A Little Post-Games Analysis

Last week, we handed out five medals for media handling of the Games, and now we're following with a different sort of list, which flags both shortcomings as well as accomplishments.

1) Yellow Card for over-generalization and reinforcing stereotypes: to Thomas Friedman for "Melting Pot Meets Great Wall." Though the Olympics could be seen as a "teachable moment," with both the U.S. and China having things to learn from the other, Friedman essentializes both countries here, arguing that the US is diverse while China is focused and goal-driven. Moreover, the jumping off point for Friedman's piece is his observation that "the Russian team all looks Russian...the Chinese team all looks Chinese; and the American team looks like all of them." Not only is this a neat bit of selective viewing (what does the New Zealand team look like? The British?), but it overlooks the fact that China is actually enormously diverse (particularly historically), even if Friedman can't "see" it by watching the opening ceremony. Friedman's essentializing impulse is further illustrated by a gaffe in this paragraph, preserved in the original but edited in syndication--at the Times, part of Friedman's intro reads "the African team all looks African"; in syndication, it became "the African teams all look African." Not only do all Chinese people not look alike, but Africa is actually not a nation.

2) Medal for humor: Xujun Eberlein at Inside-Out China translates several Olympic jokes from Chinese. Though she was concerned that jokes-in-translation are rarely as funny as the original, these manage to make the leap.

3) A medal for quick-off-the-start post-Olympics analysis to YaleGlobal for their on-going series. Part II of the series, "China's Olympic Run" ("With the Games over, the Communist Party loses a convenient excuse for every hardship"), was written by Pallavi Aiyar, who we previously interviewed about her new book.

4) Yellow Card to China Beat, for having neglected to ever mention Jocelyn Ford as one of "our women in China." Ford, a freelance journalist working in China, was previously Beijing bureau chief (2002-2006) and Tokyo bureau chief (1994-2000) for Marketplace and blogs regularly for Science Friday. Check out this fabulous short video at the Boston Globe documenting her visit to a farming village to chat about the Olympics with regular Chinese.

5) Own Goal: To China for blocking iTunes, as though it would be more damage to the regime for athletes to hear Tibet-related songs than for it to get criticized for such a ham-handed bit of censorship.

“同一个世界，同一个梦想”还是 “同会异梦”?

“One World, One Dream” or “One Game, Different Dreams”?

This piece was originally posted at Policy Innovations and has been reprinted here with permission of the author.

By James Farrer

A "silver medal" for the Beijing Olympics from the Japanese media

Mo Bangfu, a Chinese columnist writing for the liberal Asahi Shimbun, used his weekly column the day before the closing ceremonies to award the Beijing Olympics a symbolic "silver medal" for its overall organization (Aug. 23, 2008, p. B3). Despite accusations of fakery, the opening ceremonies and the Olympic volunteers both deserve "gold medals," as do the ordinary Beijing residents and migrant workers who had to put up with massive everyday inconveniences.

The government, however, deserves a "disqualification" for not allowing any demonstrations in the designated demonstration areas, for restricting the access of normal citizens to the Olympic venues, and also "poor marks" for the large numbers of empty seats at events. As a whole, Mo suggests, the Beijing Olympics deserve a "silver medal," perhaps summing up the generally positive appraisal of some of the more liberal media voices in Japan. Conservative papers, however, gave the Beijing Olympics much lower marks.

Seeing the Olympics as a watershed event, Japanese commentators have speculated about a "post-Olympic" China, and their prognoses are generally darker than the more optimistic views in the U.S. media. Influenced by Japan's own postwar experience, columnists ask whether the Beijing Olympics will serve the purpose of integrating China into global society, in the same way achieved by the former Axis powers in the postwar Rome, Tokyo, and Munich Olympics, and later by Seoul in 1988. Most answer negatively. Despite a consensus "silver medal" for a brilliant (if somewhat flawed) show, the Olympics were regarded as a political failure by most Japanese commentators, at least when judged by democratic norms. More darkly, some conservative papers suggest, the Olympics should be seen as a great "success" for the legitimacy of authoritarian rule in China.

In a front-page summary of the impact of the Olympics on China, the conservative Sankei Shimbun suggested that the Olympics were a celebration of dictatorship and the effectiveness of totalitarian government, "a celebration turning its back on democratization" (Aug. 25, 2008, p. 1). The article suggests that the Beijing Olympics should be compared to neither the 1964 Tokyo Olympics nor the 1988 Seoul Olympics, both of which led to greater democratization and the integration of Japan and Korea into the club of democratic states. Rather, the editors conclude, China's Olympics may in retrospect look more like the 1980 Moscow Olympics, which signaled political isolation and the internal disintegration of the Soviet Union. Like many conservative voices in Japan, the Sankei emphasizes the fragile state of the Chinese economy, predicting much bigger troubles, even a "hard landing" for China's "bubble economy" (Aug. 25, 2008, p. 1, "After the Olympics: a mountain of problems for China's economy").

Even the more liberal Asahi Shimbun described the opening ceremony as a "political show for the party leadership," (Aug. 9, 2008, p. 2) pointing to the important role played by Communist Party leaders in every public event leading up to the Olympics. The article claims that in every city passed through on the torch relay, the first torch bearer was always the local Party secretary. As the Games opened, Asahi guest columnist and liberal academic Fujiwara Koichi judged Zhang Yimou's elaborate opening ceremony as a "vacuous" political exercise. He writes, "It's a sad sight to see this brilliant director expending his talents on this exaggerated display of tradition and political propaganda."

Despite the emptiness of its political slogans, Fujiwara continues, it was important that the world participated in the Games in order to build bridges with the Chinese people, who can bring about real change in their government (Asahi Shimbun, Aug. 24, 2008, p. 27, "Vacuous, but engagement is important"). The closing Olympic editorial in the Asahi Shimbun, although more moderate in tone, also called for political reform in China and asked the Chinese state to give some substance to the "One World, One Dream" motto by joining the global society in the fight against global warming (Aug. 25, 2008, p. 3 "Make steps toward political reform").

Much of this criticism mirrors the English-language media, but there are some differences. Japanese media reports seem at the same time more critical and less condescending than their U.S. counterparts. Japanese seem to expect more of their giant neighbor but are also far more fearful and skeptical of it. This dynamic is especially evident in the profound mistrust in Japan's mainstream media toward Chinese political leadership and the insistence by some conservative Japanese commentators that China is headed for a severe economic downturn. These pessimistic economic predictions are significant if only because Japan is the largest foreign investor in China, which is now Japan's largest export market. Of course, Japan's reports also say a great deal about Japan's own obsessions, including concerns about Japan's declining vitality and status in comparison with its increasingly powerful and affluent "neighboring country" (a term frequently used in Japanese media).

"One World, One Dream" or "One Games, Different Dreams"?

The motto of the Chinese Olympics was "One World, One Dream" (tongyige shijie, tongyige mengxiang). But it might be more appropriate to have named the Olympics after another expression, "one bed, different dreams" (tongchuang yimeng), a Chinese idiom used to refer to two people sharing a bed but dreaming different dreams. Looking at the hypernationalist coverage of the Olympics in the United States and China, Olympic historian David Wallechinsky describes "parallel games," in which Americans and Chinese were essentially watching their own teams perform in highly selective national media coverage. But this "one games, different dreams" phenomenon is not limited to the hypernationalistic U.S. and Chinese media. Japan's media also focused almost exclusively on the events that featured participation by Japanese athletes.

The Olympics seen on Japanese television were fundamentally Japan's Olympics. Just as the Olympics seen by Americans and Chinese were fundamentally nationalist versions of the same global event. It seems that even small countries are not immune to Olympic nationalism. A report in the New York Times documents the "gold medal fever" in several countries around the world, including Mongolia, India, Indonesia, and Jamaica. Of course, some of the superstar accomplishments—such as Michael Phelps and Usain Bolt breaking records—were truly global media events, but for most viewers in the world, including those in Japan, this Olympics was a case of "same games, different dreams," in a televised experience characterized by highly selective media nationalism.

Can fulfilling the "100 year dream" mean an end to "100 years of national humiliation"?

It's clear from the nationalist narratives and folkloric themes of the opening and closing ceremonies that the "dream" that concerned the Beijing Olympic organizers was not a generic dream of "one world" but rather the much more specific dream of China's place in that world. This "one hundred year dream" of a Chinese Olympics is tied to another story of a "hundred years of national humiliation," a story in which China interprets its modern history as an underdog struggle against foreign aggression, beginning with the Opium Wars and punctuated by a series of invasions.

In what might signal an important revision of this story of national revival, state media giant Xinhua's reporting narrates the Olympics as the culmination of 30 years of "reform and opening," suggesting that 1978 be recognized as the new key turning point in Chinese history, in a new narrative of Chinese history based not on the mythology of national humiliation and resistance but on a myth of national self-renewal and openness to the world. If this story sticks, it signals a constructive revision of Chinese national identity.

Mirroring this official story, the New York Times suggests that China's newly won confidence might represent the beginning of the end of a pattern of "aggrieved nationalism" based on the story of national humiliation. The Times article cites the positive and welcoming attitude of Beijingers toward foreign visitors as evidence that the Olympics bestowed a new confidence on China that can lead to the diminishment of China's aggrieved nationalism. The article quotes Fudan University Professor Shen Dingli, who suggests that the success of the Olympics will allow China to become a "normal country" that can more objectively view its strengths and its weaknesses.

The sense of grievance at the base of Chinese nationalism may be hard to overcome. Media in Japan, which is undoubtedly the country most closely associated with China's "century of humiliation" and also the most common target of China's nationalist grievances, seemed to show a much greater skepticism about the potential for Chinese people to use the Olympics to overcome the politics of national humiliation.

Despite the positive spin surrounding the Games, Japanese media tended to interpret the nationalist imagery of the opening ceremonies and China's single-minded pursuit of Olympic gold as yet more signs of China's potent mix of populist nationalism and authoritarianism. Japan's conservative newspapers interpreted China's Olympic-fueled nationalism as a useful strategy for solidifying political control and legitimating political dictatorship by the Chinese Communist Party.

The conservative Yomiuri Shimbun, Japan's most widely circulated daily, suggested that problems such as a slowing economy, declining real estate prices, and greater income inequality will necessitate a resort to hard-line political tactics (Aug. 25, 2008, p. 2 "A return to the hard line"). Not all Japanese commentators were so pessimistic. One Asahi commentary suggested that the relatively neutral and normal diplomatic exchanges between China and Japan could be the sign of a new "adult relationship" (Aug. 24, 2008, p. 4, "The sprouting of an 'adult relationship' between China and Japan").

It is troubling that mainstream media in the one nation that could do the most to help China overcome its "aggrieved nationalism" seem the least optimistic about this possibility. American media have been quicker to embrace 1978 as the new starting point for contemporary Chinese history, with the Olympics as a 30th anniversary celebration of the opening and reform that began that year.

Faking the Olympics

"Fakery" was perhaps the most unfortunate theme of the Beijing Olympics. An editorial in the Yomiuri Shimbun reflected on Chinese Olympic "fakes," such as the use of computer-generated imagery and voice-overs in the opening ceremony, suggesting that, like the obsession with winning gold medals, these practices also reflect the methods of a totalitarian government in which ends justify means (Aug. 25, 2008, p. 3, "As the festival ends, the real trials begin"). Even the more liberal media suggested that the Chinese were "trying too hard," resulting in a less than authentic celebration of the Olympic spirit.

As in the West, Japanese media also reported on Chinese media censorship, but with some twists that were not common in U.S. reporting. The Asahi's coverage of media censorship focused not only on censorship but also on the concrete methods of Chinese authorities in constructing an approved Olympic message. Reporters from Xinhua and CCTV dominated the Chinese corps, with very few slots remaining for local and regional Chinese media. Some well-known investigative reporters were simply told not to work during the Olympics. The Chinese state wanted no independent media scoops in this Olympics. The worry expressed in these stories is that Chinese popular attitudes are easily manipulated by a still-powerful state which is able to micromanage media messages ("Chinese domestic media restrictions" Asahi Shimbun, Aug. 15, 2008, p. 2; "Chinese media" Aug. 25, 2008, evening, p. 1).

This emphasis on the state construction of media messages may sound exaggerated in China's Internet age, but Hong Kong–based media expert Rebecca MacKinnon makes a related cautionary point in her discussion in the Wall Street Journal of Internet reporting during the Games. While Internet sources might be expected to provide different perspectives on the Olympics, unauthorized critical comments about sensitive Olympic topics were quickly removed from the Internet. At the same time, media reports from official agencies were released quickly. The point of Chinese censorship now is less to stop the flow of sensitive news than to shape a dominant message.

Japanese papers also contrasted the rhetoric of "harmony" in the Chinese media with the "reality" of ongoing troubles in the Western regions of China and problems faced by ordinary residents on the day after the closing ceremonies. An Asahi article entitled "'Successful' Olympics, a different reality" (Aug. 25, 2008, p. 2) described the continuing repression of the Tibetan and Uighur minorities, as well as restrictions on the movement of ordinary Beijing citizens. The Yomiuri also reported on the Beijingers' ironic appropriation of the political slogan "harmonious society" through the creation of a new verb "to be harmonized" to describe situations in which people are forced to move their homes or otherwise sacrifice their self-interests for state-imposed goals such as the Olympics ("Increasing Patriotism" Aug. 25, 2008, p. 4).

Although not always negative, Japanese editorial voices in general seem unconvinced of Chinese sincerity and thus especially sensitive to stories of Chinese "fakes." While the Western media frequently reported on the "friendliness" of the Beijing residents, Japanese media reported on better "manners" (such as waiting in line), implying that these improvements in public behavior, like improvements in air quality, might not last beyond the state-sponsored spectacle of the Olympics. Man-made good weather and manipulated positive media coverage are all represented as troubling signs of a neighbor that is "trying too hard" and is thus untrustworthy.

It might surprise Western critics to read Japanese commentators positioning themselves as champions of democracy and individualism in China, but this focus on Chinese "fakery" and "collectivism" can also be seen as part of Japan's long history of positioning itself as a modern enlightened nation in a Western-dominated global society. Ironically, Japanese criticisms of Chinese fakery, authoritarianism, and collectivism closely resemble Western criticism of Japanese "copying" and a state-dominated "Japan Inc." during its rapid growth period of the 1970s and '80s. These obsessions tell us as much as about Japanese sensitivities as about the state of Chinese society. Indeed, one of the questions Japanese commentators ask is whether Tokyo really has an authentic vision for the 2016 Olympic bid, or more broadly, whether Japan has any viable vision for its future at all.

"One World" (revisited): Flexible Olympic citizenship

One story covered on the front page of all major Japanese dailies the day after the closing ceremonies was a tribute to the Japanese background of Kenya's Samuel Wanjiru, who was awarded the gold medal for the marathon during the closing ceremonies. Wanjiru began his serious training as a high school student in Japan, and thus could be hailed by the Japanese media as a Japanese success story as well as a Kenyan success story. In a similar fashion, Japanese media also hailed the success of the Japanese coach Imura Masayo, who led China's synchronized swimmers to a bronze medal—the team's first.

Japanese and Western media have provided numerous stories of mobile athletes and coaches swapping national affiliations all over the world. America's silver medal in volleyball was led by China's former star player Lang Ping, who was wildly cheered by Chinese fans. Russia's bronze medal–winning women's basketball team was led by American, and naturalized Russian citizen, Becky Hammon. Georgia's beach volleyball team hailed from Brazil. America's women's gymnastic coach Liang Chow hailed from the host city of Beijing. Fans are getting used to the mobility of athletic careers.

Extensive media coverage of these mobile sports figures belies the nationalist mythology that most media reporting exalts (including Japanese media). The cross-border movements of Olympic athletes and coaches are a better expression of the fluid conditions of modern transnational citizenship than the hard nationalism of mainstream media coverage. And despite the simple-minded nationalism of sports coverage, audiences throughout the world have also became willing to embrace the forms of "flexible citizenship"—as anthropologist Aihwa Ong calls them—exhibited by mobile athletic stars. As more athletes and coaches cross borders, perhaps the hypernationalism of sports will be undermined by the multinational self-representations of the athletes themselves, offering a much more progressive vision of a true "one world" that allows individuals to pursue their cross-border dreams regardless of their place of birth.

"One Dream" (revisited): Olympic Eros

When asked about the Beijing opening ceremony, Tokyo's conservative governor Ishihara Shintaro, who is not known for circumspection, said: "I suppose it's a happy occasion, something you can be proud of. But it was also like passing around the same Chinese dish for three people. It was a bit boring and too long" (Asahi Shimbun, August 19, 2008, p. 32, "The words of the mayor").

Ishihara may have been one of the few in Japan who were underwhelmed by the beauty of the opening ceremonies, which he labeled "mass games." Such inopportune comments can be taken as further evidence of his disregard for global public opinion, including a statement on the same day that visits to the controversial Yasukuni Shrine by the Tokyo governor also would have no effect on the Olympic bid. His well-known nationalist rhetoric aside, when describing his response to the sporting events Ishihara also revealed his more literary side: "Actually, [sports] are not about Logos, or language, but the world of Eros. They are about physical beauty."

Although Ishihara's comments about "Logos" seemed directed at Zhang Yimou's highly textual imagery in the opening ceremonies (based on the metaphor of a scroll and the advent of printing), Ishihara's larger point seems to refute his casual dismissal of the opening ceremony as "boring." After all, it was the extraordinary visceral beauty of the opening and closing ceremonies, rather than their simplistic narratives, that made the Games such a huge success in the eyes of the global audience, including the thrilled NHK announcers. And it was the vicarious ecstasy of the athletic performances experienced on high definition television that inspired such large global audiences. Discussions of the physical beauty of the athletes themselves were also one of the most non-nationalistic global discourses on the Internet. Eroticism, in its more direct sense, was also part of the experience of the Games for many athletes, who apparently engaged in a great deal of cross-national bed hopping. For some, at least, the private experience of the Olympics was not at all a case of "one bed, different dreams," but rather of the victory of Eros over Logos.

To return then to idea of "one dream," when Ishihara suggests that the Olympics involve a fundamentally aesthetic vision, perhaps he should also remind himself that the fact that the Chinese state was willing to spend seven years and $40 billion on an essentially aesthetic experience is itself a reassuringly peaceful expression of a shared human dream. Perhaps the legacy of the Beijing Olympics will be primarily aesthetic, not political, and that's not a bad legacy (especially, as Thomas Friedman points out, when compared to the legacy of America's past seven years).

Whether Beijing's expensive spectacle of Olympian Eros was purchased at the cost of other more fundamental human needs is obviously debatable within China. But whether Tokyo can offer an equally compelling alternative vision for 2016 remains doubtful for most Japanese. When asked whether the ceremonies in Beijing gave him any ideas for Tokyo's bid, the mayor said, "Not really, we want to do something totally different, if given the chance." What that difference will be is still unclear to most Japanese.

Tokyo is obviously a great global city, with the best urban infrastructure, public safety, and global cuisine in the world. It is deserving of a second Olympics, but it is also deserving of more progressive global representations from its media and politicians. Ishihara is clever, charismatic, and quotable, and clearly a relief from the leaden boredom of most Japanese political voices, but with such a figure at the helm, Tokyo's Olympic bid faces an uphill battle for global recognition.

James Farrer is associate professor of sociology at Sophia University in Tokyo. He is the author of Opening Up: Youth Sex Culture and Market Reform in Shanghai (University of Chicago Press).

Olympic Echoes

The echoes of the Beijing Olympics have been soundly drowned out, at least in US medialand, by the Democratic Convention. Even so, there's still a lot of good and interesting coverage and reflections on the Beijing spectacle. Here are a few of our favorites.

1. For a variety of takes on the closing ceremony, see Danwei's wrap-up.

2. In case you missed them, here are Xinhua's pictures of a sweaty President Bush chatting with the eventual gold medalists in women's beach volleyball.

3. Mary Beard at TLS wrote two recent pieces on the Olympics that may be of interest--both written from a classicist's perspective, the first beginning from the premise of how London will possibly live up to Beijing's show, while the second a tongue-in-cheek reflection on Greek Olympic traditions.

4. For those tracking superstitions in 2008 (like the earthquake premonitions and the Olympic harbingers of doom), Shanghaiist is keeping up on connections between the earthquake and the Chinese medal count.

5. After all the mentions in the media over the last few weeks of the massive mobilization of humans necessary for the Olympic performances (a mobilization made possible, commentators implied or sometimes said, because China is an autocratic regime), Jamie Metzl of the Asia Society urges in FEER that liberal democracies need to go toe-to-toe with Beijing's technocrats and prove that liberal democracies can also put on a good show. (Is that the acrid smell of Cold War in the air?) At openDemocracy, Kerry Brown argues that the Olympics have already changed China in ways that matter. For a nuanced discussion of this notion of "changing" China, take a listen to Louisa Lim's Monday report.

Beijing Architecture: Part 2

By Eric Setzekorn

In the midst of the forest of new skyscrapers, a subtle change is occurring in Beijing architecture which may have more lasting importance than the soaring towers of the Central Business District. Outside the fourth ring road massive new apartment blocks are greatly increasing the average living space and comfort level of the growing middle class.

Built in record time by massive crews of migrant laborers the new complexes promise residents a more controlled and relaxed life , but the centralized, homogenous designs hinder the development of neighborhood feeling and community. The new developments allow the beneficiaries of China’s thirty years of rapid development to isolate themselves from urban crime, noise and pollution in gated communities removed from the majority of the population.

Construction site for massive new complex with over 30 cranes in operation.

The developments have been fueled by easy credit at rates often below the rate of inflation, the desire of city officials to leave tangible legacies, and real estate developers eager to tap into the booming wealth of Chinese professionals. The resulting scale of Beijing’s new communities is unrivalled in East Asia, with the possible exception of South Korea’s chaebol apartment blocks. Single developments can occupy up to a square kilometer, with average buildings up to twenty floors high. Located far from the major commercial areas in Chaoyang or the city center, massive underground parking garages extend up to three floors below ground. Residents are mostly young professionals with university educations and stable high-income jobs in technology, finance or service industries.

Compared to the cramped, five and six story brick apartment blocks built in the 1960s and 70s, the new areas are bright, airy and spotlessly clean. Large kitchens boast a full range of modern appliances and multiple bedrooms allow one-child families to have private rooms, often with a spare room available for visiting grandparents. With average prices ranging from $150,000 to $300,000 U.S. dollars, the quiet dignity of homeownership is relatively accessible and many buyers are in their mid to late 20’s. Although many analysts expect a post-Olympic slowdown, most buyers are confident the double-digit growth in property prices will continue for the foreseeable future.

New, wide roadways with separate bus lanes and elevated subway line.

While home ownership is undeniably a good thing for individual and society, and Beijing needs to continue new development projects to improve the quality of life for its citizens, there are multiple blind spots in the centralized pattern of Beijing’s urban architecture. Much of Beijing’s development program seems to have been copied wholesale from historical bad examples, such as Robert Moses's automobile-centered vision of New York or the hubris of Chicago’s Cabrini Green.

The popularity of grey tile and unfinished stone is practical given Beijing’s harsh environment but presents a rather gloomy, cold and foreboding appearance. Residents spend little time outside their apartments due to a lack of congenial open spaces such as parks or courtyards. Shopping for groceries normally involves a trip to a large shopping center, often a Carrefour with attached parking garage, which can be kilometers away. Due to the one-child policy and the career orientation of many young residents, children are few in number and seldom seen. Large numbers of private security guards in sometimes garish uniforms complete with tassels and braid occupy all entrances and patrol the grounds.

High-end housing development adjacent to elevated subway.

The overall effect is to create a highly structured, managed space with little variation or required social contact. Some of this effect can be blamed on 1950s zoning, which divided Beijing into large city blocks that not only make the city difficult to walk, but also increase traffic congestion and hinder small development of individual parcels of land in favor of large, square complexes stretching from street to street.

A deeper problem for Beijing is the rapidly growing social stratification that has accompanied the housing market expansion. New buildings are built by work gangs of unskilled laborers coming from the countryside who live eight to ten to a room on site until the project is completed. In these temporary structures, sanitation facilities are limited, bare bulbs provide lighting and the un-insulated metal or tents rely on weak space heaters in the winter months.

Mule haulers under elevated subway with local resident in background on roller blades .

View from northernmost subway stop in Beijing, Tiantongyuan on the new line 5, looking south at new developments all completed in last 3 years.

Meanwhile, many residents commute to work by car along wide, well designed highways or can take the modern, efficient metro service which has expanded rapidly into the wealthy northern suburbs. Older, normally working class areas of the city are forced to rely on the crowded and unreliable bus system. Very selective public and private schools have also boomed in these new areas as parents with sufficient income seek to provide their children with every advantage in gaining access to domestic and foreign universities. These schools boast fantastic computer and language facilities and in several cases cricket teams.

Open fields in north of Beijing with subway line already completed and ready for future expansion.

While every city wrestles with issues of growth and income distribution the sheer size, high rates of economic growth and the fact it is the national capital make Beijing an interesting test case for Chinese mega-city development. In the next twenty years, as the ratio of urban to rural population steadily increases, dozens of other Chinese cities will be confronted with similar problems of sustainable, equitable urban growth.

Hand Grenades and Olympics

We intereviewed Lijia Zhang about her forthcoming book, Socialism is Great!, in early June. The piece below was originally published in The Guardian, where it received almost 400 comments before the paper closed comments for the story. Since then, it has been published in numerous other publications, including China Daily.

By Lijia Zhang

At my school, sports lessons included an exercise where we threw hand grenades (made from wood topped with metal to resemble the real thing) against a wall that stretched a red slogan with the reason for our militaristic "sport" – "exercise our bodies and protect our motherland." We feared that China might be invaded one day by the American imperialists or Soviet revisionists. Indeed, the whole West seemed holding evil intent towards us. Living in a closed country, we had little idea about the outside world.

I went to school in Nanjing in the early 70s, when the revolutionary fever of the Cultural Revolution was calming down. A few years earlier, my father was banished to the countryside for criticizing the government. My grandfather, a small-time grain dealer, had committed suicide – as he worried his not-so-politically-correct background would land him in trouble. These were the darkest times for my family as well for my our nation. Somehow the image of those dark days remain deeply imprinted on the Western mind, even though China has come a long way since then. Maybe the West is a little too keen to report the negative stories? Or perhaps, the West feels more comfortable hearing such stories?

That’s my impression, as a Chinese who has lived abroad and now writes for the Western media, based in Beijing. I had dreamt of becoming a journalist or a writer since hand grenade days. But my dream was shattered at the age of 16 when my mother dragged me from school to work at a state-owned missile factory. Only after I finally made my way to England did I dare to pursue my long-buried dream.

My journalistic career started with the Olympics. In 1993, on the night when the result of Olympic bidding was announced, I was at Tiananmen Square, reporting for the ABC (Australian) when the fountain went off – it must have been the biggest pre-mature ejaculation in history - as people thought China had won the bid. It was heart-breaking to interview the bitterly disappointed crowds. But China wasn’t really ready. The memory of the bloody crackdown in 1989 was still fresh.

I was also in Beijing eight years later when China did win the bid. In our neighbourhood, grannies spent the whole afternoon practice their dancing steps and their husband beating the drums and gongs. This time, they were not disappointed. The wild celebration, in the deafening noise of fire crackers, drums and gongs, laughter and ecstatic cries, went on the whole night. In a live interview with the BBC, I made the remarks: “In the ecstatic cries, I heard Chinese people’s longing for the recognition and respect from the world.”

I was just as happy as everyone else. Ever since the economic reforms, China has driven millions of people out of the poverty. An incredible feat in human history. As a child, I used to roast cicadas to eat to satisfy my craving for meat; now my 19-year-old nephew, a law university student in Nanjing, drives his own car. And people are now enjoying a great deal more personal freedom. As a rocket factory girl, I had to endure so many rules. I worked there for ten years without any promotion partly because of my naturally curly hair: my boss thought I wore a perm. Back then only those with bourgeois outlook would curl their hair. These days, young women curl their hair, shave off their hair or change the colours of their hair whenever they want.

In the past years, I have seen with my own eyes how the capital has been transformed. The state-of-art buildings, not just those Olympic buildings such as the ‘Bird Nest’ and the ‘Water Cubes’ – have popped up like mushrooms after a spring rain. Right now, Beijing, having undergone a face-lift, has never looked so beautiful, clean and quiet.

Huge effort and sacrifice has been made. Polluting factories around Beijing were shut down; construction work has been halted and cars taken off the road. These may be necessary measures to ensure the air quality. Other measures seem excessive: beggars, the homeless and migrants without documentations were driven out; while petitioners – those who try to bring their grievance to the higher authority - have been stopped from entering the capital. Potential trouble-makers are being monitored or under house arrest. Excessive. That’s always the way the authority adapts when dealing with uncertainty.

Beijing’s Olympics will be a big success because the majority of population, proud as Chinese are, want it to be, not just because the government wants to use Olympic success to gain legitimacy. Xia Fengzhi, a 67-year-old retired worker and a volunteer, told me how happy and excited he is about the games. “I want foreigners to see what has China achieved. We were called the ‘sick men of Asia. Now we are strong and rich enough to hold such a major international event,” he said.

No doubt, there’ll be plenty of negative stories in the foreign media, criticizing China’s human rights abuses, the lack of media freedom; the treatment of petitioners and the over-tight securities. Some Chinese have no access to the reports; other do but decide to diminish them as grumbles from the anti-China forces. In a survey conducted by Pew Research Centre, China ranks the first among 24 nations in their optimism about their country’s future, buoyed by the fast economic growth and the promise of Olympics. There’s another factor – the timing, I believe. The survey was conducted this spring, just after Tibet unrest and in the middle of the troubled torch relay when we witnessed a surge of nationalism in response to what many Chinese regarded as the ‘anti-China feeling’ in the west and ‘biased’ Tibet reports.

Personally, I have no problem with negative stories. But I also think it is wrong for the West to stand in a self-appointed high-moral ground to accuse China of this and that, especially when some of the accusations are not true. To take Tibet unrest as an example, what happened in Lhasa, in my view, was far more complicated than "the Chinese government’s ruthless crackdown of Tibetan protest." There was a peaceful protest but there was also a violent racial riot which I doubt would be tolerated in any country.

As a journalist, most of my stories criticize the government, which seems to have little idea about PR. Blessed with such domestic support and armed with the practiced skills in mass organization, the authority could have afforded to take a more relaxed approach. Why not make the Olympic games a really fun party – China’s big coming-out party? No need to cause so much interruption to the people’s lives. It would have been better to let the world to see China as it actual is.

And I can’t help but feeling there has been a missed opportunity on more important matters, too. Instead of trying to hide the problem, our leaders could have taken this as a good chance to address the real issues, cracking down on corruption, improving the rule of law, relaxing media control and opening the country further.

Don’t doubt our support for Beijing’s games. After all, the Olympics are meant to be the occasion to bring people with different views together. Secondly, it will provide a chance for China and the rest of the world to understand each other better. Although I can understand how China’s undemocratic political system and lack of transparency makes the West uneasy, especially compounded by the country’s rapid rise, I think much of the fear is generated by ignorance.
Today, the school kids enjoy far more sophisticated facilities than hand grenades. They know a lot more about the outside world, and so do their parents. I wonder if the Western kids and their parents know as much about China as we know about the West? If they did, would there be still the same fear? Maybe this Olympic games will bring us one step closer.

China: The Pessoptimist Nation

By William A. Callahan

China is the most optimistic nation in the world. 86 percent think that their country is headed in the right direction, up from 48 percent in 2002 according to the latest Pew Global Attitudes survey.

There are good reasons to be hopeful. 2008 is important not only because Beijing is hosting the Olympics. This year Chinese people are also celebrating thirty years of Deng Xiaoping’s economic reform policy, whose double digit economic growth has lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty, and created a new middle class that is larger than most European countries.

But China’s nationalistic pride takes pessimistic forms too. Recent bumps in the road of China’s rise have produced fierce reactions from Chinese people. Rather than wondering why Tibetan people would protest Chinese rule, Han Chinese rallied against the "bias" of Westerners who criticized their country. Last year when Western companies recalled unsafe Chinese-made toys, opinion-makers in China called for apologies not just from toy companies, but also from Western media for staining China’s national image.

Chinese public opinion not only targets foreigners, but increasingly attacks other Chinese.

Grace Wang was physically threatened when she tried to mediate between Chinese and Tibetans at Duke University in the U.S. Her family back home in China was forced into hiding.

Wheelchair-bound Jin Jing became a hero in China when she resisted protestors during the Olympic Torch Relay in Paris. But she was vilified a few weeks later when she refused to support a popular boycott against the French hypermarket Carrefour.

By going against China’s raging internet opinion, these two women were both denounced as traitors. As the Olympic celebration has approached, violence against foreign critics and Chinese "traitors" has increased, moving from denunciations on the web to bullying on the streets.

How can we understand these radical shifts between celebration and protest? Rather than simply being "a land of contradictions," I think it is necessary to see how China’s sense of pride and sense of humiliation actually are joined at the hip.

While opinion in Western countries typically is polarized between left and right, in China it is usually the same people who are wildly optimistic one day, and deeply pessimistic the next. China’s "angry youth" who flare against foreign and domestic critics are also the most prosperous segment of Chinese society.

To put it simply, China is a pessoptimist nation.

These mixed feelings come from the party-state’s official patriotic education campaign that looks to both positive and negative stories. On the one hand, Chinese textbooks are not strange: they point to the glories of ancient civilization and recent economic success.

But patriotic education also includes a heavy dose of "national humiliation education" that narrates China’s modern history as a series of shameful defeats since the Opium War in 1840. Textbooks explain that a combination of "foreign aggression" and "corrupt traitors" are to blame for China’s troubled modern history. As recent events have shown, this dynamic of internal and external enemies continues to frame the common sense understanding of international politics in China.

The pessoptimist patriotic education campaign is not limited to textbooks or classrooms. National humiliation is a popular topic in feature films, museum exhibits, romance novels, pop songs, patriotic poems, specialist dictionaries, pictorials and commemorative stamps. Since 2001, China has even had an official National Humiliation Day, which it celebrates each September. A popular historical atlas is entitled "Maps of the Century of National Humiliation of Modern China."

The Chinese Communist Party’s Propaganda Department thus has honed patriotic education into a multimedia campaign that ties patriotism very firmly to the party-state.

But it would be a mistake to conclude that pessoptimism is just propaganda used by the party elite to manipulate the people. These mixed feelings also grow out of a popular sense that China is coming into its own after over a century of being left out--and left behind. Rather than a rise and fall, Chinese people think that their country is--at last--experiencing a rise after a fall, a rejuvenation after a century of national humiliation.

Because Chinese people feel that their country is resuming its rightful place as a superpower at the center of the world, any criticism is seen as an obstacle to the PRC’s "inevitable rise." Although China’s leaders sound silly whenever they state that foreign critics have "hurt the feelings of the Chinese people," there is a grain of truth in this complaint. This mix of entitlement and righteous anger is very strong in China.

Pessoptimistic nationalism is thus continually produced and consumed in China in a circular process that knits together urban elites and rural peasants, northerners and southerners, government officials and the new middle class.

Yet this aggressive nationalism it is not the only way of understanding China’s past, present and future. Actually, "national humiliation" only became a key education and propaganda theme in the 1990s as a way to make rebellious students feel more patriotic after the June 4th massacre. Unfortunately, this tactical method of dealing with the communist party’s legitimacy crisis has become China’s most successful propaganda campaign.

The party-state’s policy thus both feeds into and grows out of pessoptimist feelings among ordinary Chinese. Patriotic education and popular opinion are interwoven, just as pride and humiliation are intertwined. China’s domestic politics are inseparable from its foreign relations in a way that intimately binds together national security with nationalist insecurities.

Here China is certainly not alone. The line between domestic and international politics is blurring in most places. Other countries also use national humiliation themes to understand national history and foreign relations: Serbia, South Korea and occasionally Russia.

The rise of pessoptimism in China is important not because China is unique, but because it is big--and getting bigger all the time economically, politically and culturally.

It is crucial to understand that China’s pessoptimism is fundamentally unstable, producing shifting feelings, which at any time could spill over into mass movements that target domestic critics, foreigners and even the party-state itself.

While it is necessary to welcome China into the international community and encourage more moderate voices in Beijing, the most important thing to recognize is that China’s pessoptimist nationalism is out of anyone’s control. Even mundane economic twists can provoke extreme reactions: when the value of China’s investment in the Blackstone Group tanked last summer, an influential Chinese blogger sensationally blamed greedy Westerners for looting China much as their ancestors had during the Opium War.

As the Olympics are showing, China’s leaders are able to control many aspects of Chinese society--even the weather. But beyond long-term education and media reform (neither of which is forthcoming), China’s leaders can’t control popular feelings.

During the Olympics we are certainly seeing much genuine happiness and gracious hospitality from Chinese people. But since China also has a huge chip on its shoulder, we need to be prepared for a harsh popular reaction whenever China hits a bump on its rocky road of political and economic change.

Perhaps American satirist Stephen Colbert said it best when he described China as a 'frenemy"--at least that’s how pessoptimistic Chinese see the rest of the world.

William A. Callahan teaches Chinese politics at the University of Manchester (UK). For those in southern California, Callahan will be giving a presentation at USC's US-China Institute on September 4, 2008.

Rob Riggle Goes to China

All week, Rob Riggle of The Daily Show has been acting out his exuberant American routine in China. Last night's interview with BizChina's anchor Rui Chenggang was a particular gem for China media watchers. Rui, who has interviewed a whole host of prominent American business leaders (not to mention Chinese ones), gives no ground to Riggle, parrying all Riggle's Daily-Show style ambushes. Unfortunately, the only available online clip is the entire episode of last night's show at Comedy Central (head here--the clip starts at 6:42, and you'll have to watch a short ad).

Learning English, Learning Chinese

By David Porter

"We are very proud to be Chinese!"

"We welcome everyone to come to China!"

Judging from recent interviews on Beijing streets that have been broadcast in recent days by American TV and radio journalists, these two phrases and others like them have topped the list of essential greetings in the city-wide cram courses in Olympics English that have proven so popular over the past year or so. A bit hackneyed, perhaps, but telling in the striking combination of hospitality and nationalism that has characterized Chinese self-presentation from the opening ceremonies to the China-US men's basketball match-up.

The current craze for English in China, where seven-year olds study the language daily and charismatic English teachers, as reported in the New Yorker, achieve the status of rock stars, reflects both these impulses. To speak a foreigner's language, even if it is only a few phrases, is to show due respect to a friend come from afar. But it's also a sign of increasing confidence and worldliness of outlook, a reflection not so much of China's opening to the world (speaking of hackneyed phrases) as of the world, at long last, opening to China.



A Chinese journalist covering the Summer Olympics in Atlanta in 1996 would have had a considerably harder time turning up a local resident who could offer so much as a cliche of cosmopolitan hospitality in the journalist's native Chinese. There seems little doubt that America's declining stature on the world stage has more than a little to do with its schools' systematic failure to engage the language acquisition neurons of young students through sustained exposure to any non-English language, let alone Chinese.

There have, however, been some signs of change. In a country where Chinese is now the second most widely used foreign language after Spanish, 200,000 students are learning Chinese at 1000 colleges, 300 elementary and secondary schools, and 600 Chinese language schools across the United States. These numbers have been rising rapidly: from 1998 to 2002 (the most recent year for which the statistic is available), the number of college students electing Chinese as a foreign language rose by 20 percent; more recently, the number of K-12 students studying the language increased eight-fold between 2000 and 2007 to approximately 40,000.

In some regions, the rate of increase has been even more dramatic: the number of Connecticut public school students enrolled in Chinese language courses recently jumped from 300 to 3000 in three years. When the first College Board AP exam was administered in 2006, 3260 high school seniors sat for the exam nationwide. With increasing frequency, local and national papers carry stories of proud (non-Asian) parents showing off their children's Chinese language skills, acquired courtesy of private tutors or, increasingly, enlightened public school districts.

This growth has been supported by the US federal government, which has designated Chinese as a "critical language," and has awarded 90 percent of foreign language development grants under the National Security Language Initiative to Chinese language programs. Senator Joseph Lieberman recently proposed an additional $1.3 billion allocation to improve the instruction of Chinese language and culture in American schools. States have begun to jump on the bandwagon as well: a recent law passed in Utah stipulates that all public middle schools in the state require Chinese language instruction beginning in 2007.

Current enrollment numbers, while increasing, are still miniscule compared to the numbers of Chinese learning English, or indeed to the number of people learning Chinese across the world, which China's Ministry of Education currently places at 30 million, with a projected increase to 100 million by 2010. Since the HSK Chinese Proficiency Test began to be administered by the Chinese government in 1990, 350,000 students have taken the test, and the number of participants is growing at 30 percent per year.

These students have clearly taken to heart the kinds of greetings we're now hearing from the streets of Beijing, and they are, much to their credit, determined to respond in kind.

The Right to Party, en Masse

By Haiyan Lee

The most clichéd way of referring to the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games in English-language media has been “China’s coming-out party.” The slightly condescending undertone is nonetheless mingled with well-wishing that the debutante will give the world a heck of a party, the glitches and disappointments in the run-up notwithstanding. For this precious moment, China chose Zhang Yimou, arguably its most talented film director, to chaperone itself onto the world stage.


By all indications, it was a good choice. The 50-minute multi-million-dollar extravaganza was so spectacular that the only appropriate response, it would seem, was a WOW! Or to wonder, like one American volleyball player did, “How did they do that?” Any more parsing would seem pedantic. But, alas, this is the age of “have computer, will blog.” So let’s begin with the New York Times piece that hails the event as a wild success with “signature Chinese touches.” There is no denying that the lavish ceremony was first and foremost about China. And the China it celebrated was ancient (the 5000-year history), civilized (the arts and crafts), inventive (the four great inventions), adventurous (the silk roads), hospitable (the Confucian chant about cherishing guests from afar), technologically accomplished (the astronaut), and innocent and hopeful (the school children). It wore love, peace, and harmony proudly on its sleeve. What more could the world ask for?

Dutiful commentators will likely remind us what this dazzling propaganda blockbuster conceals: the human rights abuses, the suppression of ethnic/regional autonomy, the rise of xenophobic nationalism, the environmental degradation, the widening gap between rich and poor, the unholy alliances with authoritarian regimes elsewhere, and so on. However, not every skeleton has been stuffed into the national closet. In fact, the ceremony openly paraded the specter of another China that should in theory jar the domestic revelers and besotted observers alike: Mao’s China.

Everything about the Beijing Olympics was meant to sweep you off your feet. But above all, it was the number of performers—15,000—in the opening ceremony that probably caused many an eye to pop and jaw to drop. Given how much of the “Chineseness” in the program belonged to the category of “invented” or at least airbrushed tradition, the surreally synchronized movements of thousands of people was perhaps the most “signature” of the Chinese touches. The antecedents are much closer in history and more vivid in memory: we need only recall the images of mass formations dressed in regulation garb, chanting in unison, marching in lockstep, waving the little red book, or doing what George Orwell calls “physical jerks.” To date, only the North Koreans can rival the Chinese in staging such spectacles of sheer numbers. It is the totalitarian aesthetic at its most beguiling and frightening. It is the power of ritual.


A new book called Ritual and Its Consequences argues that ritual is a quintessential human activity because it creates an “as if” world in which identities are made, boundaries tested, and human potentialities stretched. It can be used by rulers to solidify the existing order, or by the malcontent to imagine alternative worlds. The Chinese Communist Party, since its days of fighting guerrilla warfare in the countryside, has tapped the powers of ritual with consummate skill: it famously invented the ritual of fanshen (turning over) to denounce the ancien regime and the social order it presided over; and it mandated (and to some extent still does) mass participation in a numbing array of state-orchestrated rituals (such as mass rallies) to cultivate loyalty and conformity.

The Party understands well the transformative power of ritual: it can goad a timid peasant to point an accusing finger at a local despot, inspire saintly acts of self-sacrifice in an ordinary person, or make schoolgirls savagely beat their teacher to death. Zhang Yimou, too, has understood this well since his days as a cinematographer. The 1980s classic, Yellow Earth (directed by Chen Kaige, with Zhang as cinematographer), already gives us a good taste of Zhang’s passion for mass rituals leavened with bold colors and primal music. In a brief but powerful scene set in Yan’an, the Party’s headquarters during the war of resistance against Japan, a large assembly of men in peasant jackets and white turbans dance to the stirring beat of waist-drums, kicking up clouds of dust and a delirious atmosphere of festivity. They are sending off new Red Army recruits who file past with red ribbons tied across their torsos—after the bridegroom’s fashion at rural weddings. The scene is a potent reminder that it was the Party’s ability to absorb folk arts and rituals into its political theater, as much as its Marxist-Leninist ideology and military know how, that enabled it to sweep into power in 1949.

To be sure, the film ends on a subversive note of skepticism, showing a huge gathering of peasants prostrating on the parched yellow earth in a rain-seeking ritual and then surging forth in a direction away from the far horizon where the protagonist and communist soldier Gu Qing reappears after a period of absence. The ending suggests that the Party saves neither the girl (Cuiqiao) from the fate of arranged marriage, nor the peasants in general from the blight of poverty and ignorance. Such discordant moments, however, are rare in Zhang’s later, martial arts epics. Beginning with Hero, Zhang seems enthralled by what Susan Sontag calls “fascinatin’ fascism,” or power dressed up as splendid spectacles. Repeatedly, he knocks us dead with glorious mise-en-scènes of ancient humanity, surprisingly agile in their quaintly cumbersome accoutrements not unlike those worn by portions of the opening ceremony performers, carrying out the will of a tyrant with unstoppable menace. These are the films that have at last turned a profit for Zhang and endeared him to the authorities. They are seductive in the same way that films about the Nazi aesthetics of pomp and violence have perversely held audiences’ attention worldwide for decades.


It is no accident that a New York Times profile of Zhang Yimou calls him China’s Leni Riefenstahl. Whether or not the analogy is fair, Zhang’s success owes as much to an iron-fisted regime that loves grandeur as to our irrepressible fascination with aestheticized and ritualized politics, particularly its ability to galvanize people to achieve the seemingly impossible. In comparison, democratic politics (unless it resorts to imperialist, shock’n’awe-style violence against a “rogue” nation) is hopelessly drab and tedious—how on earth does one turn C-Span into a visually stunning and emotionally arousing spectacle? The same book on ritual mentioned earlier asserts that modern western societies cling to the virtue of sincerity and authenticity out of a profound distrust of ritual. Ritual appears to many as empty formality devoid of genuine feeling. But this doesn’t mean that we are immune to its allures of creativity, theatricality, and communality, or its promise to lift us out of our private, atomized existence.

Somewhat reassuringly, China has chosen a sporting event, rather than war or conquest, as its rite of passage, transposing its mass rituals from Tiananmen Square to the National Stadium, affectionately known as the Bird’s Nest. Sports, along with cinema, pretty much remains the only legitimate domain where our appetite for grand spectacle can be safely satisfied. Hence the nearly universal insistence that the Olympics is not about politics and should not be politicized. But as the organizers and would-be protesters are well aware, ritual takes us to an “as if” world where there are as many dreams as there are people and where the joust to control meaning is nothing if not political.


So is not the motto for the Beijing Olympics, “One world, one dream,” a tad naive? It’s a beautiful ideal, but it ill prepares one for the inconvenient fact of human plurality and the inevitable clashes of desires and interests. Might not “Many dreams, a single planet” better serve China as well as the rest of the world?

Images from The New York Times.

Painting Over Mao: Notes on the Inauguration of the Beijing Olympic Games

By Geremie R. Barmé

The ancient city of Beijing was literally turned on its head to help achieve the effects of the Olympic opening ceremony on Friday August 8, 2008. Six hundred years ago the city was designed around a north-south axis that runs from the south of the old city through the Forbidden City and on north. Along this axis the spectacles of imperial times would unfold (including the imperial “Tours of the South” or nanxun that were a major feature of the reigns of the Kangxi and Qianlong emperors in the Qing dynasty). Since the 1910s, however, Chang’an Avenue, now a multi-laned highway that runs east-west through the heart of Beijing, became the focus for military parades. From the 1950s, mass rallies organized by China’s ruling Communist Party have paraded along the avenue past Tiananmen, the most recent of these grand demonstrations being held in 1999 to mark the 50th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic (see my essay “Let the Spiel Begin”).

As part of the makeover of the city in the last decade the long-disused north-south imperial axis has been revived with a rebuilt city gate far in the south and a new park at Yongding Men, as well as a lengthy shopping mall at Qianmen that abuts Tiananmen Square. On Friday night as a prelude to the start of the Olympic opening ceremony a line of fireworks exploded in a series of “footprints” along this axis describing a path to the Bird’s Nest National Stadium.

Far in advance of this the ceremony designers created a digital mock up of the fireworks so that TV viewers in China and internationally could see an idealized version of Beijing’s central axis. To achieve the desired effect they even edited out the pollution-haze that generally covers the city despite years of effort and billions of dollars. The show that followed was also one of canny artifice, stunning design and digital wizardry. Zhang Yimou, the renowned filmmaker and overall director of the show, used a quotation from Mao Zedong to describe the thinking behind the opening: “using the past to serve the present and the foreign to serve China.”

Most observers noted that Mao, the Party Chairman who founded the People’s Republic in 1949 and led the country until his death in 1976 (launching the disastrous Great Leap Forward in the late 50s and the decade of disruption of the Cultural Revolution from 1966) was entirely absent from this paean to China’s past civilization. Of course, they might have missed the pregnant absence of the dead leader in the heavily rewritten “Song to the Motherland” (Gechang zuguo 歌唱祖国), in which he originally featured, that was mimed by nine-year-old Lin Miaoke 林妙可 that opens the show (the real singer was Yang Peiyi 杨沛宜, who was excluded on the grounds that she was not suitably photogenic). However, in reality, the Great Helmsman did get a look in, if only obliquely.

On the unfurled paper scroll that features centre stage early in the performance, dancers trace out a painting in the “xieyi” 写意, or impressionistic, style of traditional Chinese art. Their lithe movements create a vision of mountains and a river, to which is added a sun. It is a something of a stock scene of the kind seen in countless Chinese ink paintings. However, to my mind at least, it is an image that also evokes the painting-mural that forms a backdrop to the statue of the Chairman in the Mao Memorial Hall in the centre of Beijing (another version of this image hung prominently in the Great Hall of the People from the 1960s). That picture, designed by Huang Yongyu 黄永玉, a noted artist persecuted during the Cultural Revolution, is, in turn, inspired by a line from Mao’s most famous poem ‘Snow’ 沁园春・雪 (February 1936) that reads “How splendid the rivers and mountains of China” (jiangshan ru ci duo jiao 江山如此多娇). The poem lists the prominent rulers of dynastic China and ends by commenting on how all these great men fade in comparison to the true heroes of the modern world: the people. The poem is generally interpreted as being about Mao himself, the hero of the age (for a discussion of this, see my book Shades of Mao, 1996).

In their opening ceremony design, what Zhang Yimou and his colleagues achieve (among many, sometimes too many, other things), be it intentional or not, is a rethinking of this reference. Eventually, the painting is colored in by children with brushes and the sun becomes a jaunty “smiley face.” In the remaining blank space of the landscape the athletes of the world track the rainbow of Olympic colors as they take up their positions following their entry to the stadium. Thus, a Chinese landscape, with its coded political references (after all, what does a sun usually mean in modern-style guohua 国画?), is transformed into something that is suffused with a new and embracing meaning by the global community. It offers a positive message for the future of China’s engagement with the world, not only to international audiences, but perhaps also to China’s own leaders, who, apart from Premier Wen Jiabao, for the most part sat stony-faced through the extravaganza. It is also significant that many of the high-points of the opening ceremony were the result of a collective collaboration of designers working closely with Chinese artists who have returned from long years overseas, as well as with British and Japanese creators.

But after the spectacular highlights of traditional China that feature the Four Great Inventions (the segment on moveable type, in particular, is a triumph), powerful images jostle with each other, or appear momentarily only to be crowded out as one mass scene after another presses in, or some vignette comes and goes in a flood of fleeting glitz. The Chinese voice-over on CCTV1 spoke repeatedly about traditional aesthetics and the language of understatement and elegance, but after an enthralling and uplifting introduction and paean to the achievements of dynastic Chinese civilization, as the show enters the present age a certain failure of artistic coherence becomes increasingly obvious.

Thus, one could argue that the extraordinary landscape painting contains another, quite unintended, message. The “xieyi” style of Chinese art particularly values emptiness or lacunae (kong 空 or xu 虚, the spaces in paintings are also known as liubai 留白): those pregnant spaces untouched by the brush that bring the composition to life, the “vacuum” in which meaning finds full expression. In the second half of the show that inaugurated the XXIXth Olympiad with its increasing number of rapid highlights—the problematic use of the intense close-up drowned by the massing of performers—there is scarce room and an unsteady rhythm in what could have been, and in parts still is, a breathtaking work. The exciting promise of the opening sequences remains sadly under-realized.

While Zhang Yimou had overall directorial authority for the design and staging of the opening ceremony, Zhang Jigang 张继钢, deputy minister of propaganda in the PLA General Logistics Department who had worked on the Chinese ceremony at the Athens Games, was in charge of the first half of the show. The second half (including the entrance of the athletes and the torch-lighting ceremony) was overseen by Chen Weiya 陈维亚, artistic director of the generally stodgy Song & Dance Ensemble of the East (东方歌舞团). He has also designed the closing ceremony. Chen is known for the designs he has made for Tiananmen Square mass gatherings, the 2001 World University Student Games and the opening ceremony of the 2005 East Asia Games. Apart from the push-and-pull of directorial intent created by this leadership team, there were other expectations that had to be met. For example, the Beijing Olympic Games is also a vehicle for the promotion of the au courant Party line of ‘harmony’ (hexie 和谐), be it local or global. The original show was to feature a scene comprising a massed army of huge “piying” 皮影 (screen puppet) Terracotta Warriors made in the style of Shaanxi Qinqiang 秦腔 Opera puppets. Images of these figures featured in the media following the first rehearsal of the show in July this year. Recalling not only the era of the First Emperor of the Qin, but also Zhang Yimou’s 2002 film “Hero,” the phalanx of puppets was designed to perform a victory march in the stadium. They were cut from the show on advice from the Beijing Olympic Committee who deemed that they were too martial in tone. The internationally recognized Qin Warriors were replaced at the last minute by puppets made up as Beijing Opera performers. They feature in a lacklustre scene that has been widely derided by Chinese bloggers and Beijing viewers.

So, to my mind, while there was much to commend the performance in terms of scale and synchronized collective performance, after we leave the retrospect on pre-modern China (one in which the narrative about millennia of peace, exchange, harmony and friendship is problematic in other ways) coherence is sacrificed for the sake of a number of designed-by-committee themes. Meanwhile, the sardonic wit, irony and general raffishness of Beijing humor are noteworthy for their complete absence from the festivities.

The general busyness of the action and the overall bling that detract from the moments of magic in the show contain perhaps a significant cultural message in their own right. Quotations from Confucius or the repeated talk of harmony do little to disguise a paucity that is not about either “xu” or aesthetic restraint, a vision in which less is allowed to be more. At least China has the wherewithal to talk about the value of pregnant pauses and the richness of the empty space, in previous Olympic opening ceremonies, such as those held in the US and Australia, there was simply too much clamour and horror vacui.

Immediately after the Beijing ceremony one Chinese web blogger commented, “We’ve been waiting for this banquet for a long time. Instead what we got was hot-pot in which all the flavors have ended up confused.” People will debate the contents and significance of this particular visual banquet for some time to come. Despite all this, what does remain is a Chinese painting in which the whole world, through its athletes, has helped co-create.

Geremie R. Barmé is a professor of Chinese history at The Australian National University. His latest book is The Forbidden City (Harvard University Press, 2008). A shorter version of this article appeared in Sydney Morning Herald on August 11, 2008.

How to Talk to Strangers: Beijing's Advice

After her recent publication of the piece, "China Expands Its Courtesy: Saying 'Hello' to Strangers," in the May 2008 issue of the Journal of Asian Studies, we asked Mary Erbaugh if she might consider writing a short related piece for us. Herewith, her advice on greetings for those currently in Beijing--and we urge you to track down a copy of the current JAS issue and read the longer piece as well.

By Mary S. Erbaugh

US parents warn their children, “Don't talk to strangers!” But Chinese adults traditionally avoid even superficial greetings to strangers. This preserves a distinction between insiders and outsiders (nei wai you bie) which honors insiders but deflects con artists and unwelcome requests. People remain wary until they know someone's title, surname, and background through networks of connections (guanxi) with kin, classmates, and colleagues. People do not say “hello” even to neighbors on the street. In stores, restaurants, train stations, taxis, post offices or clinics, customers request service without pleasantries: “Pork chop noodles!,” “To the east bus station!” Good service focuses on a quick but silent response. Strangers remain lonely and vulnerable to rudeness, as any Chinese bus rider knows.

Mandarin classes and phrasebooks for foreigners stress phrases which are supposed to be equivalents to English “hello,” “please,” “sorry,” “thanks” and “good-bye.” But surprisingly, such phrases are not universal. The Mandarin versions turn out to be very recent, unfamiliar translations from European languages. Using them can sound as awkward, conversation-stopping, and potentially sarcastic as saying bon jour in a Mississippi gas station.

Yet the Beijing government has launched the biggest propaganda campaign since the Cultural Revolution to press people to use exactly these “five courteous phrases” (wuge limao de ci): “hello” (nin hao), “please” (qing) “sorry” (duibuqi), “thanks” (xiexie) and “goodbye” (zai jian). This deliberately innocuous effort repudiates the painful political labels of the Cultural Revolution in hopes of a public sphere that is depoliticized, harmonious, hygienically free of trash, spitting, and public urination, and internationally recognized as a world-class “civilization’ (wenming limao). (For details, see Erbaugh 2008). In the propaganda poster in Illustration 1, even zoo monkeys urge garbage-throwing visitors, “Could you please act more civilized!”

The shift toward using the five courteous phrases fills a historically recent gap in greeting foreign visitors. But the phrases are beginning to catch on locally to bridge a gap in Chinese social relations. Hundreds of millions of Chinese have suddenly found themselves as strangers in new factories and high-rise neighborhoods where 40 percent of people surveyed don't know the names of their neighbors. Self-help best sellers, arguing that talking to strangers can be good business, coach readers on how to use the phrases. Illustration 2 shows readers how to say an honorific “hello” (nin hao) to someone they know.


Adding the phrases onto traditional insider courtesy is a slow process, especially outside the metropolis. Each phrase carries problematic historic overtones. English “hello” or “hi,” translated as nin hao, sounds closer to “Greetings to the honored people,” adapted from ceremonial group greetings, e.g. leaders reviewing the troops from Tian'anmen Square or students greeting their teachers. “Please” (qing) is a verb, traditionally restricted to superior making an offer to an inferior, “might I invite you to do X.” Customers who say qing sound contradictory. Service workers are reluctant to say it, for it risks both cheekiness and assuming responsibility for situations which are often out of their control, e.g. running out of stock.

“Sorry,” translated as duibuqi, is literally “I cannot rise to face you,” closer to “I beg you to forgive me. How can I make it up to you?” It takes responsibility for serious wrong doing which demands reparations. For minor lapses, people often say “[I'm] embarrassed” (bu hao yisi) or borrow the widely understood Cantonese phrase for “[I] shouldn't / sorry / excuse me / please / thanks” (m goi). In the US people say “sorry” or “excuse me” to request attention. In Mandarin, “may I ask...” (qing wen) is often less confusing. “Thank you,” translated as xiexie, comes from “[I] refuse [it],” and the necessity to refuse any offer three times. Waiters and clerks find it confusing. “Goodbye,” translated as zai jian, sounds more like “farewell” or even bon voyage, to people you never expect to see again. Family, friends and colleagues do not tempt fate by saying it; they simply say “[I'm] leaving” (zou le).

What are you supposed to say instead of the five phrases? The title (“teacher,” “manager,” even a fictive kinship title like “grandpa”), plus surname, plus a situational comment: “Have you eaten?,” “You must be busy,” “Where are you going?” US visitors often feel their privacy has been invaded, but respond literally: “Well, I had breakfast rather late” or “I'm going to my friend Lee's house.” But situational comments are usually merely pro forma efforts to establish a connection. Only a vague response is needed: “I've eaten,” “Very busy,” “Going out.” The less people have seen foreigners, the more curious they are. Decades ago as a student in Taipei, passers-by exhausted me by yelling, “Foreigner!” “How old are you?” “Are you married?” “How many children do you have?” “Where do you live?” “What did you pay for those socks?” A recent propaganda poster in the Beijing neighborhood near Tian'anmen Square lists “Eight ‘Don't Ask’ Topics for Foreigners”: age, marital status, occupation, income, health status, as well as politics or religion.

Chinese do ask each other specific questions both from curiosity and to establish common ground when they are first introduced, especially hometown, school, and employer. Even the politest Chinese try to establish a connection with questions that US visitors may react to as annoying or clichéd: “What country are you from?” “How long have you been in China?” “Can you use chopsticks?” “What do you think of China?” China values the right phrase for each situation. Americans can grow impatient when a Chinese says “I'm happy to be in... the Big Apple / the Windy City / Nanjing, one of China's ‘three furnaces’ of hot weather / Hangzhou by the beautiful West Lake / at the Hai'er Company, China's biggest maker of home appliances.” But to Chinese ears, conventional comments show sensitivity to where you are and what to say. Americans relish political debate. But Chinese are unlikely to exhort Americans to close Guantanamo, free Puerto Rico, or pay reparations for African-American slavery. Ironically, Olympic sports talk offers situational comments with a very simple vocabulary: team names, nationalities, scores, and good wishes.

Mary S. Erbaugh is Courtesy Research Associate in the center for Asian and Pacific Studies at the University of Oregon.

Illustration 1 Credit:
于保勋。‘招我急哪？’ 中央文明办秘书组和中国科普作家协会。2003。改陋习，讲文明。北京：华夏出版社。第23页。
Yu Baoxun. 'Are you trying to make me mad?' In Zhongyang Wenming Ban Mishu Zu and Zhongguo Kepu Zuojia Xiehui {Central Secretariat for Civilized Behavior and Chinese Writers’ Committee for Popularizing Science}. 2003. Gai chou xi, jiang wenming (Change Ugly Customs, Emphasize Cultivation). Beijing: Huaxia chuban she. P. 23.

Illustration 2 Credit:
潘顺琪。 ‘与熟人打招呼’ 。靳羽西。2000。魅力何来：做一个有风度，有品位，有修养的现代人。上海：上海文艺出版社。第79页。
Pan Shunqi. 'Greeting someone you know'. Kan, Yu-sai [Jin Yuxi]. 2000. Meili helai: Zuo yi ge you fengdu, you pinwei, you xiuyang de xiandai ren (Etiquette for Modern Chinese / The Source of Beauty: Become a Poised, Refined, Cultivated Modern Person). Shanghai: Wen yi chuban she.

From the US to China, By Way of Israel

This is the fifth installment in our series on the Olympics around the world. Here Berkeley grad and assistant professor at University of Haifa Shakhar Rahav shares how Israeli media is covering China and the Olympics.

By Shakhar Rahav

I have recently returned to my native Israel after a long sojourn in the USA. One of the things I have been looking for here is the way in which China is covered and portrayed in the Israeli media, and what images of China arise in local discourse.

As elsewhere, there is much media coverage of China these days--most of it fed by economic and commercial interests on the one hand, and by interest in the Olympics and the Olympic-hype on the other.

Indeed, most interest in China is generated by commercial interests and as such reflects our globalizing world, where economic opportunity determines interest in geography. Appropriately perhaps, most media coverage that I have seen tends to be “borrowed” [I suppose in fact purchased] from other media outlets, either the large press-agencies like Associated Press and Reuters, or respectable, and for the most part pro-market, American and British newspapers such as The Economist, Bloomberg, or The New York Times (often from the business section).

[Why these newspapers and not others deserves an inquiry in itself--is it propelled simply by the power relations between the countries? Are we partial to British newspapers because of the British Mandate that ruled historic Palestine between the end of WW I and 1948?]

Most presentation of this kind therefore emphasizes China’s economic growth and its market potential. Occasionally, this coverage is punctuated by original pieces that mainly address questions such as, why haven’t Israeli firms established a more significant presence in China? Why are we not yet profiting ourselves from the bonanza of China’s economic growth? And so forth.

There are no Israeli China correspondents who report from the country on a regular basis. The occasional articles about the destabilizing and deleterious effect of economic growth are translated from the international press as well and do not justify holding a regular China correspondent. The economic logic of this is clear, yet absurdities may arise. The attack earlier this week on Chinese security personnel in Kashgar that claimed 16 victims was prominently featured, even supplying a huge front-page photo for the country’s elite liberal daily paper, Ha’aretz. The reporting was mainly a summary of foreign outlets. Yet The New York Times reporting on the incident, if one read it in detail, also quoted an Israeli expert on China and Xinjiang. When the expert appeared in Ha’aretz the following day it was only because the paper translated en bloc an entire article from The New York Times.

Yet the Olympics have of course prompted some independent coverage. The country’s best-selling newspaper Yedi’ot Aharonot devoted its entire front page to a huge photo of rehearsals of the Olympic opening ceremony. The pages are now full with talk of “the Chinese”: “The Chinese” are waiting impatiently for the games, “The Chinese” are worried about security, “The Chinese” like harmony--and so forth. Most prominent, of course, is television coverage, and the indigenous TV reporters who, as part of their media mission, are required to fill the time with incessant chatter.

Most talk centers on the sports and the competitors, and also on “our athletes.” Yet during the ceremony coverage some remarks betray a fascination with the host country and anxiety about it. “The nightclubs” have been closed report the reporters, referring to the Sanlitun centered scene (not a word about recent roundups of dissidents and gadflies). The machine-like precision of the opening ceremonies made some reporters anxious, and they spoke of the kind of state, and regime that is necessary to produce such a highly-disciplined performance (echoes of Nazi Germany and the USSR to these reporters’ minds). More contemporary concerns emerged as a former Israeli athlete who is now a TV commentator said that she hopes the exposure to the West will bring some positive advances and advance human rights. And the funniest remark, covering one of the duller moments in the ceremony, was the TV anchor who remarked on the huge amount of restaurants in the city, and then added, “they have a huge appetite.” So it is, evidently--large countries produce large appetites.

And it is appetite that brings me to the most striking presentation of China that I have encountered here. A McDonald's ad campaign presents a George W. Bush look alike, who in a commercial clip is surrounded by American-speaking security personnel dressed in suits and dark glasses, who hurry the president to a McDonald’s at an undisclosed location in Israel. After the president satisfies his urges by ordering a Big Mac, he offers a couple of Israeli children tickets to the Olympic Games in “Beijing.” The American president consequently adorns posters in McDonald’s and holds out two tempting tickets at the customer. And so, “America,” the agent of globalization, the major force and cultural ideal, presents us with food and with entertainment. It is via the USA that we the customers are invited to China. The USA, and China are thus mixed, both representing perhaps the larger international community, and the “cool” of our globalized age. The images are enhanced by McDonald’s clever agreements with the film "Kung Fu Panda," and with the Olympic Games it sponsors. McDonald’s now opens the door to an internationalized China offering Kung Fu, noodles, and burgers.

America opens the door to China. It was perhaps an understanding of this wisdom that gave basketball player Yao Ming the symbolic role of flag bearer for the Chinese Olympic delegation. The athlete, whose stardom is derived from his success in the American NBA world, leads the symbol of national pride, and so America paves the road to China, even, perhaps, for Chinese.

Shakhar Rahav is assistant professor of modern Chinese history in the Department of Asian Studies at University of Haifa.

President Bush Wanders Onto NBC Set

George W. Bush was interviewed live on NBC by Bob Costas just a few hours ago. A short but wide-ranging interview, the President covered China's human rights record ("America better remain engaged"), China and religion ("once religion takes hold in a society it can't be stopped"), Georgia ("I was very firm with Vladimir Putin"), Sudan ("Joey Cheek has just got to know that I took the Sudanese message [to the Chinese government] for him"), and doping in sports.

The interview was enormously casual--to Costas's question if Hu Jintao was "receptive" to Bush's message on Sudan, Bush responded "It's hard to tell."

For a full transcript, see here, or watch below.



It's unclear from the interview whether Bush ever did his assigned reading, but we're guessing not.

What Happened to the Women?

The opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics was so magnificently awe-inspiring as to prompt the NBC anchors to declare that, if there were a trophy for the opening ceremonies, then it must be retired. Vancouver and London certainly have their work cut out for them.

Yet as I watched a string of stunning performances of Chinese men—banging on brass drums, doing quasi-qigong dance, executing a shanshui painting with their bodies while dancing on the world’s largest LCD screen, etc., etc., all capped by the 7’6”-tall flag bearer Yao Ming—I wondered, where did China’s 640 million women go? Sure, a 9-year-old girl sang the national anthem, and another 9-year-old girl floated over the mixed-gender group of children from the 56 recognized nationalities. The group of schoolchildren in the end was also mixed gender, but adult women were minorities in the evening’s performance. I kept squinting at various performers in an attempt to ascertain their gender, but the fact that I had to look so hard indicated that something was wrong.

Many gorgeous women floated around the stage in modified Tang costume, moving very delicately, as if they actually were dolls made of porcelain (or perhaps as if their huge dresses were unbearably hot and heavy). A single woman floated out on a magic carpet-type platform supported by dozens of people beneath her, and her entire performance of swirling colored scarves around herself while she “floated” lasted maybe 2 minutes. Another handful of women actually did float like angels over the 90,000 spectators in the Bird’s Nest, with lights illuminating their ever-smiling faces of serene beauty. But that was about it. In his world-class exposé of pre-packaged Chinese culture, Zhang Yimou cast women as docile, delicate, and demure pin-up girls.

I’d never be one to say that China—or any nation in the world—has full gender equality today, but neither would I dismiss the very real advances that China has made in that direction. Shouldn’t that be recognized and celebrated on the world stage? Apparently Zhang Yimou does not think so. He lost a very wonderful opportunity to challenge the stereotype of submission that plagues Asian women everywhere. Yet China’s 639-strong Olympic team has already won 6 gold and 2 silver medals. One of the gold’s was won by 48-kilogram Chen Xiexia, who lifted 117 kilograms, more than twice her own body weight, seemingly without even breaking a sweat (US’ers can see the video on nbcolympics.com).

This intrigues me given that I recently finished Andrew Morris’s book, Marrow of the Nation: A History of Sport and Physical Culture in Republican China, in which he goes against what many scholars have said—including Fan Hong in her agreeably uncritical book Footbinding, Feminism, and Freedom, and Wang Zheng in her portrait of women’s physical educator Lu Lihua in Women in the Chinese Enlightenment—to assert that the world of Chinese athletics from the late Qing through the early Communist era was expressly male-centric. Morris argues that even the well-executed attempts of many Chinese women to re-define physical culture to be more inclusive failed because “women were still disproportionately blamed for their lack of attention to physical fitness and were stereotypically described in terms of a history of weakness and sloth” (p. 118). In other words, men policed the boundaries of “their” world of physical activity to keep women out, and they continually defined the aim of sport to be ridding China of the ignominious title of “Sick Man of East Asia,” a male-centric geopolitical goal of proving Chinese masculinity to the imperialist nations whose Orientalism cast Asians as passive and weak. Morris says that, although some advances for women were made through physical culture, in reality it was just a shift from Cherry Coke to Vanilla Coke—women’s bodies, first defined and controlled by Confucian patriarchy, were in the Republican and early Communist eras defined and controlled by nationalist patriarchy.

I’m going to be optimistic and assume that things are at least slightly different in Chen Xiexia’s China, despite the sometimes violent persistence of nationalist patriarchy (there and everywhere!). I’m going to let a 106-pound woman who easily lifts 258 pounds over her head represent today’s Chinese women, despite the fact that Zhang Yimou’s testosterone-filled celebration pulled on my heart strings.