China Around the World: Australia

Last month, China Beat started a feature that asks journalists and China scholars from around the world to write about how China is covered in their home media. Australia is a particularly interesting case, since Prime Minister Kevin Rudd speaks Chinese and has lived in China as both a student and a diplomat. Here, Rowan Callick of The Australian reflects on Australians' interest in and feelings about China.

By Rowan Callick

It’s hard for me to compare how Australians and others cover China, in part because we rarely actually meet each other to swap notes, except for the occasional encounter via the Foreign Correspondents Club of China (an admirable organization, but one without formal standing in China because it lacks—for obvious reasons on both sides—the sponsorship of a party or government body) and in part because the whole structure of journalism in China does not bring reporters together frequently, as it does in most other countries.

I sometimes go for weeks without encountering another journalist. For China has few press conferences, parliament sessions (two weeks in a year), company annual general meetings or special meetings (never), court hearings open to the media (in my experience, again, never) that bring journalists together. We tend to do our own thing, often, which—if we are attentive to our audiences—reflects their interests.

What, as a result, do I tend to report on?

My readers like to see “their” correspondent's name on the big story of the day. So I will cover the major domestic and international events involving China, as other journalists do. I was in Sichuan, for instance, covering the horrific human impact of the earthquake there. But because China has become Australia's top trading partner—and has played a prominent role in driving Australia's continued economic growth, now in its 17th year—I also write substantially on economic and business stories. And there is a constant call for cultural and arts stories, about Chinese writers, film makers and artists.

It is hard to write coherently on China today without incorporating coverage of economic development. And Australians are generally interested such issues, aware of the importance of economic openness and engagement, while of course there remain controversies and differences of opinion.

About one in every 25 Australians are now Chinese. My wife (a New Zealander) and I have a biological daughter and a Chinese son (born in Hong Kong, whom we adopted while living there), and have only on a couple of occasions had any comments or questions about our mixed family. It’s accepted as normal enough by most Australians.

China is widely viewed as an opportunity not a threat—in part because Australia now views itself as an Asia-Pacific country. In recent years, we have had rather more policy disagreements with Europe than we have had with our Asian neighbors.

On a recent visit, I noticed large posters at bus stops advertising a financial product, with the huge headline: “Think Opportunity—China.”

Large numbers of young Australian professionals—lawyers, accountants, journalists, etc.—go to work in Asia, as their parents might have gone to work in London or the US. Our children learn Asian languages—Bahasa Indonesia, Japanese, Chinese, and increasingly the latter—at school.

Our daughter, who recently returned to Melbourne after a couple of years here in Beijing, goes to a high school which has a substantial Chinese language center. She wanted to continue playing the erhu (the two-stringed Chinese equivalent to the violin), which she had taken up alongside the violin in Beijing. No problem; the headmistress pointed out that the music staff includes an erhu master from China.

So the context of my coverage may be different from that of some other journalists writing for Western media.

My readers are also of course interested in human rights issues. I believe I write quite robustly on those, and about the ominous nature of the new surge of nationalist sentiment, for instance.

But they are also interested in stories about Chinese culture. I have recently written substantially about Chinese artists, authors, actors, and directors. I have just had a long feature about emerging celebrities in China in our weekly color magazine. I wrote a 2,000 word story on Jiang Rong, the author of the smash hit Chinese novel “Wolf Totem.” I am in the middle of a 3,000 word essay about Beijing, focused on new books about the city, for our literary review. And I am also at present writing about Chinese sports stars in the run-up to the Olympics; Australians are mad about sports, of course.

The demands, and the possibilities of having stories published, are actually never-ending.

The capacity of our new prime minister, Kevin Rudd, to speak Chinese—the first western leader to do so—was a big plus in his election campaign. He is widely admired for doing so. His predecessor John Howard in part lost his parliamentary seat because a high proportion of the Chinese electors in his constituency shifted to Rudd's Labor party.

It makes less difference than I had expected that we have a “Zhongguo tong”—China expert—prime minister, though. It has certainly been no easier than before, to gain access to senior officials—in fact this year, perhaps because of the succession of controversies starting with the Tibet riots, it has been harder. His Chinese knowledge is well known here in China—where every taxi driver seems to know of Lu Kewen (his Chinese name)—and in Australia, where media were for a day dominated by his long exchange in fluent Chinese with President Hu Jintao at the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation forum leaders’ summit in Sydney, in September last year in the lead-up to the election. Rudd talked of his time in Beijing, and his family’s continuing China connections including his daughter’s recent marriage to a Chinese Australian whose family originates from Hong Kong.

Rudd has been criticized by political opponents for giving too much attention to China and insufficient to Australia’s oldest Asian partner, Japan. But he has so far avoided taking any serious political damage from being viewed as a sop to Beijing. His Chinese expertise remains for now a net plus for him with Australian voters.

Having such China knowledge can, however, cut both ways within China itself. It can become discomforting, having a foreigner somehow inside the comfort barrier. Rudd talked in a speech to Beijing University that made a big impact in April, of being a “zhengyou,” a true friend, one who felt able to talk frankly. He spoke of human rights issues in Tibet—but was rebuked by President Hu during their formal meeting later on that visit.

Certainly, having a Western leader speak Chinese is perceived by his Chinese counterparts as giving China face, as reinforcing the country’s “peaceful rise.” But it does not diminish the impact of differences in interests. Indeed, as China and Australia have enmeshed economically, the potential—sometimes realized—for arguments and disagreements has increased. The Rudd government is acting cautiously about China’s rush to acquire ownership of the country’s strategically crucial resources industry. China is reluctant to concede special advantages to Australia’s banks, universities and other service sectors, or to give increased access to Australian farmers, in the talks—which began in May 2005—towards a free trade agreement.

Rowan Callick has been the Beijing based correspondent for The Australian since the start of 2006. He was earlier the China correspondent for The Australian Financial Review, then based in Hong Kong, from 1996-2000. He notes that though The Australian’s web site is not always easily navigable or comprehensive, it is free.

FAQ #6: Are the Beijing Olympic Games being used as a Propaganda Campaign to Prop up the Communist Party?

“Olympic education” is the IOC’s label for the educational efforts that are supposed to be an integral part of the Olympic Movement as required by Fundamental Principle #1 of the Olympic Charter, which states that Olympism is a philosophy of life that blends sport with culture and education. Since 2005 China has been carrying out the largest-scale “Olympic education” campaign in history. There have been academic and professional conferences, textbooks and courses for public schools and universities, educational television and radio shows, magazine and newspaper essays, websites, and more.

In fall of 2007 I was added to the “experts team” of Beijing City’s Olympic Education Standing Office and so I have seen its workings from the inside. I have attended meetings of the Standing Office, taken part in ceremonies at schools, interviewed teachers and principals, and count the people mentioned below as my friends.

From this perspective I offer the following evidence in support of this answer to the above question: “No.”

1) The initial inspiration for Olympic education came from outside China and is the product of an international network.

In the absence of a well-established legal tradition, and in accord with the effort to implement the “rule of law,” China has treated the Olympic Charter and the Host City Contract as if they were enforceable legal documents. Fundamental Principle #4 of the Olympic Charter advocates “sport…without discrimination of any kind and in the Olympic spirit, which requires mutual understanding with a spirit of friendship, solidarity and fair play.” These constitute the core of what the IOC calls “Olympic values.” They have been the starting point for the values taught in China’s Olympic education.

Within the IOC there is a Commission on Culture and Olympic Education. Since 2000 it has been chaired by the IOC member in China, He Zhenliang, whose leadership has given it an influence it did not previously have. His prominence was one of the factors in the attention given to education in China.

Two of the people who have had a big influence on Olympic education in China are Ren Hai of the Beijing Sport University and Donnie Pei (Pei Dongguang) of the Capitol Institute of Physical Education. Ren received a Ph.D. in history from the University of Alberta. Pei received a Master’s Degree from the International Olympic Studies Centre at the University of Western Ontario, Canada and attended the International Olympic Academy (IOA) in Ancient Olympia, Greece. Both of them wrote theses on Olympic history. In 1993 during Beijing’s first bid for the Olympic Games, Ren edited the first college-level textbook for Olympic education, The Olympic Movement 《奥林匹克运动》(revised and re-published in 2005). Both Pei and Ren are active internationally, taking part in international conferences and in the sessions of the International Olympic Academy. They and other scholars collected information on Olympic education programs in previous host nations and invited international scholars to Beijing, utilizing international models in planning Beijing’s programs. I have known Ren Hai since 1994, and am currently affiliated with the Olympic Studies Center of the Beijing Sport University that he directs.

2) The initial impetus for Beijing’s Olympic education programs in the schools came from “the people” (民间), not the government.

At the 2000 Postgraduate Session at the International Olympic Academy, Donnie Pei was inspired by the Dean, Kostas Georgiadis, who led the Olympic education projects for the 2004 Athens Games. After the success of Beijing’s bid in 2001, Pei, who had worked as a p.e. teacher for ten years before going to Canada, began visiting schools in Beijing to try to persuade them to start Olympic activities. He found that most principals and teachers were uninterested because they believed the Olympics were nothing more than sports, but finally on his tenth attempt he ran into p.e. teacher Zhou Chenguang at Yangfangdian Primary School. Zhou was immediately attracted by Pei’s discussion of the Olympics as a way of teaching values because of his own crisis of conscience:

In the 1980s we still understood physical education as the Soviet Union. We required students to line up in straight lines. [For the recess exercises] I was very proud when one thousand children lined up straight. I would put a lot of effort into it. I’d stand on the platform to direct them, jump off and run up to them to straighten them up [motions hands as if adjusting a child’s torso], run back to the platform, and so on. I had put out so much effort. I started to wonder what had I trained them for? They would go out into society and what would they do with what they had learned? Did it have any use? I had produced little soldiers. What had I accomplished? They knew how to be obedient. It was a big machine for producing cabbages. I started to feel as if I had harmed them.

In 2002 Pei and Zhou initiated China’s first Olympic education school activities, a re-enactment of the ancient Greek pentathlon. Pei had gotten this idea from the IOA, where it is an annual tradition created by Ingomar Weiler, a professor in classics at the University of Graz. For Pei, the ancient Greek ideal of all-around education was the remedy for the overemphasis on testing that was plaguing China’s educational system. He says, “Olympic education is a movement, but it’s a moving movement. Humans need to be moved - materialism is not enough. Olympic education emphasizes balance, which is found in the Chinese Way of the Mean as well as in the Greek ideal of harmonious education. China needs this now, as did late 19th/early 20th century Europe in Coubertin’s times after industrialization. The idea has value because of a social need.”

By 2005, Yangfangdian Primary School had already held four installments of its annual “mini Olympic Games,” and each time Zhou Chenguang had faxed multiple invitations to BOCOG with little response from it or other official VIPs. But in that year BOCOG stepped up its operations and started to pay attention to fulfilling the Host City Contract’s stipulations on educational programs, which China took more seriously than host nations usually do. The Beijing Municipal Education Commission, working together with BOCOG, formed the Olympic Education Standing Office. They designated 200 primary and secondary schools in Beijing City and another 356 schools nationwide as “Olympic Education Demonstration Schools,” and Yangfangdian as their “Pioneer.” Principals and teachers from around Beijing were invited to three forums to learn from the experiences at Yangfangdian. By the end of 2007 hundreds more schools had engaged in “hand-in-hand sharing” with the Demonstration Schools, taking the total number of schools that had carried out Olympic activities to 1,100. It is estimated that these programs touched 400 million students nationwide.

The Heart-to-Heart sister school program was organized among 210 schools in Beijing. This program was based on the “One School, One Country” program first initiated at the Nagano Olympics in 1998. Each school established a sister school relationship with one the 205 National Olympic Committees, as well as with 5 National Paralympic Committees.

In addition, a teacher training program reached about 10,000 primary and secondary school teachers in Beijing.

Thus, what began as a “people’s” initiative was picked up by the government. But the intellectuals generally regarded this as a positive development, because without the support of the government there would have been no way to implement their ideas on such a broad scale. As Pei put it,

There is no conflict between them and us. They give us a lot of recognition. We do not take the credit. As scholars we must rely on the government. We cannot be too naïve. We are members of social life, we cannot isolate ourselves. We must have an open mind. The government needs our knowledge. We should not be the “lonely flower admiring itself” (孤芳自赏). If the government understands, then we shut up. “The flames reach higher when people from all around add kindling to them” (周人添柴火焰高). It’s teamwork.

What is most important to Pei is that “In the end my ideas go to the children. This is what I want.”

In 2008, Pei was recognized as a “Model Worker” for Beijing City, the highest form of recognition by the Beijing government.

3) Much of the framework and content of Olympic education came from the non-Communist Parties.

Two of the eight legal non-communist parties, the Democratic League and the Jiusan (September Third) Society played a key role in an unprecedented joint effort between the city government, the Party, university professors, and BOCOG, which produced important planning documents on the guiding thought of Olympic education and its concrete implementation. Between 2001 and 2008 the two political parties organized dozens of activities in Beijing, including academic forums, publications, school activities, poster exhibitions, and more, while their branches in other cities also organized activities. Many of the other political parties also organized activities in Beijing and nationwide.

Pei was not a member of the Communist Party in 2001. Several years later, he joined the September Third Society.

4) The specific content of Olympic Education is almost completely non-political.

Schools were given complete freedom to design their own Olympic education activities, and the resulting variety is amazing. Students formed their own organizing committees (following the organizational chart on BOCOG’s website) or conducted bid competitions like the Olympic bid. They organized mini-Olympic games with a parade of athletes in the opening ceremony featuring students dressed as the different nations of the world. They produced a huge amount of artwork in every conceivable medium, even beans or bottle tops glued to posterboard. They developed innumerable performance types, including the “Olympic angel chorus” at Yangfangdian, which performs a moving rendition of Bach’s “Ode to Joy” or the “Olympic Volunteer’s Song” while wearing angel wings. Students at the Information Management vocational school, most of whose parents are migrant laborers, spent two years of their after-school time producing a computer-generated animated film in which the Fuwa mascots introduce Olympic history.

Teachers I talked to felt that Olympic education was nonpolitical, and thus contrasted with the previous character education campaigns in the national curriculum. As one teacher told me, “After the national leaders have stated the policy, if the only way you can think to implement it is to shout slogans, it becomes irritating after a while.” With Olympic education, they could use concrete activities to teach children fair play, teamwork, mutual respect, selfless service, international friendship, the pursuit of world peace, and many other concepts. And unlike the previous character education, their students enjoyed the projects.

The words “communist” and “socialist” are almost completely absent in Olympic education materials and lectures. In mid-May, I sat through 1-1/2 hours of presentations by teachers at local schools considered to have the best examples of Olympic education, and I did not hear the words “communist” or “socialist” once. Last week I attended a meeting of the Olympic Education Standing Office to plan a book that will summarize and analyze the thousands of activities carried out under its umbrella. The success of the Olympic education effort is not being judged by whether it promoted loyalty to the Party or nation, but by whether it motivated the students and produced creative results. I also attended several of the lectures delivered in the teacher training program and to the volunteers. Like the content of the school programs, these lectures largely impart knowledge about the world outside China.

The most political content I have seen was at a meeting run by the Communist Youth League of the Beijing Forestry University, which was a training lecture for college student participants in the Green Long March project to promote environmental awareness across China. A few speakers almost casually mentioned the support of the party and government for the various volunteer projects organized by the CYL, but that was it.

I do not feel that the Party and government are explicitly claiming responsibility for organizing these games – on the contrary, public statements claim that the games belong to all people, that “everyone can participate” (China has placed particular importance on the Olympic creed that “the most important thing is to participate”). The strongest argument that one could accurately make is that the Games implicitly support the Communist Party. But if one wants to venture into the realm of implicit messages, there many others that contradict this one. I believe the major message in Olympic education is that there is an exciting and colorful world out there, and China is about to join it. And this is in accord with the major goal of Olympic education, which is to produce a next generation of Chinese people who are better prepared to be active citizens in that world than the current adults, who are all too conscious of their limitations.

Conclusion: Beijing’s Olympic Education De-politicizes the Olympics

Actually, I think it is more accurate to conclude that the Olympic Games have been de-politicized in China’s Olympic education efforts. And this, in my opinion, is part of a backlash against the politicized national curriculum. Ren Hai reached this conclusion in a recent essay:

Today’s world lacks an education that focuses on a global horizon and is firmly based on the interests of humankind as a whole. It was precisely this lack that sparked the emergence of Olympic education. Olympic education aims to cultivate qualified citizens of the “global village,” to help them break through the various limitations of their respective societies, to impress the seal of a world citizen on top of the existing identity of a national citizen. (In the forthcoming Olympic Studies Reader).

Enduring social change only occurs when the ideas in people’s heads change. In my opinion, Olympic education is one of the most important dimensions of the Beijing Olympics, one whose effects will be felt for decades to come. But we will never be able to prove them or measure them, and so what is going on in this realm will be unlikely to make headlines, and its place in history may never be recorded.

I once witnessed Donnie Pei become irritated at a reporter asking him questions about political issues surrounding the games. He stood up and passionately told him in English:

The Olympic Games are a congregation, a celebration, a holiday – it’s a festival. If some Westerners take this time to raise political issues, tell them they’re stupid. Even if it’s George Bush – tell him to go to the IOA and receive an Olympic education. Olympism is respect for any culture, any people, any nation. That’s why the Olympic Games survived one hundred years until now. We are promoting love between people. I don’t want to promote hatred, such as the Tibet and Taiwan protesters. We are China. We should understand each other better through the Olympic Games.

Duelling Dreams at the 2008 Beijing Olympics

Jim Leibold originally developed this piece on Chinese and Western viewpoints on the Beijing Olympics for use in his teaching; he's adapted it here for the China Beat audience.

By Jim Leibold

This year is China’s year. On the 8th day of the 8th month at 8pm, it will light the flame of the 29th Olympics Games—bringing not only the world’s athletes to Beijing but also thousands of foreign visitors and millions more through the massive global media contingency that will descend on the capital.

What will the media spotlight capture? The luster of an ancient civilization and emerging superpower as many in China hope; or the darker, seedier corners of an authoritarian yet fragile party-state as many in the West suspect.

According to the Chinese government, the Olympics games have never been about politics and nor should the Beijing Games. The Games are all about sports: the principles of peace, fair play, friendship, honour and glory on the track and in the pool. The Games are about cultivating and spreading the “Olympic Spirit” and “Olympic Culture” throughout China and the wider world.

But in reality the Games have always been about politics. One only has to recall Hitler’s showcase Berlin Olympics of 1936, the tragic deaths at the Munich Olympics in 1972, or the boycotts of the Montreal, Moscow and Los Angeles games. And the Beijing Olympics are shaping up to be the mother of all political events: as different global constituencies compete for resources, power and influence (not to mention money) in the main event as the athletes go for gold on the sidelines.

If we hope to understand the significance of the Olympic-size struggle that is playing out on the front pages of our newspapers, online chat-rooms and city streets in the lead up to the Beijing Games, we need to first contextualize (dare I say essentialize) the two contrasting worldviews at play here. I would like to suggest that the ongoing controversy surrounding the Games is a reflection of two competing social imaginaries which go well beyond the swimming pool and the track and are deeply rooted in how China sees its place in the world and how the rest of the world views China.

Competing Worldviews: China
Despite China’s rising economic and political muscle, it still views itself as a victim of the international system. Modern history as it is taught in Chinese classrooms begins with the 1840 Opium War. And the story of how the British government ordered a military attack on the forces of Qing China because one of its officials, Lin Zexue, dared to destroy the British opium supplies that were poisoning its youth and destroying its economy. This was the opening salvo on what the Chinese rightfully remember as the “century of humiliation.”

From Sun Yat-sen to Mao Zedong, Chinese leaders called on their people to “wake up” and throw off their slavish mentality so that they could once again stand up in front of the world. This narrative of national victimhood and the resulting struggle for national dignity is perhaps most clearly symbolized by the apocryphal sign which supposedly forbade dogs and Chinese from entering Huangpu Park in the foreign concessions of late 19th century Shanghai.

Although the sign appears to have never existed (at least as a posted placard), the very idea of its existence circulated widely among turn of the century Chinese nationalists, who used it as a highly emotive example of the humiliation the Chinese were suffering at the hands of the foreign imperialists. Take for example Li Weiqing’s 1907 appeal:

“On the banks of the Huangpu river the foreigners have set up a garden where the green grass is like carpet and the flowers like silks and satins. People from all countries of the world are admitted, even Indians who have lost their country, indeed even the dogs of foreigners are admitted. Only Chinese are not allowed to go there. Foreigners despise us so much, they regard us as more base than slaves, horses and dogs…So it can be seen that in the modern world only power counts. We should exert ourselves to obliterate this disgraceful humiliation.”

For many Chinese living both at home and abroad, this struggle for national dignity continues today, making another imaginary scene—this time from Bruce Lee’s 1972 film Fist of Fury—a source of great inspiration and hope. Set in 1930s Shanghai, where the Chinese faced not only the oppression of the West but also the rising militarism of their fellow Asian neighbours Japan, Bruce Lee fights back on behalf of his nation and people, defeating the Japanese traitors and destroying the symbol of foreign insult:

VIDEO 1: “no dogs and Chinese allowed”:


But didn’t this “century of humiliation” end in 1949 with the Communist revolution? After all Mao had claimed that the Chinese people had finally stood up from the rostrum at Tiananmen Square. Yet, the chaos of the Cultural Revolution left China looking like the “joker in the pack” of the international system. When Mao died in 1976, China was still one of the poorest countries in the world, with an average caloric intake lower than those experienced in the Auschwitz death camp if we are to believe Jung Chang and Jon Halliday.

China has come a long way since 1976. Proud of their country’s achievements over the last three decades, most Chinese look to the 2008 Olympics with a sense of rising confidence. For them, the Olympics is about pride and dignity: the reversal of historical wrongs and the restoration of a once proud and mighty nation. Today’s Chinese youth are extremely patriotic and highly sensitive of any criticism which seems to hark back to the bad old days when their countrymen were viewed as backward, yellow-skin coolies.

Competing Worldviews: The West
Yet, outside China, the world continues to look at the “dragon” with a combination of fear and desire. On the one hand, the West has long looked to Asia with a lust for the exotic and the erotic: the lost and hidden realm of Shangri-la and the fragile submissiveness of the Oriental beauty. In the ancient traditions of the East, and in particular its Tibetan incarnation, the West has long sought an escape from the brutal realities of Western modernity: its wars, its poverty, its social atomization.

This desire for escape was brilliantly captured in James Hilton’s 1933 novel, Lost Horizon, which told the story of British diplomat Hugh Conway’s discovery of the hidden paradise of Shangri-la deep within the Himalayan mountains of Tibet, where he found love, happiness and, most importantly, meaning. This hugely successful paperback was made into an academy award winning movie in 1937 by leading Hollywood director Frank Capra and then remade into a dreadful, almost comical, musical in 1973 with a memorable Burt Bacharach score. It didn’t seem to matter that the wise High Lama was a Belgium friar named Father Perrault nor that the only Tibetans or Chinese depicted in the film version were played by Western or Japanese actors. For both the book and the films represented a sort of Western fantasy, a postmodern simulacra, where one could sing and dance without the troubles of war, disease or those “dirty Orientals” getting in one’s way:

VIDEO 2: “Lost Horizon 1973 Remake”:


In the final scene from the 1973 remake, Conway has escaped from an Indian hospital in an effort to get back to Shangri-La while American government officials (he’s American in the remake, of course) attempt to bring him back home. Asked if he believes Shangri-la exists, the Indian doctor replies: “Yes. Yes, I believe it. I believe it because I want to believe it.” In other words, there is no need to concern yourself with the reality of China or Tibet when you can create your own version of Shangri-la in the back lots of a Burbank studio.

Yet this desire for the lost wisdom and beauties of the East has been accompanied by an equally strong fear of its “Yellow Hordes” and looming “Yellow Peril.” There is a long history of anti-Chinese racism and migration exclusionism which is deeply rooted in the histories of Australia, America and other Western nation-states.

Like Hilton’s Lost Horizon, the fictional character of another English novelist tapped into this fear of the menacing Oriental: Sax Romer’s evil criminal genius Dr. Fu Manchu. In his first book, The Insidious Dr. Fu Manchu (1913), Rohmer wrote:

“Imagine a person, tall, lean and feline, high-shouldered, with a brow like Shakespeare and a face like Satan, ... one giant intellect, with all the resources of science past and present ... Imagine that awful being, and you have a mental picture of Dr. Fu-Manchu, the yellow peril incarnate in one man.”

One of Fu’s greatest agents was his daughter, Fah Lo Suee or “Sweet Perfume,” who seduced and then tortured Western man in Rohmer’s 1930 The Daughter of Fu Man Chu. Here the fear of pain mixed with the masochistic tickle of pleasure:

VIDEO 3: “I Am The Daughter of Fu Manchu by Charong Chow”:


In sum, we can best understand the ongoing political drama surrounding the Beijing Olympics as a clash of competing worldviews: for the Chinese, the games are a battle ground for upholding national dignity and the rewriting of past historical crimes; for the West, the games are yet another opportunity for it to project its unrealistic fantasies of fear and desire on the Chinese people.

Now, let me see if I can explain what I mean in further detail by taking a closer look at some of the ways that the Games have been politicized both inside and outside of China. Here my aim is to demonstrate how these two radically different social imaginaries are shaping the language and actions of different actors during China’s Olympic moment.

A Game of Cat and Mouse
Since its initiation during the controversial 1936 Berlin Olympics, the torch relay has always been one of the more colorful and symbolic acts of the games, as well as its most overtly political. But the Chinese have taken the relay to a new level: on what was originally dubbed the torch’s 130-day, 137,000-kilometer “journey of harmony.” Not only did they hope to stage the longest relay in Olympic history--with over 20,000 torch bearers carrying the torch to over 20 countries on 5 continents before finally encircling (or rather literally enclosing) the Chinese nation-state, including its highest and lowest points in Mount Everest and the Tarim basin in Xinjiang.

Yet, as all are aware, the torch’s journey around the globe has been anything but harmonious. From the moment it was lit in Athens, the torch has been dogged by controversy. First in London, then Paris and San Francisco, pro-Tibetan independence groups attempted to douse, grab and disrupt the torch while a group of ex-Chinese army strongmen and national police tried to escort it through chaotic city streets. As more than one commentator has pointed out, the entire relay descended into a comic book style farce, with organizers forced to take last minute detours, freeway “jogs,” or laps around a lockdown stadiums or parks to avoid protestors.

For most Westerners, the relay is all about freedom of speech and the right of the individual: the right of athletes and others to criticize the human rights abuses that they claim are occurring in Tibet and elsewhere in China. Take for example, the actions of American environmental advocate Majora Carter, who was selected as one of the torch bearers for the San Francisco leg of the relay. When she attempted to pull out a small Tibetan flag from her sleeve, she was pounced on. In her words:

“The Chinese security and cops were on me like white on rice, it was no joke. They pulled me out of the race, and then San Francisco police officers pushed me back into the crowd on the side of the street.”

As the below video reveals, Carter seemed to be more offended by the denial of her own freedom of speech than anything that was happening in Tibet:

Video 4: “Olympic Torch Bearer Removed For Carrying Tibetan Flag”:


For most Chinese, however, the often comic kafuffle surrounding the relay has been deeply felt, and personally insulting. This sense of anger propelled 27 year-old, disabled fencer Jin Jing into the national spotlight. Dubbed by Chinese netcitizens “the Smiling Angel in Wheelchair,” Jin Jing tenaciously clung to the torch from her wheel chair as several protestors attempted to wrestle it from her hands during the Paris leg of the relay. And as the following YouTube montage reveals, these heroics have transformed her into a national hero:

Video 5: “Jin Jing Chinese National Hero”:


Boycotting the Games
While the Chinese see the Olympics as a sort of coming-out-party and showcase for Chinese national pride, others have used the spotlight to highlight any number of beefs they have against the Chinese state. Many of these groups have adopted a very slick, PR-style approach to their protests, one which makes full use of the multimedia potentials of the internet. Take for example the following:

Video 6: “Olympic Boycott ad”:


In their campaigns, these e-activists have either re-packaged the five cute and cuddy Olympic mascots, the fuwa or “friendlies,” or manipulated the Game’s official motto, “One world, One dream,” and its associated logo. And it seems that there is no shortage of causes that they are fighting for: global warming; religious freedom; labour rights; unfair trade; human rights; press freedom; and even animal cruelty.

The two most vocal groups have been the Dream for Darfur NGO backed by actress Mia Farrow and Students for a Free Tibet headed up by the Canadian-Tibetan activist Lhadon Tethong.

In a 2007 Wall Street Journal op-ed piece, Mia Farrow dubbed the Beijing games the “Genocide Olympics” due to the Beijing government’s continued support for the Khartoum regime and their ethnic cleansing of the non-Arab tribes in the Darfur region of Western Sudan. While Beijing claimed that it was “an insult to the Olympic spirit to wantonly blame China for the Darfur crisis,” it also dispatched a special envoy to the region to pressure the Sudanese government into agreeing to a UN peacekeepers force. Yet, with only a handful of peacekeepers on the ground due to continued foot-dragging in Khartoum, the group has kept the heat on. In February, it claimed its first major scalp when Steven Spielberg announced that he was resigning from his role as a special adviser to the Game’s opening ceremony, claiming that China must do more to pressure its African ally over the Darfur crisis.

As a global franchise of sorts, Students for a Free Tibet have launched a number of creative “direct action” campaigns across the globe aimed at rising awareness of China’s own “genocide” in Tibet. A year prior to the start of the games, they managed to unfurl a huge banner on the Great Wall of China, reading: “One World; One Dream; Free Tibet 2008.” They have also launched a campaign against the Olympic mascots, in particular the Tibetan antelope Yingying or Yingsel as she is known in Tibet. In June of 2007, they had the following press conference to announce that Yingsel had defected from the Olympic team:

Video 7: “Students for a Free Tibet Press Conference”:


While Yingsel might be in hiding, she isn’t hard to find on the internet: she has her own website and can be found networking on Facebook and Myspace, and now even has her own Pac-Man style game where Chinese cops chase her around a maze as she searches for tsampa and momos in a quest for survival. On YouTube, Yingsel can also be seen taking on Olympic sponsors Coca-Cola:

Video 8: “Yingsel Thinks Coke Is GROSS”:


Selling the Games
Facing a PR crisis of disastrous proportions, the Chinese government hired the New York-based global communications consulting firm Hill and Knowlton to help it wrestle back the message from the activists. Their brief: repackage China as a kinder, gentler state—a “responsible stakeholder” and a modern superpower with a glorious past.

Domestically, Beijing’s charm offensive has focused on cultivating the “Olympic Spirit” among its citizens, as this advertorial demonstrates:

Video 9: “Catch the Olympic Spirit – CCTV Advertorial”:


And it seems to be working, if we are to believe official Chinese government statistics: 95% of Beijing citizen agree with their government’s handling of Olympic preparations, and the government has had little trouble filling the estimated 200,000 volunteer slots needed to guide foreign visitors and athletes around while keeping a watchful eye on any “suspicious behaviour.”

Internationally, Beijing’s charm offensive has focused on re-packaging the ancient Occidental desire for the jewels of the Orient, albeit with a distinct postmodern twist. Dubbed the “Green Games; High-tech Games; and People’s Games,” Beijing has set about reinventing its cityscape: a dozen or so new sports venues include the “Bird’s Nest” and the “Water Cube”; an extended cross-city underground; a massive new airport terminal; a series of new, gleaming office buildings; an egg-shaped national theatre and; even the world’s highest ferris wheel.

To spruce up the city’s environment, the government has reportedly planted of over 10 million trees around the city of Beijing while moving 200 factories outside the city confines. It now boasts that 90% of city buses and 70% of its car run on clean burning LPG. The “Beijing Weather Modification Office” has even promised to produce clear skies for the games through cloud seeding. Yet, with the Games less than a month away, the city is still struggling to meet WHO guidelines for clean air.

But it is not all about high-rises and clean air, the organizers have also attempted to play to the Western desire for the traditional secrets of the Orient – Shangri-la with a distinctly post-Mao face. To some extent, one could argue, that it is about putting forward Chinese culture as a positive and palpable alternative to Hollywood-articulated Western modernity.

And here, the Chinese have brought in the big-guns, such as this promotional video for the games directed by the now world famous film director Zhang Yimou. As artistic director of the Opening Games, we can get a feel here for how Zhang wants to use the games to re-package Chinese culture:

Video 10: “Zhang Yimou Beijing Olympics Advertorial”:


Some critics inside China have argued that this type of stereotypic and sentimental imagery only serves to cheapen the country’s rich cultural heritage. Unmoved, Zhang has claimed that his opening ceremony “will offer ‘Chinese cuisine’ which suits foreigners’ palates.”

All this doesn’t come cheap. It is estimated that the final price tag for staging the games will be somewhere in the range of US$50 billion–over 10 times the cost of the Sydney games and more than 5 times the last games in Athens. But all this money appears to have done little to dampen the growing anxiety about what a rising China might mean for the future of the globe.

That was until the 7.9 magnitude earthquake struck Sichuan province on 12 May, killing nearly 100,000 people and leaving another 5 million homeless. The openness and speed with which the Chinese government responded to this crisis (especially when compared to the foot-dragging of the Burmese authorities) has helped to take some of the bite out of international criticism of China, at least for now. But it’s uncertain whether this goodwill will outlast the Olympic flame.

Cyber Games
Olympic protest movements are nothing new, as I have already pointed out. Yet, in recent years, the battle ground has significantly shifted as new communication technologies have unleashed new platforms and outlets for both activist groups and the state to get their messages out. The tragic outbreak of violent riots in Lhasa on March 14th and in surrounding Tibetan areas and the way in which these events were reported highlights how these new technologies have altered the landscape in which this ancient struggle between fear and desire is being playing out.

Students for a Free Tibet has made extensive use of the Internet and other visual media to get images and information out of Tibet and spread word about what they see as the Communist regime’s brutal response to these Tibetan “protests.” To further their cause, they have created clever, eye-catching animations, such as this video:

Video 11: “Boycott Beijing Olympics”:


But it is also about presenting much more graphic, disturbing and confronting videos, such as this recently released video (warning these images are quite disturbing):

Video 12: “Students for a Free Tibet March 14th Video”:


By distributing and sharing these graphic images on the Internet, Students for a Free Tibet bypass the mainstream Western media (which would never contemplate showing such a video), thus taking their message directly to their target audience: the globally wired and connected youth.

In China, however, such confronting imagery is central to the government’s propaganda on the Tibet riots. The blooded bodies are just different: Chinese rather than Tibetan. Take for example, this documentary which has been repeatedly shown on state-owned CCTV in China:

Video 13: “CCTV 3.14 Doco on Tibet”:


Fed a steady diet of this type of highly emotive imagery, it is not surprising that few Chinese have any sympathy for the Tibetans and their international supporters. Rather, most Chinese believe that these continued attacks on their national dignity go well beyond a few radical fringe elements in the West. They have accused the mainstream Western media of bias in its coverage of the Tibetan riots, and it would appear with some merit (albeit minor when compared to China’s propaganda machine). To highlight their claims, a group of Chinese net-citizens set up the website http://www.anti-cnn.com/, where they have sought to counter the pro-Tibet lobby.

In other words, in the lead up to the Beijing Olympics, these clashing worldviews are being played out daily not only on the world’s streets but also increasingly in cyberspace. Spend a bit of time on youtube and you will get a feel for type of video jostling which continues on the Tibet issue.

Games for Sale
Finally, the Olympics are not only about politics and sports but also money: vast sums of it. The selling of the Beijing Games has recast that ancient Oriental desire to consume and possess the “Other” in a new economic light: the craving to hawk one’s wares in the world’s largest marketplace.

In the arena of global capitalism, the Beijing Games are truly big business–a virtual orgy of dollars and brands. And all the world’s leading multinational companies are planning to be there: Adidas, BHP Billiton, Coca-Cola, General Electric, Johnson & Johnson, Kodak, Lenovo, McDonald's, Microsoft, Panasonic, Samsung, Visa and Volkswagen. Some have committed upwards of $100 million dollars to put their goods and brands before China and the world’s consumers.

To land the sale, they have turned to familiar faces, Chinese stars such as Jackie Chan and Yao Ming who are just as well known in the West as they are in China itself. Take for example the follow Visa commercial:

Video 14: “Jackie Chan Olympic Commercial”:


The opening ceremony is expected to be the first TV sporting event watched live around the world by more than 4 billion people (1 billion of them in China itself) and the games will bring over half a million international tourists to China.

Multinational brands are using the event as an opportunity to build credibility and visibility with the booming Chinese consumer market. And unlike their Western counterparts, it appears that Chinese consumers are extremely brand conscious with one recent survey revealing that 68% of Chinese would be significantly more interested in brands that sponsor the world’s biggest sporting event.

Yet for most Olympic sponsors, the controversy surrounding the Beijing Games has become an Olympic-size headache. Activist groups like Dream for Darfur and Amnesty International have been making it difficult for these companies, calling in some case for a boycott of their products back home.

In November of last year, Dream for Darfur issued a report card on the Olympic sponsors, rating their actions, or rather inaction, on the issue of Darfur and what they claim is the Chinese government’s complicity in the crisis. In the report, 13 of the 19 top corporate sponsors were issued with a failing grade, including Kodak, Microsoft, BHP, and Visa. McDonald’s was the only company to escape with a satisfactory C grade.

Caught in a difficult catch-22 position, these companies risk losing consumers back home if they don’t address the concerns of these activist groups, but if they criticize Beijing, they also risk running foul of the Chinese government and jeopardizing their future in the world’s fastest growing consumer market. Thus far their strategy has been to join the Beijing government in stressing the apolitical nature of the games while highlighting their charitable record on other social issues around the globe.

China’s Olympic Moment
So how will China’s Olympic moment turn out? I think a couple of things are certain:

1) China will win the most gold medals—topping their performance in Athens where they won 32 gold medals to America’s 35;

2) Multinational companies will make heaps of money as they increase their brand profile in China;

3) International activists will stage creative protests and other forms of “direct action” in Beijing during the Game which will be covered cautiously by international media outlets and completely ignored by the Chinese media;

4) The vast majority of Chinese people will continue to vigorously resist any attempts by “outside forces” to ruin China’s coming out party, or at least those attempts that they learn about through China’s great firewall of media censorship.

What remains unclear is just how significant the 2008 Beijing Olympics will be viewed in the history of China’s post-Mao era. Will it mark China’s ascendancy to global superpower status as the CCP hopes: what some academics have referred to as a global “power shift” from West to East? Or will it mark the beginning of the end to a brutal authoritarian yet fragile regime as many of its Western critics hope?

Nazi Germany won nine more gold medals than the USA at the 1936 Berlin Game and the Soviet Union won over 80 gold medals at the 1980 Moscow Olympics boycotted by the USA and others, but both regimes collapsed soon thereafter. While Japan and Korea won few medals at the 1968 Tokyo and 1988 Seoul Olympics, these games marked an important turning point in the economic and political development of these two Asia countries.

Which category will the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games fit into: Berlin and Moscow or Tokyo and Seoul? Time will tell.

Jim Leibold teaches at La Trobe University in Australia and recently published Reconfiguring Chinese Nationalism: How the Qing Frontier and Its Indigenes Became Chinese.

Things We'd Rather You Not Say on the Web, Or Anywhere Else

Following George Carlin's death last month, China Beat got to thinking about his "seven dirty words" and what those same "seven words" might be in China. We invited David Bandurski of China Media Project to write a satirical piece in the style of Carlin, riffing on this idea of banned words in China.

By David Bandurski

I love words. And I thank you in advance, dear citizens, for obeying mine. Words are dangerous and slippery things. Some people in the West will tell you that words are playthings, and that we should all be free to do with them as we please. But I want to tell you that words are really all we have – and this is why the Party has troubled itself to choose them so carefully on your behalf.

You will have heard, I suppose, that Article 35 of our nation’s constitution guarantees that you enjoy “freedom of expression.” You will no doubt agree, however, as a matter of moral principle, that responsible citizens must enjoy all things in moderation. No good can come of enjoying words too much – and this is why we have taken it upon ourselves to parcel out this freedom, so that all Chinese can enjoy words with more or less equal moderation.

Comrade Mao Zedong once said, “Power grows out of the barrel of a gun.” But words too are powerful. It is not my intention to spook you, dear citizens, but we must all remember the way that too many words under the policy of “glasnost” – a Russian word whose direct translation is “chaos” – spelled the end of the Soviet Union.

We must not forget – and this begins with not remembering – how Zhao Ziyang said on May 6, 1989, in the midst of popular demonstrations, that propaganda leaders should “open things up just a bit.” “There is no big danger in that,” he said. His words were careless, and the end result was chaos. Nobody wants chaos. Just try to picture what it does to GDP.

Comrade Zhao, you see, failed to understand the real power of words. He failed to understand that the Party and the masses must not be too profligate with them if they are to “do the great work of socialism with Chinese characteristics.” That is why the Party had to step in afterwards to reorder your words and ideas. We have our own word for this: “guidance of public opinion.” Say it with me: “guidance of public opinion.”

Good. Now, dear citizens, I think it is best to instruct you with a couple of examples of what I mean about words. This way you will understand how to use them with responsibility and care, correctly upholding – say it with me – “GUIDANCE of PUBLIC OPINION.” Right. I hope these examples will help you remember how to forget the right things.

There are more than 40,000 characters in the Chinese language. Fortunately, basic literacy requires only about three to four thousand of these words, which makes it much easier for us to keep an eye on the ones that matter. The most important thing is not the characters themselves, but rather how they are put together. Words are like chemicals. You have to mix them carefully. I’m sure you would agree that’s just good science.

Take, for example, the character for “people,” min (民). When we place it behind the character for “person,” ren (人), we get a very nice word that means generally “the people.” We can use it in sentences like, “The Party cannot do without the people and the people cannot do without the Party,” in which the Party and the people are more or less interchangeable.

On the other hand, if we take this harmless character min, and place behind it the character for “host” or “master,” zhu (主), the result, “democracy,” is a dangerous discharge that upsets the harmony of our first sentence. One simple character rips the Party and the people apart. We must not let words come between us, dear citizens.

This word, “democracy,” is a perilous word that must be handled with great care. The only ones we can trust to use “democracy” safely are trained Party scholars. They are able to neutralize the word by sealing it up in proper contexts. Phrases like “intra-Party democracy” and “developing socialist democratic politics” are some of the more advanced ways the Party has managed to quarantine this word and keep all of you safe. On the Web, we have more sophisticated technical means of protecting you – by blocking, for example, searches of words like “constitutional democracy.”

We are constantly improving our technical and other means of fighting dangerous words so that your thoughts and ideas can be healthier. But we do need your help and cooperation. This is a “people’s war” on vocabulary, and our enemies are spilling off the tongues of the West.

Still, if we use words like “democracy” at the discretion of the finer minds in the Party, this can sometimes help promote international harmony. In my report to the 17th Party Congress last year, I used the word “democracy” in a safe context more than 60 times. Hearing the word so often, Western media got a bit over-excited. Their words for us were kind and harmonious.

“Harmony.” Now that’s a nice word. What should you say to help you fend off dirty words like “democracy”? That’s right: “Harmony.” Say it with me: “Harmony.”

“Harmony” packs quite a punch for such a small word. It muffles socio-economic problems of all kinds, most of which have arisen from the last decade of reforms.

Let’s just say you’re eaten up with words about how you were kicked off your farmland to make room for a big shopping mall that lined your local Party secretary’s pockets. The Party deals proactively with such issues by stepping back and taking a birds-eye view of your grievances. We call this the “scientific view of development.” I don’t want to get bogged down in details – the Party prefers economy of words. But basically, we are working toward a “moderately well-off” and “harmonious society” where you can afford to buy Fendi at your neighborhood shopping mall.

Of course, a “harmonious society” can only be achieved by dint of hard work. No one can get anything done when faced with constant distractions. I urge you to keep your voice down and be “harmonious.” I know that’s easier said than done. And that is why the Party lends a hand, “harmonizing” news, blogs, chatrooms and any other places where words tend to cause trouble.

“Harmony” is one of my favorite words. It reminds us that the only way we can give proper and “scientific” attention to solutions is by drowning out the noise of nagging problems.

There are many words we’d rather you not say or enjoy publicly, especially as the Olympic Games draw nearer. But you need not worry yourself over this. The Party has put numerous measures in place to ensure that you are free to make the right word choices. Sometimes, as your options are managed, you may feel at a loss for words – and really that is OK. After all, so long as your tongue is tied, we have no reason to bind your hands.

David Bandurski is a free-lance journalist and a scholar at the China Media Project, a research program of the Journalism & Media Studies Centre at the University of Hong Kong.

Kung Fu Panda, Go Home!

By Haiyan Lee

It seems that boycott fatigue has finally hit the Chinese, in a year that has lurched from one boycott to another—against such entities as a French supermarket chain, a Hollywood star, and an American cable channel. When the latest clarion call was issued by a performance artist named Zhao Bandi赵半狄 against Kung Fu Panda, he was greeted with jeers and mockery. Zhao presented his case in a blog: Hollywood is morally corrupt for churning out loathsome personalities like Sharon Stone (who betrayed schadenfreude over the Sichuan earthquake as “karmic retribution” for Tibet) and Steven Spielberg (who quit his role as artistic advisor to the Olympics over Sudan). Therefore it should not be allowed to profit, in China, and so soon after the earthquake, from China’s most iconic “national treasure” (国宝)—the panda. And for Chinese to help line the pockets of the Hollywood reprobates would be tantamount to stripping valuables off the bodies of the quake victims.



The banner that Zhao strung up outside the State Administration of Radio, Film, and Television, telling Kung Fu Panda to go home (《功夫熊猫》滚出去！), was taken down within 20 minutes by plainclothes police (see picture above). The movie opened in multiple cities on June 20 as scheduled to huge mirthful crowds. But Zhao’s effort was not a complete failure: the release of the movie was delayed for one day in Sichuan—home of the panda reserve and site of the earthquake—over concerns about possible “misperceptions” and hurt feelings. For this minor victory, Zhao received a phone call from an irate Sichuanese who gave him a bank account number and demanded that a suitable sum be deposited into it. For what? To compensate for the psychological loss he allegedly sustained for being prevented from enjoying the movie simultaneously with his dear compatriots throughout the rest of the country (全国人民)!

Most of the detractors simply regarded Zhao as a clown and a hypocrite, asking tongue-in-cheek if he had come down with a case of “boycott disease” (抵制病), or if he was jealous of Hollywood’s high-tech virtuosity. Zhao has indeed made a name for himself (“the Pandaman” 熊猫人) with his panda-themed performance art, most notably a goofy line of black-and-white and furry fashion gear (picture below). Apparently his being Chinese not only entitles him to playful (and gainful) appropriation of his national patrimony, but also obligates him to guard it against profiteering interlopers.



Given how favorably predisposed the Chinese generally were to the movie, it seems that Dreamworks has hit the right note in saying that the movie is intended to be a love letter to the Chinese and a tribute to Chinese culture. Audiences across China have indeed been duly pleased (and tickled) by the movie’s clever blend of made-in-Hong Kong kungfu lore, Chinatown chinoiserie, American teenage humor, and state-of-the-art animation technology. Commentators can’t seem to get over the realization that a didactic story （励志）could also be so fun, unlike so many Chinese-made “main-melody” (主旋律) fares featuring humorless, grandstanding heroes. Of course, the tried and true technique of defamiliarization is key here: a wok may be just a wok in a Chinese movie, but in Kung Fu Panda it is also a fight prop and hence an ingredient of hilarity. Other everyday objects too tumble through a riotous kungfu career: noodles, dumplings, chopsticks, and whatnot, cooking up a pandamonium unlike anything the Chinese audiences are accustomed to—with perhaps the exception of Stephen Chow’s manically droll Kungfu Hustle.

The subversion and parodying of kungfu movie conventions doesn’t stop with substituting woks and chopsticks for swords and nunchakus. Genre bending seems to come with the territory of global mass culture. If Zhao Bandi had spent some time pondering the losses and gains of commercialized cultural borrowing, including his own, he might come to see the movie not as the battered victim of cultural imperialism coming home to roost, but a celebration of middle-class values—hardworking and having faith in yourself—and a dramatization of the middle-class predicament—to live a life of ordinary fulfillment (such as carrying on the family noodle soup business) or to pursue lofty ambitions (such as becoming the dragon warrior and savior of the realm). These values and predicaments can hardly be stamped Chinese. They are rather the stuff of a bourgeois fairytale in an amusingly exotic (or, shall we say, multicultural) getup designed to ensure the movie’s global marketability. Po the panda is the classic involuntary hero, a burly version of Spiderman. Martial arts (kungfu), like Spiderman’s web or the Hulk’s gamma rays, is the magical force that enables the virtuous to triumph over the wicked who wields it for nefarious ends.

Yet Kung Fu Panda does Americanize the kungfu genre far more radically than, say, Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. This it does by playing fast and loose with a crucial genre device. On the surface, both movies honor the idea that supreme martial arts skills can be codified in writing and that the book—the Holy Grail of kungfu—is usually hidden in some secret location or jealously guarded by an impartial agent. In Crouching Tiger, Jade Fox steals the secret manual from her master because he would not transmit esoteric Wudang techniques to a female disciple. She then uses it clandestinely to train her young aristocratic mistress Jen to fight. However, she does not know that Jen is stealthily studying the text of the manual whereas she, being illiterate, can only make out the pictures. As a result, Jen blindsides Jade Fox when they are pitted against each other in a match. The assumption is that writing encodes greater cosmic-martial truth than image. Those who can read attain higher occult power than those who can only view. While this may sound hopelessly snooty in the age of YouTube, the basic idea still resonates in Chinese cultural spheres.

Variations of this idea can be found in most Chinese-language kungfu movies. The literary and martial arts are taken to be two sides of the same cosmic coin, or the Way. Both are said to be inspired by the tracks and movements of birds and beasts. Hence the same metaphors and protocols inform both the civil and martial domains, invariably urging the harmony of heaven, earth, and man. Zhang Yimou rehearses this idea to a fare-thee-well in Hero. In that movie, the king becomes enlightened of the essence of swordsmanship by mediating on the majestically rendered calligraphic character for “sword” (劍). Such hyperbole can strike an uninitiated viewer as all very “mystical and kungfu-y” (Po’s complaint against Master Shifu the red panda), if not downright silly. But a bona fide kungfu flick really can’t do without it. Just ask any kungfu junkie.

Interestingly, Crouching Tiger almost went without this essential device. James Schamus recalled that after his Taiwan-based scriptwriting partners perused his initial draft, they wanted to know where “the book” was. Apparently not understanding the special status of writing in Chinese culture, he had done away with “all the bother about who has the book, who stole the book, who understood the book and why the book was variously hidden, coded, burned, memorized, etc.” In the end, he was glad that his collaborators insisted on putting the book back in.

In Kung Fu Panda, the Holy Grail is the “dragon scroll” lodged securely in the mouth of a stone dragon on the high ceiling of the Jade Palace. It is destined, intones its guardian Master Oogway the tortoise, for the eye of the true dragon warrior. And yet when Po finally fetches it with the blessing of Shifu, he finds himself staring into a flimsy blank scroll with a reflective surface. The significance of the blank scroll eventually dawns on him when his goose father the noodle-maker confides to him that there is no such thing as the “secret ingredient of the secret recipe.” “Things become special,” he explains, “because people believe them to be special.”

Thus a homely American self-help maxim (dubbed “Hallmark-Fu” by a British reviewer) steals the thunder of oriental mysticism. Intriguingly, the image of the wordless scroll evokes the point I made in an earlier post about the ring as the forbidden symbol of power in the Lord of the Rings trilogy. There I suggested that the imperative to destroy the ring is connected to the idea that power in a democracy is in theory an empty place. Here, the secret that is supposed to empower whoever possesses it once and for all turns out to be a hoax, so to speak. The hero (Po) and the villain (Tai Lung the leopard) are forced to fall back on their native moral endowments and painstakingly acquired martial capabilities. The quest is turned inward. And the true hero prevails because of the nobility of his purpose and because the people are on his side, not, in the last analysis, because he has the book.

Such is the coup pulled off by Kung Fu Panda against the genre to which it also pays earnest tribute. Audiences of course can enjoy the movie for whatever reasons, but at least part of the pleasure, I suspect, is coming from its cheeky deflation of the ponderous mood that sometimes weighs down the kungfu genre. If anyone should be upset about the movie, it should be the diehard kungfu aficionados. The movie has so upped the ante that future makers of kungfu movies will have to think twice before they whip out the ubiquitous book, however much it is rooted in Chinese cosmology. In this sense, Kung Fu Panda is a disarmingly cute and merry face of the global modernity that has made it impossible for anyone to lay claim to beloved cultural symbols as inviolable national patrimony.

From Lovers to Volunteers: Tian Han and the National Anthem

By Liang Luo

As the clock counts down towards the opening of the Olympic Games at 8 p.m. on August 8, 2008, the Chinese government and many ordinary Chinese citizens are hoping that one particular song will make an impression on television viewers in all corners of the globe: “March of the Volunteers,” the country’s National Anthem. Not only will it play during the Opening Ceremony and the Closing Ceremony, but also every time a Chinese athlete wins a gold medal, and expectations are running high that this will happen a lot, thanks largely to the high caliber of the women competing for the PRC.

Even if international audiences grow accustomed to the sound of the tune, they are unlikely to know that the national anthem is actually a theme song of a film that antedates the founding of the PRC by a decade and a half, a film that was just as much about Chinese nationalism as it was about sentimental young lovers and their struggles in troubled times. And even within China, many people don’t know much about the two originators of the song, composer Nie Er and poet and playwright Tian Han, beyond a few recycled clichés about their dramatic lives.

Given the obsession with the supposedly auspicious number 8, Tian Han’s own biography is a very appropriate point of departure. He was born in 1898, a year famous for the “Hundred Days of Reform,” an effort at radical change stymied by conservatives within the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911). And he died in 1968—not, as one might expect from the author of the lyrics to a national anthem, in the limelight, but rather in obscurity, under an assumed name, in a military hospital. So who was this man? How did he emerge as the key creator of the National Anthem of the PRC? More importantly, how did expressions of nationalism come to be so intricately connected with images of strong-willed (and bodied) women in modern China?

Born into a declining gentry family in the countryside of Hunan, Tian Han came to understand the world around him through local operas and puppet plays. In 1913 and 1915, while still a teenager, he took the step from being a consumer of opera to a producer and published two opera librettos, the very first literary works in an extremely prolific career. During Tian Han’s Tokyo sojourn from 1916 through 1922, his love for Chinese opera, combined with his sensitivity to new cultural trends, immediately drew him towards film and drama. What began as love at first sight in Tokyo became a lifelong passion for film and drama throughout Tian Han’s cultural journey from Tokyo to Beijing, culminating in his attempt to reform Chinese opera “from the perspective of the film art.”

This genre-centered biographical sketch by no means suggests that Tian Han somehow lived in a sociopolitical vacuum. He was, at one and the same time, a man of letters and a man of action: an active student leader during his Tokyo sojourn, a famous “leftist” playwright during his Shanghai years, an organizer of anti-Japanese “guerrilla drama troupes” during the war with Japan in the Chinese hinterland, and a middle-ranking cultural bureaucrat in Beijing after the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949.

By the time Tian Han came to conceive the film story Fengyun ernü (Lovers in Troubled Times) which the future National Anthem emerged from, he had undergone radical self-criticism some four years earlier, and had joined the Communist Party in 1932. One would expect to see a film made by a Communist-controlled film company portraying soldiers on the warfront; however, the film rather faithfully follows Tian Han’s story, opening with a scene of flirtation between a Westernized femme fatale and two young men.

Tian Han immediately configured his male protagonists in relation to two spatially hierarchical worlds: the world of the poor young girl and her laboring mother living downstairs from the two young men’s attic room; and the world of the seductive Mrs. C, living on the third floor of a private villa, who has “the eyes of a wolf” and who, in the young man’s poem, is “the daughter of Eve, the messenger of Satan.” The young men gradually enter deep into these two worlds. When they pawn their valuables to pay the rent for the poor young girl, she visits their room and discovers there the painting of a phoenix. The story of the immortal phoenix that leaps into fire every five hundred years to be reborn fascinates the girl and she decides to change her name from Ah Feng to Xin Feng, that is, from a “little phoenix” to a “new phoenix.”

After the death of Xin Feng’s mother, the poor virgin becomes a member of the two young men’s “artistic family.” No sexual relationship in this “artistic family” of two young men and one young girl is depicted. However, celibacy does not mean lack of romance. On the contrary, the lack of obvious sexual encounter could itself be an indicator of the underlying romance. In particular, for the “lovers in troubled times” in Shanghai, physical sacrifice and anti-Japanese activism seem to substitute for sexual intercourse. The sexual energy between the young men and the young girl is further disguised as educational zeal to mold the virgin girl into a modern woman. Baihua, the Romantic poet, insists that she should receive modern education; while his friend Zhifu, the practical “revolutionary,” wants to introduce her to factory work.

When Zhifu is arrested for his radical activities and Baihua is hunted by the police, the poet finds shelter with the mysterious Mrs. C, who treats him like her husband, greets him with a warm kiss and keeps him at her place overnight. The overflow of sexual energy and the mutually beneficial sexual relationship between the poet and the femme fatale further illustrate the uneasiness surrounding the platonic relationship between the young men and the virgin. As if mesmerized, the poet goes with the femme fatale to the seashore of Qingdao, a German colony and an escapist utopia; while Xin Feng, the girl under the protection of the poet, has to quit school and join a touring dance troupe to make a living.

The climax, both in terms of plot and in terms of the sexual energy circulating within that plot, comes when Baihua and Mrs. C go to a variety show in which Xin Feng, the virgin girl touring with the dance troupe, performs a miniature opera entitled “Tieti xia de genü” (“Singing Girl under the Iron Hoof”). This “New Phoenix,” the patriotic singing girl, is indeed the virgin Baihua helped to educate. The image of a virgin under the iron hoof, though charged with sexual energy, is used here as a warning bell to awaken the poet from the licentious life he was living in his escapist dreamland. The poet starts to feel a more important task waiting for him after this dramatic encounter. He gets in touch with Zhifu and through Zhifu’s introduction joins the volunteer army in the northeast.

Baihua’s troop happens to be in Xin Feng’s village where he discovers the phoenix painting and reunites with Xin Feng, who, after meeting Baihua, leaves the dance troupe for her homeland and warfront. Facing Japanese air raids, with flag in hand, Baihua and Xin Feng, marching with the masses, start to sing the last stanza from the long poem “Great Wall”:

Arise, you who refuse to be slaves (of the femme fatale!).
With our flesh and blood let us build our new Great Wall.
The Chinese nation has come to the time of greatest danger
Every person must join the ultimate cry:
Arise! Arise! Arise!
The masses are of one mind,
Brave the enemy’s gunfire,
March on! March on! March on! On!

Situating the young poet Baihua first and foremost in his struggle between the world of the virgin girl and the world of the femme fatale, the theme song of the film, Yiyongjun jinxingqu (“March of the Volunteers”), which has been regarded only as a nationalist call to arms in the face of the Japanese invasion, can be interpreted rather differently. “The nationalist poet” Xin Baihua, writing his epic poem in the hopes of educating the poor girl to become a “modern woman,” found himself the prey and a love slave of the femme fatale.



The almost comical displacement from freed slave of a femme fatale to freed slaves of the national enemy is suggestive of the intrinsic connections between the personal and the political. Just as in the painting entitled “Fenghuang niepan” (named after Guo Moruo’s poem), in which a phoenix throws itself into the fire to gain a new life, the young intellectuals were also transforming themselves through a baptism by fire, from sentimentalists to revolutionaries throughout the political vicissitudes of modern China. However, the sudden and complete transformation of the poet Xin Baihua, mesmerized by a femme fatale until the very end of the film when he not so convincingly rises up to defend a greater cause, cannot be taken as representative of a generation of modern intellectuals. The apparently seamless transition from individual desire to collective ideology did not turn out to be as smooth in real life, as exemplified in Tian Han’s own painful metamorphosis throughout the Communist era, culminating in his silent death during the Cultural Revolution in Beijing.

Tian Han took part in the new Political Consultative Conference that designated “March of the Volunteers” as the temporary national anthem for the PRC in 1949. According to Chinese researcher Guo Chao, Zhou Enlai nominated “March of the Volunteers” based on its popularity among the Chinese people and argued against others’ reservation towards its “outdated” lyrics. This “temporary” national anthem was in use for more than a decade and a half, until the Cultural Revolution, when “East is Red” and “Sailing the Seas Depends on the Helmsman” in reality replaced “March of the Volunteers” as national anthems. When Tian Han was criticized as a “poisonous weed” during the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s and 1970s, though the tune could still be played, the lyrics of “March of the Volunteers” were banned. After the Cultural Revolution, a new committee was established to create a “new” national anthem, and finally new lyrics were written collectively to the tunes of “March of the Volunteers” in 1978. The new lyrics end with the following lines: “We will for generations/Raise high Mao Zedong’s banner/March on!”

I consider myself lucky to have no recollection whatsoever of the new lyrics. When I started elementary school around 1980 in a mountain village in Sichuan province, it may have been too backward to quickly adopt the recent changes in the lyrics of the national anthem; or more likely, I was simply too young to take notice of such changes. After I transferred to a bigger city in 1984, the lyrics of the national anthem that I heard and sang at the weekly flag-raising ceremony were always Tian Han’s original, which, I now know, was restored to its original tune and reestablished as the National Anthem in 1982.

My personal encounter with the National Anthem coincides with the first meaningful participation of the PRC in the Olympic Games, in 1984. When Xu Haifeng won the first gold medal in Los Angeles and “March of the Volunteers” was heard for the first time in the history of the Olympic Games, the PRC announced its Olympic dreams to the world through its newly restored National Anthem. China would finally win its bid for the 2008 Olympic Games seventeen years later, in 2001, after its failed attempt in 1993; and “March of the Volunteers” would for the first time be written into the Chinese Constitution as the National Anthem of the PRC in 2002.

It is high time for us to look back and gain some historical perspective on “March of the Volunteers,” the most popular song of 1949’s China: born out of anti-Japanese sentiments as well as youthful desires of modern Chinese intellectuals at a time of personal and national crises, this film song celebrated modern Chinese intellectuals’ metamorphoses from lovers to volunteers; however, that process has not been as smooth in real life as in the film, and lovers and volunteers seem to have always coexisted in their mutual desire for sexual and patriotic expressions.