic audience and not the international audience. They gave dozens if not hundreds of interviews to Chinese media, appeared frequently on CCTV, and were influential in shaping domestic media opinion. They seldom gave interviews to foreign media and on occasions when they did they were belittled as Party-liners (see these characterizations of Beijing Sport University’s Ren Hai and People’s University’s Jin Yuanpu).

As a result of the orientation of the intellectuals who designed it, the guiding thought of the People’s Olympics was largely diverted away from any focus on China’s international image and into a debate over culture and education. In my interactions with BOCOG and the intellectuals who were working with it, I felt that about 80-90% of the effort that went into this symbol-making was directed toward the domestic audience. The main focus was on the questions of how to manage the “combination of Eastern and Western cultures” （东西结合）that the Games were supposed to facilitate, how to promote Chinese culture within China and to the world, how to use the enthusiasm for the games to raise the general quality (素质) and civility (文明) of the Chinese people, how to prepare the next generation of young Chinese to take their place in the international community.

These discussions and debates formed the intellectual context for Zhang Yimou’s opening and closing ceremonies, the Olympic education programs in the schools that reached as many as 400 million Chinese schoolchildren, the training programs for the 70,000 Olympic volunteers, the cultural performances in the Cultural Olympiad, and the myriad of other cultural and educational activities that surrounded the Games.

Perhaps the major way in which the guiding thought about the promotion of China’s national image was generated was through three keypoint research projects commissioned by the National Planning Office of Philosophy and Social Science, which is administered by the Central Propaganda Department. These grants are the government’s way of channeling academic research in directions that serve its needs. The relative unimportance of the Beijing Olympic Games is indicated by the fact that from 2003 to 2008, only five related projects were funded, of which three were “keypoint” projects with a competitive application process. By way of comparison, in the same time period the number of funded projects that fell under the rubric of “Marxist-Leninist Services” was 190, and under “Party History and Construction” was 178. The first relevant Olympic project was the 2003 project entitled “Improving China’s International Position and Reputation through the 2008 Olympic Games.” The Beijing Sport University won the bid for this project and in April 2007 published the results in Research on Improving China’s International Position and Reputation through the 2008 Olympic Games　(《２００８年奥运会提升中国国际地位和声望的研究》). Its 65 chapters contain thorough summaries of the issues that provoked negative media reports in past Olympic Games, such as delays in venue completion, transportation problems, media information glitches, terrorist acts, and so on. The lesson that Beijing clearly learned was that these particular problems should be avoided at all costs, and ultimately they avoided all the problems that got negative media coverage in previous Olympics. The analyses of Western media coverage of the Beijing Games since 2001 indicated that “political” issues – as they are called in China - would dominate coverage. However, the resulting recommendations merely emphasize the importance of treating the media and other leading opinion-makers well.

The most daring chapter, “Beijing Olympics Speed Up the Transformation of the Functioning of the Government,” analyzes the promises made under the rubric of the “People’s Olympics” - and improving human rights is not listed as one of them.

A second keypoint project of the National Planning Office of Philosophy and Social Science was the 2006 project “Construction of the Humanistic Concept, Social Value and National Image of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games” (《2008年北京奥运会的人文理念、社会价值与国家文化形象构建》), which was awarded to the People’s University. Through this project and elsewhere, the People’s University promoted its concept of the “Cultural Olympics.” The final report has not been completed, but in a summary of their conclusions on CCTV in February 2008, they argued that research shows that culture constitutes the core of national image, and “therefore in the construction of a national image, we should hold the line on ‘Cultural China’ （坚持走“文化中国”的路线）in order to make the idea of ‘Cultural China’ into the core theme for dialogue between China and the international community in Olympic discourse.”

So my first point is that if the “People’s Olympics” was the response to the West’s human rights accusations, then that response was delivered in the form of culture and symbols - the “look and image” of the Games, the “branding” of China, the display of “Chinese culture” – and not in the form of verbal debate or dialogue. They were very successful in the former, but the absence of the latter led critics to characterize the Games as one big show orchestrated by the Party-state. This simple-minded view does not do justice to the passion with which the producers of the People’s Olympics threw themselves into fulfilling their mission of promoting Chinese culture and achieving its integration with Western culture. I believe we should accord them more respect.

If the People’s Olympics was to be the response to Western criticism of China’s human rights record, then it probably needed to directly address the issue of human rights, but the topic was never directly taken on in the reports and research devoted to the topic. But now we run into the structure of domestic control over discussions of human rights. The sports scholars, philosophers, and members of non-communist parties who were developing these documents were not likely to address such a sensitive topic as human rights because it was not their job. The job of communicating China’s position on human rights to the outside world one is one of the official responsibilities of the State Council Information Office, which is simultaneously the Office of Foreign Propaganda of the Central Committee of the Communist Party. This organ’s function is to act as the media conduit between China and the outside world. The Information Office is under the Party Central Committee’s Propaganda Department, which is the nerve center of China’s thought control system. But the factionalism between the various “systems” （系统）of the Chinese government is well-known, and the propaganda system is a different system from the sport, cultural, and educational systems involved in creating and implementing the People’s Olympics; its power base is in media and communications circles. I did not see evidence that it had an active role in conceptualizing the People’s Olympics.

National Image

While the other systems were doing their work, the Information Office was involved in a separate effort, which involved a different group of intellectuals in the field of communications, whose core was located at the Communications University of China. The question of China’s national image had been the subject of a fair amount of intellectual work, though not nearly as much as the multidisciplinary effort behind the “People’s Olympics.” The third relevant keypoint project designated by the National Planning Office for Philosophy and Social Science was the 2005 project, “The Design of China’s National Image in Communications with the Outside World (对外传播中的国家形象设计),” which was awarded to the Foreign Communications Research Center (对外传播研究中心), a unit administered by the Foreign Languages Publishing Bureau, which is in turn under the Party Central Committee. The major results of this project, which involved scholars in communications at China’s top universities, were published in April of 2008 (Communication of a National Image, 《国家形象传播》). Among the 60 chapters, there is not one on the Beijing Olympics. The chapters that touch upon the Olympics agree that Olympic Games are an excellent opportunity to promote a national image; but they use the examples of the Tokyo 1964 and Seoul 1988 Olympic Games as models for a promoting a positive image, and they do not offer the possibility that the Games can promote a negative image. And so three years of work by China’s top communications intellectuals failed to produce a strategy for dealing with attacks and criticism.

Olympic China National Image Ad

If there had been a master plan for using the Olympics to promote China’s image, it would have been developed by the Central Propaganda Department. The single person most responsible for coordinating everything would have been Li Dongsheng, who was simultaneously a member of the Party Central Committee, Vice Minister of the State Administration for Industry and Commerce, and – more to the point here - Deputy Director of the Central Propaganda Department, chief of BOCOG’s Media and Communications Coordination Group, and president of the China Advertising Association. Western media tended to make a big deal out of the American (Hill and Knowlton) and British (Weber Shandwick) PR firms that had worked for BOCOG, but in fact the non-Chinese viewpoint that they provided to BOCOG was only one among many collected, and probably not the most influential – and in any case, BOCOG was not empowered to discuss “political” issues.

So the major reason that there was no master PR plan was due to the strict division of labor with regard to communications with the outside world, with only the organs under the Central Propaganda Department empowered to speak about “political” issues. While the sport, educational, and cultural systems were crafting their “cultural” messages, the Information Office was engaged in a completely independent effort to produce a television commercial for “China” at the end of 2007. The difficult eight-month birthing process of the “Olympic China National Image Ad” indicates that if Li Dongsheng were trying to develop more proactive communications with the outside world, he may have had his opponents. The ad had been approved at the start of 2007, but it was not finally pushed through until just before the end of the fiscal year. Pressure was exerted via a long article entitled “Raise China’s Face – Where is China’s National Image Ad?” （《扬起中国脸—中国国家形象广告在哪里》）which appeared in November 2007 in Modern Advertising Magazine, a publication of the China Advertising Association of which Li was president. The article was written with the help of scholars at the Communication University of China and demonstrated the widespread support of the heads of China’s major advertising firms. One section, “Using the Opportunity of the Olympics to Build a National Image,” reviews the risk of negative media coverage but, like the other publications discussed, it does not develop a communication strategy for responding to it.

I was invited to be on the panel of academics that evaluated the bid presentations by eight of the top advertising agencies with offices in China. After leaving the hotel where we were sequestered, I never heard anything further about the project until the ad was shown on CNN and BBC on August 8, the day of the opening ceremony. I have still not seen it. Its release had been delayed from the original planned date of April because of the torch relay protests and the Sichuan earthquake disaster. Local reports on the internet make it seem that the project was not finally awarded to one of the advertising firms, but instead to a production team formed by the Information Office. It was also apparently cut to 30 seconds from the originally planned 90.

At the time, we were told that we were making history, because for the first time China was reaching out to the world to try to shape its image, rather than waiting for the world to come and understand it. Those involved in the process seemed to feel that it was an extremely important first step. In December 2007 the Information Office already expressed to me that it knew it was not effective in communicating a positive image of China to the world. It evidently felt it needed a new strategy for dealing with the human rights issue because in December 2008, it announced that together with the Foreign Ministry it was spearheading China’s first-ever “Action Plan on Human Rights,” which would be prepared for release in January by a panel including 50 institutions and NGOs. That this effort was spearheaded by the Information Office and Foreign Ministry, and not by the ministries and offices that actually control human rights, has led Western critics to describe it as a public relations ploy. However, another way of looking at it is that because they are the interface with the outside world, these organs are probably better versed on human rights debates than any others in China. Also, the Information Office’s close connection with the Central Propaganda Department is necessary in dealing with a very important ideological issue. The Chinese announcement states that it will not be just another white paper on human rights, but an actual action plan with benchmarks. A more optimistic interpretation of this measure might be that China’s international image is now being enlisted in a strategy to name and shame the other state organs into closer adherence to international human rights standards. I believe that the momentum for the action plan was strengthened by the difficult experiences surrounding the Beijing Olympics.

2008 Retrospective: Olympics in Taiwan

China Beat will be running a series of 2008 retrospectives over the coming weeks--pieces that both look back at events of the year (some well-trod ground, others largely unnoticed) as well as tying those earlier events into on-going trends and situations. In this piece, Jennifer Liu reflects on Taiwan's 2008 Olympic experience, memories of which take on a different hue in light of Taiwan's tumultuous autumn.

By Jennifer Liu

Olympic fever still hasn’t waned in China (especially in Beijing), but when I was living in Taiwan this summer, it seemed Olympic excitement had already run its course or maybe it never even took off. While China was gripped by Olympic fever, its “rogue province” took a much more detached attitude to the proceedings. According to Nielsen’s ratings, China, along with South Korea, had the highest rate of viewership for the Games – 94 percent of the total population watched some portion of the Olympics. Ratings in the U.S. were an impressive 69 percent. But in Taiwan, none of the cable channels even broadcast the Olympic Games – only the opening ceremony was shown. Furthermore, the single sport the Taiwanese seemed passionate about was their national one: baseball.

Baseball alone rallied Taiwanese crowds in similar ways to the Olympic excitement across the Straits. For Chinese Taipei’s first game against the Netherlands, the McDonald’s located on Xinsheng nanlu (across from National Taiwan University) provided patrons with a large screen showing the entire game. The fast food restaurant also gave each spectator (many of whom had eagerly lined up for hours outside before the game began) red thunder clappers and a free hamburger. At the Shinkong Mitsukoshi (新光三越) department store complex near Taipei 101, cheerleaders rallied the crowd. Some fans symbolically ate poached eggs (荷包蛋, hebaodan) – the Chinese word not only sounds like “Holland posting a zero,” but further implies it since an egg is shaped like a zero. The phrase was also a play on the notion that the Chinese Taipei team was going to “bomb” Holland, and indeed it did in a 5-0 victory.

Fans with blue thunder clappers watching the game between Taiwan and the Netherlands on a big screen in the Shinkong Mitsukoshi plaza
The next game was against Japan. I went to the same McDonald’s to watch (this time, no thunder clappers or free hamburgers), and unfortunately, the Chinese Taipei team suffered a crushing 1-6 defeat to the Japanese. Nonetheless, the Taiwanese were confident their team would win in the next day’s game against China. That wasn’t the case, and many were shocked and dejected when China, not known to excel in baseball, upstaged Chinese Taipei 8-7.

Fans watching the game between Taiwan and Japan at McDonald's
Hidden beneath the baseball scores and unfortunate losses, however, was a strange turn of Olympic scheduling: Taiwan’s first three games were all against countries that have a share in the island’s complex history. The Dutch colonized Taiwan in the early seventeenth century until Zheng Chenggong (Koxinga) expelled them from the island in 1662. After a Chinese armada defeated Zheng’s grandson, the Qing dynasty annexed Taiwan and placed it under the jurisdiction of Fujian province. Following its defeat in the Sino-Japanese War, the Qing ceded Taiwan to Japan in 1895. After fifty years of Japanese colonization, Taiwan experienced a “glorious return” (光復) to China at the conclusion of World War II. However, some argue that when the Guomindang retreated to Taiwan and set up an authoritarian regime, its rule was also a form of colonization.

As Susan Brownell wrote about earlier this year at China Beat, sports have long been a form of communication between Taiwan and the mainland – the competition between the two entities has mainly been good-natured, yet sometimes fraught with tension. I wondered then what went through the minds of the Taiwanese, especially when their team was defeated by both Japan and China. On the one hand, although the Japanese colonized the Taiwanese and treated them as second-rate citizens, many of them still admire and imitate Japanese culture today (for instance, Taiwanese youth prefer to visit Japan over the U.S.). On the other hand, many Taiwanese resent China’s heavy hand, leading frequent mass protests on the streets against President Ma Yingjou for his “friendly” policies toward the mainland. When Ma allowed direct flights between China and Taiwan, the media reported negative stories of mainlander tourists who escaped from their tour group. One television report chastised seven mainlanders who went to Shilin Night Market, ordered one oyster pancake between them, then demanded seven chopsticks (providing a stereotypical example of how mainlanders are cheap).

This week Ma took another dramatic step in improving relations with China as a way of reviving Taiwan’s tepid economy, as well as building the island’s long-term security and fostering peace with the mainland. Starting on December 15, direct, regularly-scheduled passenger flights from Taiwan and China finally commenced (flights have been ongoing since July, but not daily – only tourist-group charters on weekends and holidays). Under the landmark agreements signed last month, the number of passenger flights was increased to a maximum of 108 per week, up from 36. Furthermore, the two sides launched the first direct postal and shipping links across the strait.

After the Guomindang retreated to the island, it gradually limited the flow of mail to the mainland before completely restricting communication in 1954. With the restoration of the “three links” – direct air, shipping, and postal – these connections end the tedious and costly practice of routing passengers, goods, and mail via a neutral port – usually Hong Kong or Macau. This breakthrough under Ma’s leadership occurs at the same time that Taiwanese prosecutors are indicting former President Chen Shui-bian and thirteen others, including his wife, son, and daughter-in-law, on graft charges and money laundering. Chen had been detained since November 12 on suspicion of corruption, but was released without bail on December 13 around 1:00am to prevent immediate commotion and protest. Taiwanese critics assert that the chief judge who released Chen is a closet DPP supporter because of his decision. Meanwhile, Chinese media are mum on the subject for fear of taking sides and facing accusations from the DPP that mainlanders favor the GMD. Nonetheless, Chinese are paying close attention to the trial, devoting large amounts of news coverage in hopes of using it as an example of how government corruption should be dealt with in their own country.

Thus, despite the “three links’” potentially increasing harmony between both sides, suspicions still remain. Likewise, even though observers deemed the Beijing Olympics a major success, no one has noticed that the Taiwanese consumed the Games with much less enthusiasm than mainlanders.

Jennifer Liu is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of California, Irvine.

Human Rights and China’s Public Diplomacy

A Controversy over a Beijing Olympic Float for the 2008 Pasadena Rose Parade

By Hongmei Li

While the Tournament of Roses is busy preparing for the Pasadena Rose Parade on Jan. 1, 2009, it is interesting to revisit a controversy over a Beijing Olympic float for the 2008 parade for at least three reasons: (1) the controversy, largely provoked by FLG practitioners and other human rights groups, attracted huge media attention and the Pasadena city government and its human relations commission held several meetings to consider its position; (2) some analogies can be drawn between the controversy and the protests against the overseas leg of the Beijing Olympic torch relay; (3) the controversy also indicates the challenges that Beijing faces in general when it attempts to engage the American public in specific and the Western publics in general.

The Pasadena Sister Cities China Subcommittee initiated the idea of a Chinese Olympic float in 2004 as a form of cultural exchange. In 2004, Avery Dennison, a Pasadena-based company that has branches in China, expressed an interest in being a sponsor. There were sporadic meetings between Pasadena and Xicheng, which is a sister city of Pasadena, from 2004 to 2006. However, Xicheng was told by the Beijing City Municipality that it had “no right to enter an Olympic float.”

Sue Zhang, a prominent Chinese American community leader in Los Angeles became interested in the idea of a Chinese rose float and thus contacted officials in Beijing and talked with the mayor in Pasadena. She was connected with Avery Dennison through the Pasadena Sister Cities Committee and thus became an organizer of a Beijing Olympic-themed float. Ten Chinese Americans became sponsors, with each contributing 20,000 dollars and Avery Dennison contributed 200,000 dollars.

The ten Chinese Americans, most belonging to Beijing Association with Sue Zhang as the chair, then become a newly named organization called the Roundtable of Chinese American Associations in Southern California, On April 15, 2007, Sue Zhang announced at a press conference that a Beijing Olympic-themed Rose Float would appear in the 2008 Pasadena Rose Parade. The announcement was greatly applauded by the conference participants, most of whom were overseas Chinese community leaders and participants in Los Angeles. A Chinese cultural consul in Los Angeles stated that “having the float was a one-hundred year dream fulfilled” and it was “a proud achievement of all Chinese throughout the world.” Many participants at the conference claimed that the float symbolized how Chinese Americans had overcome ideological differences for the first time to accomplish a common goal.

At the beginning, the Olympic float was meant to be part of an overseas marketing plan for the Beijing Olympics. However, after the entry was announced officially, various human rights groups protested against it. Key protest groups include the Caltech FLG Club, Reporters Without Borders, the Visual Arts Guild, Amnesty International, the Conscience Foundation, the China Ministries international, the LA Friends of Tibet, Human Rights Watch, Justice for American Victims in China, New York Coalition for Darfur and the Burma human rights groups. FLG practitioners voiced their concerns first at a city council meeting on June 25, 2006 and were key players in the protest.

Human rights activists made a concerted effort in lobbying the city council members of Pasadena and voiced their concerns repeatedly at routine city council meetings. They spoke about their own suffering or suffering of their relatives or friends in China. Issues such as torturing, the imprisonment of FLG practitioners, journalists and Catholic ministers, police corruption and lack of media freedom were constantly voiced during the public comments sessions on the following days: June 25, July 16, July 23, July 30, Oct. 1, Oct. 8, Oct. 15, Oct. 22, Nov. 5, Nov. 19, Dec. 3, Dec. 10 and Dec. 17.

Mayor Bill Boggard was placed at the center of the controversy because of his active role in promoting the float. The Pasadena City government and city officials made various arrangements to have dialogues with human rights activists. The city council requested its human relations commission to draft a report regarding the float. Consequently, the commission held two special hearings: One meeting was devoted to receiving public comment, and one was devoted to formulating the final form of the report and recommendation. The city council had a special meeting on Oct. 29, which marked a shift in protesting strategies for activists. Prior to the meeting, human rights activists mainly pushed for the dropping of the float from the parade. The argued that the Chinese government was sponsoring the float; the float was about celebrating the Chinese government and thus validating its human rights abuses; the inclusion of the float would be embarrassing to Pasadena. Such rhetoric and request were similar to the reactions of human rights activists to the Beijing Olympic in general. Protesters used withered roses to symbolize shame that the Beijing Olympic float brought to the parade. (See image 1)

Human rights activists urging dropping the float, provided by Xiao Rong
Human rights activists also repeatedly linked the Beijing Olympics to the 1936 Games in Nazi Germany. They called the float “the float of shame,” “the propaganda float” and the “float of genocide.” They produced and circulated an image that transformed the float into a tank that featured a lonely person with a rose in hand trying to stop the tank, which resembled a well-known image about the Tiananmen Square Student Movement in 1989, where a lonely person was trying to stop a stream of tanks from advancing. This tank image was constantly circulated over the Internet as a symbol of brutality of the Chinese Communist regime and humanity of protesters. (See Image 2)

Float of Shame
At the same time, Reporters without borders, also set up a billboard at the intersection of Del Mar Avenue and Arroyo Parkway in early December featuring the Olympic five rings as handcuffs, suggesting that the Beijing Olympics represents tortures rather than human connections. Lau faxed this image to city council members and distributed this image. This powerful image was widely used in protests against the overseas leg of the Beijing Olympic torch relay. (See Image 3)

Five Rings as Handcuffs
On December 31, more than one hundred protesters gathered around the Orange Grove Boulevard close to the Tournament House. Some were local people and others came from Northern California and other places. They distributed flyers and set up banners exposing human rights abuses in China. Some drivers honked to show support. On January 1, 2008, when the Beijing Olympic float, featuring five mascots with the logo “one world one dream” rolled down through the Orange Grove, some protesters held the handcuff image aiming to shame Beijing in front of the world. Protesters also asked supporters to turn their backs to the Beijing Olympic float, but few spectators complied though. (See Image 4 and Image 5)

Beijing Olympic Float in Pasadena Rose Parade (AP/Reed Saxon)
(AP/Nick Ut)
The controversy was covered extensively by media such as Pasadena Star News, Pasadena Weekly, the LA Times, KPCC, the Associated Press, Voice of America, KTLA Channel 5, KABC Channel 7 and Chinese-language media. Pasadena Weekly also published letters from residents, most condemning China’s human rights records and viewing the US human rights policies toward China as too soft. Kenneth Todd Ruiz from Pasadena Star News and Joe Piasecki from Pasadena Weekly were staunch supporters for human rights activists.

For the float supporters, one of the most important strategy is to keep the float apolitical by delinking the Beijing Olympics in general and the float in specific from human rights issues in China. It must be pointed out that all city council members and officials, and officials from the Tournament of Roses, regardless of whether they supported the float, all expressed sympathy to human rights activists, condemnation of human rights abuses, and support for human rights improvement. The support can be seen in ongoing conversations between the city government of Pasadena and the human rights coalition about a possible pre-parade human rights torch relay and other arrangements. Even though the arrangement failed for various reasons, with each side telling a different story, sincere efforts to accommodate human rights activists indicate that human rights issues were of significant importance to officials in Pasadena.

There were several controversial points regarding the float. The first was whether the float was political, whether the inclusion of the float was a “validation of the government of China and all its activities such as human rights violations,” and whether such violations should be embarrassing to Pasadena. While protesters viewed the float as the right target, supporters argued that “the float is about celebrating the Olympics and it is consistent in the patter of the celebration tradition in the parade.”

The second point that led to disagreement was whether human rights should be a leading concern when the US deals with China. While some viewed as more desirable to have good relationship and share values, but for others, China is about human rights abuses and anything related to China is opportunity to reach out. It was really about engaging China or shaming China. For supporters of the float, the shame strategy was ineffective and they argued for a middle ground that let the float in and simultaneously showed concern to human rights issues. But for protesters, losing face for the Communist Government was an important strategy to get their message out. While supporters generally viewed that people should be patient with the government and that changes were not made overnight, protesters were extremely suspicious of the government and felt that some Chinese organizations were front organizations of the government.

The third point of disagreement was whether Pasadena had the jurisdiction and moral authority to address human rights issues in China. For many, it was the federal government that should address China’s human rights abuses and the role of local government is to take care of local issues, but for protesters and their supporters, Pasadena should express its stand in China’s human rights abuses. The Beijing Olympic float is complicated because it is a local float with international meanings. Pasadena was especially reluctant to address this issue for being afraid of opening up possibilities for other human rights groups to request Pasadena to deal with similar issues. Because many overseas Chinese were proud of the Beijing Olympics, Pasadena did not want to offend the large Chinese community in Los Angeles.

Understandably, float supporters expressed displeasure of the float being hijacked and they questioned why they did not pick up the Huntington Library where there is a Chinese Garden, or GE or even Wal-Mart that has large businesses in China. Protesters focused on the float because of the tremendous publicity the tournament of roses brings. The 119-year-old yearly parade is one of the most viewed events in the US. The 2008 parade was broadcast live by nine networks/stations and amounted to 14.7 U.S. national Nielsen rating points, or approximately 15.96 million households, with a total audience of approximately 40 million in the U.S. In addition, the Rose Parade was televised in 215 international territories.

The controversy also indicates that relatively small number of committed activists can be very powerful in setting the agenda and influencing international issues. While during the Olympic torch relay, Tibetans and their supporters were most active in posting Beijing, but FLG practitioners were active protesters against the Olympic float. Generally speaking, China’s dim international images, particularly the perception of China’s human rights records, can pose tremendous challenges for China when it engages with the international community. In my conversation with float supporters at the Pasadena city government and the China Sister Cities Committee about whether they would have done things differently if they had known the controversy, all of them expressed a hesitation and stated that they would think twice before any involvement.

One idea about human rights activists seeking overseas support. On the one hand, seeking overseas support can publicize their causes and give the Chinese regime more international pressure, but on the other hand, it gives the Chinese government more legitimacy to crack them down and it might further alienate many Chinese who do not necessarily support the Chinese government and nevertheless are concerned with China’s international images. Indeed, the overwhelming support for the overseas leg of the Beijing Olympic torch relay in April-May 2008 indicates that Chinese nationals or overseas Chinese can rally around the government when an idealized image of China is threatened. To a large extent, many Chinese nationals and overseas Chinese are still very sensitive to the issue of national dignity, largely because the national narrative of China’s one-hundred-year humiliation (bainian quru shi) is still resonant with many Chinese. Thus, the backing from any foreign government can backfire by provoking the image of foreign colonizers suppressing the Chinese people again.

From Iron Girls to Oriental Beauties

By Hongmei Li

In a piece I did for the Huffington Post on women and the Olympics, I provided a brief overview of the history of ideas about feminine beauty in China and their links to concepts of modernity. This post supplements it by looking at the shift in representations of women from celebrating iron girls to extolling Oriental beauties over the course of the still relatively short history of the People’s Republic of China (PRC).

During the three decades that followed the 1949 founding of the PRC, one goal promoted in official discourse was that of erasing gender differences and promoting gender sameness.  This was linked to achieving a broader agenda: the elimination of class and socioeconomic differences.  The underlying assumption was that women and men had the same fundamental responsibility: serving collective units, above the nation.  The following are typical images of Chinese women during this period.

As you can see, women were dressed in the same androgynous way as men and they were portrayed as enthusiastically engaged in building a Socialist nation. Eroticism had no place in the official discourse. High-achieving “iron girls” (smiling soldiers, peasants and workers engaged in military, agricultural and production labor) were praised in the official discourse. These girls were said to be provided with a vast platform of sky and earth on which to achieve great things (guang kuo tiandi, da you suo wei).

Typical Images of Iron Girls during the Culture Revolution




In the last three decades, however, the image of Chinese women has dramatically shifted and women’s bodies have been closely associated with pleasure and the rise of consumer culture. In the 1980s, feminized women were said to represent progress and the iron girls were ridiculed. Numerous books and magazines have begun to stress “nu ren wei,” which can be literally translated as the taste of womanliness and that stresses gender differences and femininity. There has been an explosion of feminine and erotic images of women in Chinese TV programs, magazines, billboards and other media outlets. To be good looking is now often considered something that is important to becoming happy and achieving success in a career. Here are some images of two well-known Chinese actresses Zhang Ziyi and Gong Li, which clearly link women with consumer culture and fetishize particular parts of the female body.



Images of Zhang Ziyi and Gong Li as Symbols of Beautiful Consumer Culture


In Chinese gender discourse, one of the often heard issues is the production of the Oriental beauty in China, which can be clearly seen in the Beijing Olympic medal presenters. Approximately 380 Chinese women were selected to be Beijing Olympic medal ceremony presenters as medal tray carriers, flower presenters, and attendants for guests, officials and athletes: they must be aged between 18 and 25, with height between 5”6 and 5”10. And they must have a “regular appearance with standard proportion.” It was also reported that there were guiding criteria regarding applicants’ sizes of waists, breasts, and hips (sanwei). In their heavy training schedules, they were required to carry themselves and walk in a particular way so that they could represent the oriental beauty to the world. Chops were also used to produce the perfect smile, which was defined as the exposure of six to eight upper teeth.

An Image of Chinese Medal Presenters in a Training Session

The medal presenters for the Olympics aim to represent Chinese women as reserved, submissive and traditional in the finest sense. Ironically, these women are somehow similar to women waitresses and stewardesses. Often times, in job ads for waitresses and stewardesses, there are requirements about an applicant’s height and regular appearance (五官端正). Once selected, they are often trained for their smiles and postures.

While discriminatory hiring practices existed in the US, but they become subtler now. Employers often declare that no individuals will be discriminated against based on gender, race, nationality, or sexual orientations. In China, however, such discriminatory employing practices seem to be officially endorsed and become more explicit. Indeed, it was reported in 2004 female applicants for civil servants in Hunan Province were required to have balanced breasts, which caused a public outcry. While economic reforms give some women more opportunities in their career development, they also expand gender inequalities. Ironically, China could claim the most progressive gender policy in the past, its current gender discriminations in social, political, economic and cultural arenas mean that women are put in a worse situation than before. A common Chinese saying that summarizes an effort in vain states, “several decades’ hardship only leads to the pre-1949 China overnight” (辛辛苦苦几十年, 一夜回到解放前). Efforts need to be made in order to prevent such a retreat from happening.

Whose Peoples’ Games?

Ethnic Identity and the 2008 Beijing Olympics



By James Leibold

With the self-professed slogans of the Green Olympics, High-tech Olympics and the People’s Olympics, the Beijing Organizing Committee for the Olympic Games (BOCOG) should have anticipated criticism. It left nothing to chance in hosting the world’s athletes and spectators—gleaming stadia, smiling faces and blue skies: all as ordered. But as many Western observers noted, BOCOG forgot to invite the Chinese people—with security guards, CCTV cameras and robot-like volunteers ensuring little spontaneity or popular emotion at the so-called People’s Games.

In the wake of the unprecedented media coverage of China’s global “coming out party,” few have paused to consider who and what were on display at Beijing 2008. In the pomp and pageantry of the most expensive Olympic Games in history, whose image did the organizers project before the world’s probing gaze? In promoting the Olympic Games and Olympic Movement, BOCOG promised to “organize diversified cultural and educational programs to cater to the needs of the people,” while encouraging “the widest participation of the people in the preparation of the Games” in order to “increase the cohesion and pride of the Chinese nation.” But a closer look at the preparations and staging of the Games reveals deep strains in the very fabric of the Chinese nation, not only the fraying threads of class, place, and gender, which have been often commented on, but also of ethnicity.

It has become commonplace in academic literature to speak about the “inchoate,” “incoherent,” and “amorphous” nature of Chinese nationalism, what John Fitzgerald termed a “nationless state,” a fractured and divided people forcefully held together by an autocratic state structure. Unlike Europe, state and nation building in modern China occurred alongside one another, with an increasingly powerful state elite experimenting with different formulae for the nation: who was to be included, in what proportions, and under what terms. Here the ethnic composition of the nation-state proved particularly problematic. China is home to both a single, dominant Han majority—whose over one billion people are beset by numerous linguistic, cultural, class, and place divisions—and scores of small and highly scattered minorities living along the state’s massive frontier regions.

In the making/baking of the nation-cake, we can identify at least three distinct, yet overlapping, recipes in the Chinese cupboard over the last century or so. What I will term: 1) Leninist-style multiculturalism; 2) Han racism; and 3) Confucian ecumenism. It is important to note that each of these recipes explicitly excludes the possibility of ethnic separatism and transnational ties. The nature and size of the baker’s bowl was never really in question; rather the modern Chinese state and its elites inherited the Qing geobody and set about constructing the nation from within its boundaries. Yet while the contours of the nation-cake were largely fixed, its ingredients were open for debate. In what follows, I seek to tease out some of these unresolved tensions, and explore how they were reflected on the stage and behind the scenes of China’s Olympic moment.

Leninist-style multiculturalism
As a Leninist party-state, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) sought initially to solve the “national question” in accordance with the “scientific laws” of historical materialism. Material progress was viewed as a linear path; but not all peoples were thought to progress at the same rate, leaving the problem of “backward and feudal national minorities” for the state to resolve. Lenin’s solution, as outlined in the 1903 program of the Russian Communist Party, was “the right of self-determination for all nations comprising the State”; that is, the strategic recognition and protection of individual nationalities’ interests within a multi-ethnic state structure.



While Mao and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) were quick to rule out the possibility of territorial succession for China’s minorities, they followed the Soviet Union in creating a complex system of cultural, economic, and political autonomy to protect the independent development of each nationality free from ethnic chauvinism. In the PRC today, Leninist-style multiculturalism includes an intricate series of affirmative action policies aimed at preserving the cultures and identities of each of the state’s fifty-five officially recognized national minorities.



In this spirit, 42 of China’s 639 Olympic athletes in 2008 were non-Han competitors who managed to win 6 of China’s 100 medals. And while not all Chinese nationalities competed at Beijing, a colourful caricature of this ethnic mosaic was ceremonially paraded across the Bird’s Nest stadium at the start of the Opening Ceremony. Despite the tightly controlled nature of minority participation in the Games, the official policy of multiculturalism required a degree of visibility and active participation from the minorities, including thousands of torch bearers (including 22 Tibetan mountaineers on the slopes of Qomolangma), ethnic singing and dancing at Olympic events, and extensive media coverage of the 9th National Minority Nationalities Traditional Sports Games held in Guangzhou in November 2007. Foreign visitors were also encouraged to visit the recently completed “Chinese Ethnic Culture Park,” a 50-hectare “anthropological museum” located just south of the Olympic Green where visitors could experience real, live “ethnic gatherings,” and learn more about the “behaviour, genius, liability, aesthetics and cultural essence” of the minorities while wandering through the individual “ethnic villages” that have been authentically preserved by the Chinese state.

Han racism
While Leninist-style multiculturalism does create genuine spaces for minority agency, it also engenders resentment and racial hatred. As Frank Dikötter has demonstrated, racism has deep roots in China. Driven by a strand of cultural xenophobia that labelled non-sedentary neighbours “barbarians” and sought their exclusion from Chinese political life, Han racism was perhaps most clearly articulated in opposition to the Manchu rulers of the Qing dynasty, where Han revolutionaries like 18 year-old Zou Rong called for the “annihilation the five million and more of the furry and horned Manchu race, cleansing ourselves of 260 years of harsh and unremitting pain, so that the soil of the Chinese subcontinent is made immaculate, and the descendants of the Yellow Emperor will all become Washingtons.”

Following the collapse of the Qing, this sort of racial vilification was swept under the rug of the new Republic and its idealized “Union of Five Races” (Han, Manchu, Mongol, Tibetan, and Hui), and was later attacked as “Han chauvinism” by the CCP. But the party-state has struggled to completely stamp it out. If anything, the collapse of ideology and the rise of new communication technologies in China have provided alternative platforms for its articulation.



In its moderate form, Han racism identifies the Han people as the cultural and racial backbone of the nation, mandating the Han man’s burden of civilising the “backward” and “feudal” minorities. In its more virulent articulation, Han racism advocates the forced assimilation or extermination of all non-Han peoples in China, an ideology that one online blogger termed “Chinazi” (China + Nazi = Chinazi) in admiration of Nazi-style racism while calling for the preservation of superior Han blood from barbarian contamination.



This sort of chauvinism is largely hidden and subconscious. Take for example, the use of Han actors to portray the minority children at the opening ceremony. Facing criticism from the foreign media, BOCOG vice-president Wang Wei dismissed the incident as “not worth mentioning” and “completely normal” in Chinese tradition. But few Chinese would have missed the powerful symbolism of a red-dressed Han girl singing the emotive “Ode to the Motherland” (gechang zuguo) from an elevated stage as the colourful “native” children paraded before her and the all-Han BOCOG officials before saluting the motherland’s flag. It would seem that the Han man’s burden was nearly fulfilled; but not all bloggers were happy. Several complained about the Han girl’s Western style dress and the Manchu derived “horse jacket” (magua) and “riding gown” (qipao) that other Han performers were wearing. These foreign styles, it was claimed, diluted the traditional essence of Chinese (zhonghua) culture embodied in the long silk robes of Han clothing (hanfu).

Yet, outside the carefully controlled public arena, one finds more explicit expressions of Han racism. Following the March 14th riots in Lhasa, which killed 18 and injured over 500 mostly Han migrants, racist diatribes inundated popular Chinese blogs before being removed by censors. When discussing the vitriolic Song dynasty war song, “Defend the Han Homeland” (hanjia jiangtu) on Han Minzu BBS, a retired Beijing solider asserted that “national unity and fusion can only be achieved through struggle and not compromise,” and “because we Han give them preferential treatment, some national minorities now think they are naturally superior to the Han and discriminate against us, even to the extent of disrespecting our people’s history, customs, habits and traditional clothing.” Others used much less subtle language.

Confucian ecumenism
Throughout the long sweep of its history, racial exclusionism has been a distinct yet largely heterodox tradition. During times of strength and unity, the Chinese state stressed the ability of its culture to literally absorb neighbouring “barbarians” through a peaceful process of laihua (come and be transformed), incorporating them into the Confucian datong (great community) or tianxia (all under heaven). More recently, the colonial extension of the Chinese state has pushed its institutions and people into the furthest corners of the geobody, ensuring that few regions are not actively guarded over by Han soldiers, bureaucrats, teachers, or entrepreneurs. The demographic and political weight of the Han community has led some intellectuals to begin to question the official policy of multiculturalism, calling for a revival of what they see as an ethnically neutral Confucian ecumenism.

Take for example, the US-educated Chair of Sociology at Peking University, Professor Ma Rong, who speaks with the authority of the Han state despite his Hui ethnicity. In a recent article, he called for the “de-politicization” of ethnic relations in China, which requires a departure from European-style liberalism and Soviet-style multiculturalism and a return to a traditional “culture-centred” approach to diversity that is fundamental to his reading of Confucianism. Rather than promoting ethnic integration, Ma Rong argues that the “institutionalization of ethnic groups” under Mao Zedong promoted ethnic stratification and tension. In response to Western criticism, China should “learn from their ancestors and their experience for thousands of years in guiding ethnic relations,” and return to the bedrock of Confucian “culturalism,” where culture rather than ethnicity serves as the key marker of civilisation and public policy focuses on promoting a universal culture and identity through acculturation rather than the protection of individual minority rights and benefits.



Confucianism and its idealized “harmonious society” were a dominant theme at the Opening Ceremony. Despite the brief nod to multiculturalism, it was Confucius in the form of 2008 Fou drummers who welcomed guests with the opening lines of the Analects. They were followed by 3000 Confucian disciples and the repeated creation of the Chinese character for “peace” (he) as organizers sought to convey Chinese culture and its people as an ancient and outwardly looking civilisation. Riding a wave of renewed interest in Confucianism and the establishment of thousands of international institutes bearing his name, many Chinese hope that Confucius will one day rival Socrates’ influence on global thought.

Confucian ecumenism and its ethnic double blind were perhaps best symbolized by the Ceremony’s two leading (genuine) minority performers: the 15th century Hui Muslim admiral Zheng He and the Zhuang nationality gymnast Li Ning. While the Great Wall made only a fleeting appearance, the Silk Route and the “Maritime Silk Route” of Zheng He’s famous sea voyages took centre stage. As an armada of blue-robed performers swung massive wooden oars across the stadium floor, foreign television commentators waxed lyrical about the seven treasure fleets of this “Chinese Columbus,” who spread Chinese culture and goods as far as Africa and possibly beyond. The day started with the lighting of the Olympic torch next to a bust of Peking Man at Zhoukoudian and ended when the Olympic cauldron was set ablaze by Li Ning. Failing to mention his ethnicity, the People’s Daily described him as a “Chinese gymnastic champion” and “national hero” who won 6 medals at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympic Games and then went onto become a millionaire entrepreneur in Reform era China. In representing both the traditional and modern faces of China, these two “Chinese” figures signified the great coalescing force of Confucianism and its ability to fuse different peoples into a powerful, cohesive whole.

Final words: But whose?
It’s too early in my research to draw any definitive conclusions. But I find it hard to imagine the CCP abandoning its official position on multiculturalism anytime soon. Like other multiethnic societies, outbursts of racist vitriol are inevitable in China, a troubling reflection of the growing social dislocation and atomization in this rapidly transforming society. The Internet provides new spaces (dark corners) for its expression; but the State and its intricate security apparatuses maintain a vigilante watch over any “irrational expressions of patriotism.”



In contrast, there appears to be great sympathy for a new approach to ethnic relations among the Han elite, and here Confucian ecumenism seems to offer a distinct alternative, or at the very least a new indigenous grammar. But shifting rhetoric is easy; transforming institutions is not. Dismantling the complex structures of Leninist-style multiculturalism would require bold action. Not only are the state’s basic institutions—government, education, media, police, and military—organized to reflect and respect the individual diversity of China’s 56 nationalities, but, perhaps more importantly, any attempt to unwind these institutions would meet with harsh criticism from the West and the withdrawal of the validation that China seems to crave.

In seeking the moral high-ground on controversial issues such as Tibet and Xinjiang, China still feels compelled to argue its case in the language of the West: be it the Hegalian “politics of recognition” or the Nietzschean “war on terror.” Confucius might have welcomed the world to Beijing, but Count Jacques Rogge sent them home.

Dr James Leibold is a Senior Lecturer in Politics and Asian Studies at La Trobe University and author of Reconfiguring Chinese Nationalism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). A copy of the text with references is available from the author at j.leibold@latrobe.edu.au.

Faking Heaven: The Utopian Will to Order in China

By Timothy S. Oakes

Now that the 2008 Olympics have come and gone, Beijing can perhaps breathe a sigh of relief that after two weeks of intensive scrutiny, the most embarrassing thing the foreign media could come up with during the Games was that some of the events in the spectacular opening ceremony were faked. First, we learned that 9-year old Lin Miaoke was not in fact singing a revised “Song of the Motherland” at all, but was lip-synching the voice of the less photogenic Yang Peiyi (see Geremie Barmé’s “Painting Over Mao”). Then, we learned that at least some of the firework footprints leading up to the National Stadium were photo-shopped versions of one that had been done ahead of time. And finally, we learned all of the children dressed in nationality costumes were not minority children at all but Han Chinese. A few newscasters and pundits did their best to muster some shock (shock!) that the world had been hoodwinked into believing China could really pull off the perfection we saw on our television screens.

We tend to smell in fakery like this the whiff of scandal. The fake carries with it the stain of deception, of shame, even immorality. And yet, it turns out that fakery is an important part of our ability to imagine perfection. This is not because perfection is the opposite of fakery, but because perfection depends upon the fake. Only the real world is imperfect, blemished, and full of chaos and unpredictability. The fake world of televised opening ceremonies, by contrast, is dependable, predictable, and orderly. And while we may live in the messiness of the real world, we yearn to believe in the more ordered and dependable replica we see on television.

Of course, it also turned out that during the 2000 Olympics, Sydney faked their opening ceremony too. The Sydney Symphony mimed its entire performance. In fact, some of it wasn’t even the Sydney Symphony playing on the backing tape, but their archrival, the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra. Such orchestral maneuvers, it seems, are routine for important events where nothing can be left to chance. And so, China apparently has no monopoly on faking it. Nevertheless, the situation in Beijing gave Ai Weiwei occasion to lament in The Guardian about how China may be able to fake its way to a perfect Olympics – to the “fake applause” of the media and the public – but “true happiness” can never be faked: “This nation is notorious for its ability to make or fake anything cheaply,” he wrote. “‘Made-in-China’ goods now fill homes around the world. But our giant country has a small problem. We can't manufacture the happiness of our people.” He added that, “Real public contentment can't be pirated or copied.”

Maybe so. But accusing China of faking itself into modernity is as old as, well, modernity itself. In River Town, Peter Hessler recounts a scandalized 17th century Spanish priest named Domingo Navarrete who described business methods in China thus: “The Chinese are very ingenious at imitation. They have imitated to perfection whatsoever they have seen brought out of Europe. In the Province of Canton they have counterfeited several things so exactly, that they sell them Inland for Goods brought out from Europe.” While there’s nothing novel in remarking on the ubiquity of China’s knock-off economy, it may be worth reflecting on just what is so important about shoring up the boundary between the real and the fake, especially when using the yardstick of modernity to measure China’s emergence as a world power.

Accusing China of faking its way into modernity is equivalent to accusing China of doing exactly what the dream of modernity demands of its supplicants: a will to hide disorder with order, to keep at bay the ever-present chaos of the world with a reliable façade of predictableness, indeed an ability to hold out the threat of disorder as reason enough to demand that people willingly play their roles in maintaining harmony. The ‘paradise’ of order and harmony that modernity promises, like all utopias, cannot but be realized without dissolving the boundaries between the real and the fake, the sacred and profane, the original and the virtual.

So perhaps Ai Weiwei has it wrong. What if "true happiness" must always be complicit with fakery? What if something so lofty and pure as true happiness can never be realized except in some form of approximation or replication, where all the inevitable blemishes, mistakes, and unexpected turns of events can be controlled, deleted and photo-shopped out? Judging from the comments posted on The Guardian’s website, many of Ai’s readers bristled at the implication that true happiness could only be found in a ‘free and democratic’ country like England. And that shouldn’t be surprising. While the English are perhaps more enthusiastic than others at disowning happiness, the point is that true happiness is often something that is thought to be found faraway, in other places or in other times. And should we actually ever experience true happiness here and now, it is likely to dissipate before we’ve had time to realize what hit us. From this way of looking at things, Ai Weiwei is simply following in the footsteps of generations of utopian thinkers who have imagined a paradise of perfect happiness lying just beyond the horizon, just out of reach, and just about anywhere but here and now.

But for those of us who must live here in the present, we’ll have to make do with photo-shopped fireworks and lip-synched songs. Still, China’s current enthusiasm for fakery is disarming. In today’s post-reform consumer economy of leisure culture, there is little that isn’t faked. It’s almost too banal to mention how true this is of basic consumer goods from DVDs and liquor to I-Phones and Rolexes. But that’s just the beginning. China’s cultural landscape is now dotted with fake Eiffel Towers, fake Capitol buildings and White Houses, and fake English villages. There are towns, like Zhouzhuang, that are even fakes of themselves. Like the ‘scandal’ of a fake Olympic ceremony, China’s fake landscapes are nothing more than an homage to modernity’s insatiable appetite for order, efficiency, and rationality, all in the name of achieving that inevitable repose of harmony and tranquility promised by modernity. It is a utopic order achieved by blending the real and the fake, by replication and mimicry.

Lewis Mumford once wrote that there are two kinds of utopias: one of escape and one of reconstruction. The latter should be easily recognized in the Socialist Realist art of the Mao era. In the Party’s current version of this utopia, however, order is highly valued. In fact, however, it is difficult to find a vision of utopia that does not imagine a highly ordered society of peace, harmony, and tranquility. This seems as true of utopias of escape (e.g. Peach Blossom Spring, Shangri-la) as of utopias of reconstruction (e.g. New Harmony, Indiana). Orderliness is a virus of utopia that just won’t go away.

China’s current vision of a modern utopia similarly places a high value on order and harmony. If we are scandalized by the deliberate and repeated transgressions of the boundary between real and fake going on in China today, then we have only forgotten that the modern project has always yearned for the kind of order that can only be dreamed of and that has only ever trafficked in the arts of fakery.

Timothy S. Oakes is associate professor in the Department of Geography at University of Colorado at Boulder.

Olympic Echoes in Denver and St. Paul

When the media spotlight shifted instantaneously from Beijing to Denver last week, it was easy to focus on things that the Olympics and the Democratic Convention had in common as spectacles, especially since each ended with a big party in a stadium where rock music played and fireworks exploded. But if there's a real American sequel to the Beijing Games, it's the Republican Convention underway in St. Paul.

It’s true that in Denver one big story involved long-term rivals working together to achieve a new goal. This is definitely an Olympian theme in the era of “Dream Teams” made up of members of competing NBA squads.

Beijing-Denver similarities pale, however, when placed beside the deeper links between China's first Olympics and the latest GOP Convention. Consider these:

The Role of Natural Disasters. The Olympics themselves went ahead as scheduled, but China’s leaders had to alter some features of the torch run due to the massive Sichuan earthquake, so as not to seem inappropriately celebratory at a tragic moment. This brings to mind the last minute alterations to the St. Paul schedule inspired by the hurricane.

Historical Revisionism. For those familiar with China’s modern history, it was deeply ironic to see leaders of the once fiercely anti-Confucian Communist Party look on approvingly as Confucius was quoted and honored during the opening ceremonies. But we’re now seeing something just as drenched in irony: the GOP presenting itself as the party that stands for women’s rights.

Extending Control. China’s leaders saw hosting the Games as a way to buttress their legitimacy. And they used the opening ceremony to encourage people to concentrate on only the good things their Party had done for the country, which explains why on 08/08/08 audiences were reminded of China’s impressive new space program but not the 1989 Beijing Massacre that put an end to the Tiananmen protests. Similarly, the GOP is striving now to emphasize accomplishments and gloss over stigmatic events like the Abu Ghraib scandal as it struggles to keep control of the White House.

For this last reason in particular, the true political sequel to the Olympics is the St. Paul Convention.

Americans trying to understand the international reaction to the three big spectacles that have followed each other in quick succession, like the opening legs of a relay race, would also do well to keep something else in mind. Many people in other lands see the organizations currently in power in the United States and in China as having an important feature in common, even though only one will have to win in a post-spectacle national election to stay in power. Namely, the American Republican Party, like China's Communist Party, is widely seen as having demonstrated a disturbing tendency to take a dangerously unilateral approach to foreign policy of late.

We should not be surprised then if outside of the United States a lot of people watching the spectacle in St. Paul are secretly hoping the same thing as so many Democrats. That it will prove less successful than the Beijing Games were, in the sense of doing less than that extravaganza did to increase the odds that the same organization that now controls a big powerful country will continue to do so for at least a few more years.

* This piece was published first earlier today, under a different title, at the History News Network