Smoke and Mirrors: China and India

After reading a short excerpt from Pallavi Aiyar's new book, Smoke and Mirrors: An Experience of China, at Danwei.org, we wanted to ask her a few questions about her experience as a journalist and writer working in China (Danwei has also posted an interview with Aiyar, asking for her insights on the relationship of and comparisons between China and India; and additional reviews of the book have been posted at the WSJ China Blog and The International Herald Tribune). Here are her answers to our questions, followed by a short excerpt from the book. Smoke and Mirrors can be purchased at this website, and, according to Amazon, will be available in the US in September.

China Beat: Did you expect to end up spending as long a stretch of time in China as you have?

Pallavi Aiyar: Not at all. I came to China only reluctantly, following my then boyfriend who was a Sinophile. I was at the time, a typical middle-class Indian with an Anglophone education so that “abroad’ and “the UK/US” were almost synonymous for me. China might have been next door to India geographically but conceptually it was a black hole. I spent my first year in the country teaching something called “English journalism” (which turned out to be mostly English) to students at the Beijing Broadcasting Institute while learning Chinese myself. At the end of the year, I felt it would be a waste not to stay for at least another year and recoup the investment of that first year in China. And so it went, year-after-year. With hindsight, moving to China was the best decision of my life. Not only did the boyfriend become my husband, but the timing was right and ripe for an Indian in China. Bilaterally, relations began heating up and internationally as well the China story increasingly became the China-India story. An almost bottomless appetite for China news was to evolve south of the Himalayas and I was one of the very few people in a position to sate that hunger. Given that China and India together account for almost 2.5 billion people, the fact that when I first began writing from Beijing I was one of only two Indian correspondents in the country is a profound comment on how disconnected these two neighbors were. There are now four of us Indian correspondents in China (compared to some 125 American journalists), but I remain the only Mandarin-speaking one.

CB: What was the single thing that surprised you most about China during your time there--the thing that jarred most with the image of the country you had formed by reading about it ahead of time?

PA: To be honest I hadn’t done much purposeful advance reading about China. What I knew about it was primarily based on random articles I came across from time-to-time in Indian and foreign media. I had a vague understanding of the fact that after some two decades of reforms China was generally thought to have pulled well ahead of India economically but wasn’t quite able to visualize what this would mean in terms of the visceral difference in the physical experience of being in say New Delhi and in Beijing.

In my immediate impressions of the country I was very much the average Indian. What really “shocked and awed” was thus Chinese infrastructure. Beijing’s roads seemed impossibly smooth, its airport impossibly efficient, given that despite what I had read about China’s material progress it was still designated as a “developing” country.

Once I was able to look beyond the razzle and dazzle of China’s infrastructure, what jarred most was the homogeneity of the country. I had read much about the diversity of China, its foods, its fifty-plus minorities, its linguistic multiplicity, etc. But in fact I found it remarkably similar in architecture (from the “historic” pagoda-style buildings to the more modern bathroom-tiled atrocities), language (all the dialects shared the majority of written characters so that in fact the diversity really existed only in spoken form and the country was knit by hanzi) and most of all attitude. It was really strange how no matter whom I was speaking to—taxi driver, economics professor or the bicycle repairman round the corner—the moment I said I was Indian, the response consisted of how wonderful Hindi movies were, how Indian women had such large eyes, and how the dancing and singing was simply fantastic. The whole country seemed programmed to reproduce the same answers to the same questions.

I must stress that my reaction was conditioned by my Indian-ness. India was a country of 22 official languages and over 200 recorded mother tongues. Far from being bound by a common script many of the languages in India did not even belong to the same linguistic group. In my “Hindu” country, there were more Muslims than in all of Pakistan. India’s cultural inheritance included fire-worshiping Zorastrians, and Torah-reciting Jews. With no single language, ethnicity, religion or food India’s diversity was on a whole other plane to China’s.

CB: Do you see particular advantages or disadvantages you have working as a reporter in China due to being Indian? Or due to being female? And if the latter, do you feel this is dramatically different than the advantages or disadvantages a Chinese female reporter would have in India or, say, England, where I see from the web you studied for a couple of different graduate degrees?

PA: On the whole, being an Indian helped me gain access as a reporter because I did not automatically fit into the “foreign/western media = anti-China” equation. The fact is that as an Indian journalist my agenda was different than that of many Western colleagues. The audience in India was rarely interested in the usual human rights/corruption issues that the US media, for example, focus a lot on.

Given India’s own human rights problems and abysmal levels of corruption, the idea of having me write about China was not for me to serve as a watchdog on Beijing. It was rather to explain a changing China to an audience that knew very little about its neighbor, in addition to suggesting ways and means by which the Indian establishment might learn from China regarding economic policy, foreign policy power projection, poverty alleviation, etc.

Moreover, over the course of the time I spent in China, the Chinese authorities gradually began to take India a lot more seriously—especially after the likes of Goldman Sachs and McKinsey started to mention India in the same breath as China. They were as a result increasingly keen to reach an Indian audience.

Being a female reporter in China was a liberating experience. I felt free to travel and report in even relatively remote parts of the country without my gender being an issue. India is a far more difficult place for women in general. Even in big cities like New Delhi it’s hard for women to walk on the streets free of harassment or what Indian law rather quaintly calls “eve teasing.”

While I don’t think being female brought any particular advantages to reporting in China what struck me most was how it did not bring any disadvantages. I never felt patronized by male interviewees or sexually threatened in any way.

Regarding England—let me just say that I spent three months back at Oxford last year as a Fellow at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. At one of the very first seminars organized for the term, the presenter (an eminent German foreign correspondent) bemoaned the decline of “serious” journalism in the West, attributing this to “sensationalization, simplification and feminization”!

CB: If you could convince academics to do more work related to a topic in Chinese history or contemporary China, what might that be?

PA: The impact of model worker Shi Chuanxiang on the profession of manual scavenging. The difference in attitude and circumstance between toilet cleaners in China and India struck me strongly and is something I write about at length in the book.

CB: What do you feel is the most exciting part of covering China?

PA: Trying to penetrate and understand well enough to explain to others a society that is so perfectly self-contained that its language requires even proper nouns to be translated. China, I would hold, has been the least outward-oriented of all major cultures, in recent centuries. To be a link or bridge, however minor, in the new process of connecting this civilization outwards is exciting. It feels pioneering in a way that, say, reporting from Brussels or even Moscow wouldn’t.

CB: A lot has been written lately about comparisons and contrasts between China and India. Is there anything you've read lately that you found particularly insightful on that topic?

PA: My book!

Immodest humor aside the answer would be: not really. As you say there is so much out there at the moment that I’ve almost made it a rule not to read anything with “dragon” “elephant” or “chindia” in the title!

India and China are not only different in their modern political avatars, but have historically been very different cultures. India’s philosophical and cultural underpinnings were steeped in metaphysics, ontology and epistemology forming major intellectual planks of Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, etc. Territorial integrity and notions of empire were much less central to India’s image of itself. As a result, the Indian civilization was more of a conceptual rather than geographic entity; less united territorially and politically than the Chinese empire. In contrast, China was always more coherent territorially. Its empire was moreover underpinned by philosophies like Confucianism that tended less to the metaphysical and more to the practical, legalistic and political.

The point to remember is that while the two countries share superficial similarities they are very, very different, often making comparisons unhelpful and on occasion even disingenuous.

***

From Smoke and Mirrors: An Experience of China, by Pallavi Aiyar, HaperCollins India, 2008.

Five years was a decent slice of time to spend in a country and I had used it relatively well: travelling and asking questions. But as I geared up to draw a curtain across my China-life, I was increasingly being called upon to answer a few questions as well.

“Where was China heading?” people would ask me when I travelled outside the country to Europe or the U.S. Was the CCP doomed or would it continue to be a formidable political force in the coming decades? Would China implode in the absence of a democratic revolution? Was its economic growth sustainable without fundamental institutional reform?

In India, the key question was different. From newspaper editors to the maid at home the most common query I encountered was a deceptively simple one: what could India learn from China? What should India be doing that China had already been doing? For China the U.S remained the ultimate benchmark when it came to its self-assessment of national power and achievement. But for India, it was China that had emerged as a commonly used yardstick to evaluate its own progress.

Back in China the question I faced with greatest frequency was again different, at once the crudest and perhaps most difficult of all to answer. “Which is better? India or China?” taxi drivers in Beijing had asked me with monotonous regularity. “Do you prefer India or China,” my students at the Beijing Broadcasting Institute had often queried. “Do you like living in Beijing? Or was it better in Delhi?” my hutong neighbours enquired whenever they got the opportunity.

This last question in its various forms was one that I spent much thought grappling with and my answers were as variable as the day the question was posed. Following conversations with Lou Ya and other toilet cleaners in my neighbourhood I would think back to the wretched jamadarnis back home and marvel at the relative dignity of labour that China’s lowliest enjoyed.

In my hutong the refuse collectors wore gloves when picking up the garbage on their daily rounds. This single, simple article of protective clothing and the barrier it created between bacteria and skin leant them at least a modicum of self-respect. Their children almost always went to school. They may not have been well educated themselves but could usually read and write enough to avoid the worst kind of exploitation.

These were modest gains and not everyone in China could claim even such moderate progress. But were I one of the millions-strong legions of cleaners, sweepers, janitors or night soil workers in India, I would probably prefer by some twist of karma to have been born Chinese.

But on other days I felt differently. These were days when I spent hours hunting for a Chinese source amongst the country’s think tanks, universities and research institutes for fresh insight or an alternative point of view on an issue for a story I’d be working on. It was always such dishearteningly hard work.

China’s was a pragmatic society and over the years I met any number of people blessed with more than usual amounts of a canny, street smart, intelligence. As evidenced by the Zhejiang entrepreneurs, ordinary Chinese were masters of locating the loophole, of finding escape routes, of greasing the right hands and bypassing stifling regulations. If need be they could sell contact lenses to a blind woman and chicken feet to a vegetarian.

But while it may have abounded with consummate salespeople and irrepressible entrepreneurs, Chinese society remained deeply anti-intellectual. More a product of a political and educational system that discouraged criticism and encouraged group-think, than any primordial characteristic, this was the aspect of China I personally found most wearying.

It was the absence of a passion for ideas, the lack of delight in argument for its own sake, and the dearth of reasoned but brazen dissent that most often gave me cause for homesickness. When the Foreign Ministry interpreter Xiao Yan claimed in Tibet that China was different from other countries in that all Chinese must think the same thing, she was consciously overstating her case in light of Jes’ comments. Nonetheless a nub of truth in what she said remained.

In China, those who disagreed with mainstream, officially sanctioned views outside of the parameters set by mainstream officially sanctioned debate, more often than not found themselves branded as dissidents – suspect, hunted, under threat.

Thus a professor who misspoke to a journalist could suddenly be demoted. An editor who pursued a corruption investigation too zealously might find herself fired. A lawyer, who simply tried to help his client to the best of his abilities, could were the client of the wrong sort, ironically land in jail himself.

In universities like BBI the idea was drilled into students’ heads that there were right answers and wrong answers. While ambiguity and nuances may have been both sensed and exploited in practice, on a purely intellectual plane there was little space for them.

For an argumentative Indian from a country where heterodoxy was the norm, this enforced homogeneity in Chinese thought and attitude scratched against my natural grain[1]. There were thus occasions when despite all of India’s painful shortcomings, I would assert with conviction that it was nonetheless better to be an Indian than endure the stifling monotony of what tended to pass as an intellectual life in China.

But then I would return to Delhi for a few days and almost immediately long to be back in Beijing where a woman could ride a bus or even drive a bus without having to tune out the constant staring and whispering of the dozens of sex-starved youth that swarmed around the Indian capital’s streets at almost any given time.

Later on the same day however, I might switch on the TV and catch an ongoing session of the Indian parliament, not always the most inspirational of bodies but when looked at with China-habituated eyes, more alluring than usual.

China’s economic achievement over the last 30 or so years may have been unparalleled historically, but so was India’s political feat. Its democracy was almost unique amongst post-colonial states not simply for its existence but its existence against all odds in a country held together not by geography, language or ethnicity but by an idea. This was an idea that asserted, even celebrated the possibility of multiple identities. In India you could and were expected to be both many things and one thing simultaneously.

I was thus a Delhite, an English speaker, half a Brahmin, half a Tamilian, a Hindu culturally, an atheist by choice, a Muslim by heritage. But the identity that threaded these multiplicities together was at once the most powerful and most amorphous: I was an Indian.

India’s great political achievement was thus in its having developed mechanisms for negotiating large-scale diversity along with the inescapable corollary of frequent and aggressive disagreement. The guiding and perhaps lone consensus that formed the bedrock of that mechanism was that in a democracy you don’t really need to agree – except on the ground rules of how you will disagree.[2]

All of which being true still did not help to definitively answer the question, “If I could choose, would I rather be born Indian or Chinese?”

Perhaps part of my problem was that unlike how students were educated in China into believing there were right and wrong answers I had been encouraged to do precisely the opposite. “Always problematise,” my earnest, khadi kurta clad professor, Sankaran, used to thunder at us during class back in my undergraduate days as a philosophy student in Delhi.

But if forced to reply in broad brush strokes I would assert the following: were I to be able to ensure being born even moderately well-off, I would probably plump for India over China.

In India, money allowed you to exist happily enough despite the constant failure of governments to deliver services. Thus most Delhi households that could afford it had private generators for when the electricity failed and private tube wells in their gardens to ensure the water supply that the municipality couldn’t. The police offered little protection from crime and so many households hired private security guards.

Having developed the necessary private channels with which to deal with the lack of public goods one was free in India to enjoy the intellectual pleasures of discussing the nature of “the idea of India” or to enjoy the heady adrenalin rush of winning a well-argued debate.

These were real pleasures and freedoms and their broader significance was not merely confined to the elite. A tradition of argumentation was fundamental to India’s secularism and democratic polity, with wide-ranging implications for all sections of society.

On the other hand, were I to be born poor, I would take my chances in authoritarian China, where despite lacking a vote, the likelihood of my being decently fed, clothed and housed were considerably higher. Most crucially, China would present me with relatively greater opportunities for upward socio-economic mobility. So that even though I may have been born impoverished, there was a better chance I wouldn’t die as wretched in China, as in India.

This was not to deny the importance of the vote for India’s poor, which undoubtedly endowed them with collective bargaining power. Dislocating large numbers of people to make way for big infrastructure projects for example was an uphill task for any Indian government. As a result, the kind of wanton destruction of large swathes of a historic city like Beijing justified by the hosting of a sporting event would be extremely unlikely to occur in India.

In China on the other hand, not only did the poor lack a vote,[3] but the CCP was also adept at disabling the capacity of disaffected peoples to organise, thus depriving them of the influence of numbers that could pressure government policy through other means.

However, it was also patently clear that in India the right to vote did not necessarily or even usually translate into better governance. Fear of alienating a vote-bank might persuade a local politician to turn a blind eye to illegal encroachment by migrants on city land. But the ensuing slum would lack even the most rudimentary facilities like sewage or water supplies.

Citizens threw out governments in India with predictable regularity. The country’s vast poor majority dismissed on average four out of five incumbents, so that what was called the anti-incumbency factor was possibly the most crucial in any Indian election.

Often celebrated as a sign of India’s robust democracy what this state of affairs in fact reflected was a track record of governance that was so abysmal that even in regions where incomes had improved and poverty reduced, people believed this was in spite and not because of the government.[4]

So ultimately despite political representation for the poor in India and the absence of political participation in China, the latter trumped India when it came to the delivery of basic public goods like roads, electricity, drains, water supplies and schools where teachers actually show up.
This counterintuitive state of affairs was linked to the fact that while in China the CCP derived its legitimacy from delivering growth, in India a government derived its legitimacy simply from its having been voted in. Delivering on its promises was thus less important than the fact of having been elected.

The legitimacy of democracy in many ways absolved Indian governments from the necessity of performing. The CCP could afford no such luxury.

Footnotes
[1] See Sen Amartya, The Argumentative Indian: Writings on Indian Culture, History and Identity, Penguin, 2005
[2] See Guha Ramachandra, India After Gandhi: The History of the World’s Largest Democracy, Macmillan, 2007
[3] 40 million peasants have been forced off their land to make way for roads, airports, dams, factories, and other public and private investments, according to China: the Balance Sheet, Center for Strategic and International Studies and the Institute of International Economics: Washington, DC, 2006
[4] Aiyar Swaminathan, A vote against misgovernance, The Times of India, 15 May 2004

China Beat Contributors around the Web

1. Jeff Wasserstrom was recently interviewed about the Shanghai NIMBY protests for a Danish newspaper.

2. For visitors heading to the Olympics, Wasserstrom also recently published a few suggestions at Outlook India for a Beijing itinerary for “culturally-minded tourists.”

3. Contributor Richard Kraus was referenced recently in a New Yorker article on the classical music scene in China.

4. Pankaj Mishra (oft-referenced in these pages) published a short piece a few weeks ago in The Guardian on inter-war travel writing. Mishra mentions off-hand that, in contrast to the quickly seen and sketched travel writing of the 1930s, “the best non-fiction books about foreign countries today…are products of prolonged engagements”—and Mishra cites China Beat contributor Peter Hessler as a prime example of this.

5. If you are curious about Cantabs among the China watchers, take a peek at Harvard Magazine’s recent list of alums on the China beat. These include one writer actually on our China Beat, Leslie Chang as well as several regularly referenced here, like James Fallows and Evan Osnos

Susan Brownell Around the World

China Beat contributor Susan Brownell is showing up all over the web these days, as her special knowledge on Olympic and Chinese sports history is in high demand. Here is a list of some of her recent media appearances:

1. On PRI’s “The World,” Brownell talks about some of the differences between Western and Chinese notions of body and sports; the report also includes a short excerpt from Jonathan Spence’s Reith Lecture “The Body Beautiful,” which Xu Guoqi blogged about at China Beat earlier this month.

2. Brownell has also been cited in several NPR reports, including these two by Louisa Lim: “Sporting Fame Comes with Limits in China,” and “China Trains Cheerleader to Rally the Masses.”

3. In this AP report, Brownell comments on the Chinese allocation of protest zones, an idea she discussed earlier in her #4 and #5 Olympic FAQs, originally posted at China Beat.

4. Brownell has talked about the Chinese Olympic training program in several places recently, including The Christian Science Monitor, The Macau Daily Times, and The Los Angeles Times.

5. Brownell has also been quoted in a number of pieces abroad, including papers in France, Hungary, Spain, and Sweden.

Securing the Olympics

Security has been a major issue and challenge at all recent Olympic Games and failures of that security (as in Atlanta in 1996) surely weigh heavily on the minds of Olympic planners. However, the Beijing Olympics have been marked not only by their incredible security preparations, but also by foreign scrutiny and suspicion because of China's international reputation as a heavily-policed state. Here, Eric Setzekorn shares what he is seeing on the ground in Beijing.

By Eric Setzekorn

More than any state-of-the-art sports complex or amazing athletic performance, many visitors will remember the Beijing Olympics as the world’s largest security event. In an effort to squelch any sort of protest or more serious terrorist act the government has instituted strict new rules and enforced many existing but hitherto disregarded laws. Estimates of total security personnel range from 250,000 to 500,000, depending on the criteria, but visitors should be either alarmed or comforted to know their every action is monitored and scrutinized.

The epicenter for Olympic security is Tiananmen Square. Since 1989 and even more so since the Falun Gong crackdown, Tiananmen Square has boasted a comprehensive security plan based on numerous security cameras backed by scores of uniformed and plainclothes police. New checkpoints have been established at all entrances to the Square and are equipped with larger than average cameras, most likely biometric scanners, and all bags are thoroughly searched. The level of scrutiny is high--after inspecting not only my bag but a folder of articles inside, I was asked by the polite but stern officer why I carried several papers regarding Chinese politics.

Above, Security Checkpoint in Tiananmen Square

In the square itself much of the large area has been subdivided and occupied with space-filling decorations. A large area of plants and trees has been constructed in the northeastern corner between the Square and Chang’an Avenue. Large barriers block direct line of site from Mao’s Mausoleum toward the Forbidden City. While this ruins much of the stark beauty of the square it makes sense from a security and crowd control perspective.

Barriers north of Mao’s Mausoleum

Olympic Garden In Tiananmen Square

In a smart public relations move, most police and military officers patrolling the square are unarmed except for pepper spray and a taser. Long black vans parked nearby hold SWAT teams if there is any real trouble and the lack of overt weapons makes the police presence less intimidating to ordinary visitors than the AK-47-carrying soldiers that typically inhabit the Square.

Leaving the square and walking along Chang’an Avenue long rows of local university students line the road at 40-foot intervals. Given a t-shirt, fanny pack, and sun umbrella (teal for boys, purple for girls) they stand motionless unless approached to ask for directions or information. Given only a small stipend for meals and transportation, they volunteered because of a genuine desire to help the Beijing Olympics but also to practice their English.

Student volunteers along Chang’an Avenue outside Raffles Hotel

In less commercial areas, this type of duty is relegated to older residents who are given an orange and white Olympic shirt and a red armband saying they are a “public safety officer,” and who then sit in front of their buildings on low stools chatting and fanning themselves in the heat. These “officers” have no real duties to perform, schedule to maintain, or uniform to wear. For men, rolling their shirts up above their stomachs seems to be popular, as is wearing large sun hats for the women. While it does appear somewhat comical with small groups of retirees sitting every 50 feet they are probably the best monitoring system imaginable. Although given no training, having no English skills, and bringing their own cell phones to call the local patrolmen directly if there is “trouble,” they are an extremely cost effective and numerous auxiliary force. As a secondary benefit, for the price of a t-shirt, sponsored by Yanjing Beer, they are made to feel they are part of and responsible for the success of the Olympic games.

Retiree volunteers outside their apartments

Outside the second ring road, security decreases with an emphasis on regular patrols by foot and car. Police are now much more visible directing traffic at major intersections and assisting traffic wardens to clear accidents quickly. When motorcades or VIPs are on the move, small groups of heavily armed military police occupy strategic intersections in full uniform with helmet, body armor, and assault rifles. Due to stringent housing laws that were previously un-enforced, private housing areas have also increased security and tightened regulations. These rules are designed to limit a large floating population of foreigners and domestic tourists that could be hard to track during the games.

Private security checkpoint in housing area

Most housing areas have installed gates manned 24 hours a day to separate residents from any potential guests who must proceed to the local police station for a temporary residence permit. Large police sweeps of twenty to thirty officers going through housing blocks for any unauthorized visitors seem mainly to inconvenience the large floating Korean student population in the Haidian district and stops landlords from renting apartments at huge mark-ups for the month of August.

While there is clearly a need for a comprehensive and large security presence at obvious targets during the Olympics, for many visitors the true symbols of the Beijing’s Games could be the 6th and 7th Fuwas, JingJing and ChaCha (jingcha being the Chinese word for police).

A Defense of Jiang Rong’s Wolf Totem

By Timothy Weston

I have a confession to make: I was moved by Jiang Rong’s Wolf Totem, think it’s an important novel and that it’s well worth reading. The reason I say I feel a need to “confess” as opposed to just being able to state this is because recent postings on The China Beat, as well as some of the reviews referenced in those postings, attack the book with a sharpness and thoroughgoingness that initially made me question my own taste and to think that I was politically incorrect for liking and being impressed by the novel as I read it. But after finishing Howard Goldblatt’s translation of Wolf Totem—a book that we now know is the work of Lu Jiamin, using “Jiang Rong” as a pseudonym—my conviction remains unchanged that this is indeed a major work. Reactions to the novel have varied widely, as Jeff Wasserstrom pointed out in an earlier post to this site. Here, very briefly, I’d like to add one more voice of praise, for in my opinion it would be a pity if, swayed by the negative things they have read about it here or elsewhere, China experts (or other interested readers) were to decide that reading the novel isn’t worth the effort.

Before saying more I want to make clear that I agree with many of the criticisms made of the book: it is didactic, does lack character development, and is too long. Moreover, to the extent that it advocates that Chinese adopt wolfish cunning and aggressiveness as national characteristics, it does open itself to the charge of being nationalistic, though personally I did not find this theme overly offensive. Fully mature and great literature it may not be, but courageous, imaginative, and a deserving winner of the inaugural Man Asian Literary Prize I think it is. No other novel, from any country, has given me so deep an appreciation for the vitally important and interconnected roles played by all creatures and species within the natural environment, or of the fragile relationship between we human beings and the ecological setting in which we live. At a moment when awareness of our endangerment of the planet is rising to new levels, Jiang Rong has produced a profound lament about what it can mean when human beings and human societies carry on with little-to-no regard for the natural environment.

This message is of course universally relevant and highly timely. The fact that is has been articulated so passionately by a Chinese writer is remarkable, given the low level of environmental consciousness usually attributed to contemporary China. Here, then, we have a powerful Chinese contribution to the global discussion about our human-caused planetary environmental crisis. For me, this is a welcome development.

Also welcome, in my view, is Jiang Rong’s willingness to merge his tale of environmental destruction with an open discussion of Han Chinese cultural and political imperialism. In Wolf Totem disregard for other cultures (in this case nomadic Mongolian culture) goes hand in hand with disregard for the natural environment; the same unthinking mindset produces both. Having noted with sadness the scarcity of publicly expressed Chinese compassion for the feelings of Tibetans during the recent disturbances in Tibet and elsewhere, I find it refreshing to encounter Jiang Rong’s concern over Han insensitivity to minority peoples.

While Jiang Rong is critical of Han Chinese ignorance and arrogance with regard to minority cultures and ways of life within China, Wolf Totem is not a simplistic good guy versus bad guy story, nor an overly determined good ethnic group versus bad ethnic group tale. Ethnicity is not treated in an essentialist fashion in this novel. Chen Zhen, the novel’s protagonist, is a Han Chinese, as are several other important characters, and they develop a deep appreciation for the environment and the brutal and amoral ways of nature. Han Chinese are not irredeemable, in other words. Nor are Mongols portrayed as being wholly in touch with nature; among other things, in fact, the novel narrates fissures within Mongol society along generational, geographic and ideological lines. As with the Chinese, some Mongols are shown to be sensitive to the environment and some are not.

As environmental studies becomes an ever more important part of school curricula there’s a growing need for books that speak to environmental issues in creative and compelling ways. While reading Wolf Totem I kept thinking about how to use it in my teaching. Since I am a historian, I thought of pairing it with Mark Elvin’s recent monumental historical study, The Retreat of the Elephants, or with Judith Shapiro’s Mao’s War Against Nature. My sense is that Jiang Rong’s literary exploration of environmental issues in China would work well with those more academic treatments.

There is of course also the question of why Wolf Totem has been so amazingly popular in China. I can imagine an entire class session devoted to that issue alone, for if, as one blurb on the cover of Goldblatt’s translation states, the novel has in fact outsold any other book in Chinese history since Mao’s little red book, that is a truly astonishing fact. What does it tell us about Chinese society today? No doubt many things, not all of them positive (other reviewers are likely right that the macho tone of the novel is at least partially responsible for its extraordinary appeal in China). Nevertheless, at this time, when the price of decades of disregard for the natural environment is becoming painfully obvious to more and more Chinese, my hunch is that a great many of the millions of Chinese readers of Wolf Totem have been attracted to the message of environmental warning that is its central theme. Along the way, of course, they are treated to an unusually self-reflective discussion of Han Chinese relations with minority peoples who belong to the Chinese nation. One can hope that in this way, too, the novel is having a positive affect on those who have been reading it.

What We're Reading Today

There are a few themes we've been tracking lately at China Beat, including growing Chinese nationalism, middle class protest, and India-China comparisons. Here are a few stories we've noticed around the web this week that address some of these issues:

1. For a thoughtful take on the fenqing phenomenon, check out Evan Osnos's recent New Yorker piece, "Angry Youth: The New Generation's Neocon Nationalists."

2. Financial Times ran a recent piece on the efforts to stop construction of a nuclear power station in Rushan (southeast of Beijing)--see "China Pressure Groups Learn to Tread Carefully."

3. Earlier this week, Danwei.org ran an excerpt from the book Smoke and Mirrors: An Experience of China by Pallavi Aiyar. The excerpt considers the differences between development in China and India.

4. In May, we ran a piece by Steve Smith on disaster rumors in the wake of the Sichuan earthquake. In the weeks to follow, some Chinese began to speculate that the cute little Olympic mascots, the fuwa (the Friendlies), were actually harbingers of doom, each one predicting an Olympic year debacle. Today, Shanghaiist reports that their own creator has disowned the fuwas. Look here for the piece, along with links to spoofs on the fuwa and further explanation of their role as harbingers of the apolocalypse.

5. And, for a little lighter reading for those of you carefully packing and repacking your Beijing Olympic wardrobes, check out this Sartorialist-inspired blog of Beijing street-style, Stylites in Beijing.

Rocking Beijing

By Eric Setzekorn

Like almost every aspect of Beijing life in the past five years, the live music scene has undergone rapid but uneven development. Beijing has always prided itself onthe gritty originality of its live music compared to the dominance of cover bands in Shanghai or the saccharine Canto-pop of Hong Kong. The recent opening of new, modern venues on both sides of the city has allowed dozens of new bands and a newly affluent urban youth to establish a flourishing but still shallow live music scene.

For live music, particularly rock and hip hop music, the Olympics are bringing challenges such as new rules and regulations but could allow some bands to develop a global fan base which remains a central difficulty for Chinese groups. A less immediate and more difficult issue will be resolving the internal contradictions between Chinese rock and its relation to Chinese society. The elephant in the room of any discussion of China’s music scene is how to rectify the anti-authoritarian values which infuse rock music and even more so punk and hip-hop with the boundaries of the Chinese political system. At present the young, often highly nationalistic youth seem to be pulling in the same direction as the government, which comes as a shock to many foreign visitors and seems to betray the core anti-establishment values of rock, punk and hip-hop. However, the post-1989 cultural détente in which musicians stayed away from politics may be eroding.

Beijing has slowly struggled to rebuild its music scene after rock music had been identified by the government as a “bad element” following the events of 1989. The introduction of punk and alternative rock sounds from groups like Nirvana and Sonic Youth in the 1990s helped influence new groups like the all-girl band Hang on the Box, which was the first Chinese band on the cover of Newsweek Asia, and whose music marked a sharp change from the Bruce Springsteen-esque Cui Jian types of the 1980s.

However, the still small underground rock scene suffered from a lack of funding and limited exposure that kept most groups at a non-professional level. It has only been in the past few years that bands have been able to perform in purpose-built, high quality venues in front of large crowds. The opening of D-22 in 2005 by American professor Michael Pettis was a turning point and helped revitalized the Haidian university district’s languishing nightlife and live music scene. Across town in business-oriented Chaoyang, several venues with a capacity of up to 2,000 opened their doors to both local and foreign groups.

One of the most interesting clubs is the centrally located “Mao Live House” near the Bell and Drum tower, north of the Forbidden City. A converted movie theater, it has space for up to 400 and, with backing by the Japanese “Bad News” record label, installed high quality lighting and sound equipment--surely a first for Beijing. Its snarky logo features only the hairline of Mao circa 1970 in black set against a white backdrop. Mao also shows various local underground films during set breaks. A recent five-minute film showcased a young film student doing tai-chi while standing on an on-ramp to the second ring road. Throughout the five minutes the incredibly brave/foolish filmmaker was not questioned or stopped by any passerby or even the police but his attached microphone recorded a constant stream of profanities from drivers.

It would be easy to assume that venues like “Mao” possess and cultivate the anti-establishment ethos that permeates many rock, punk or hip-hop clubs in the U.S. or Europe, but the non-political tone of the majority of musicians and fans limits many of the protest aspects of rock music. The majority of live music fans are under thirty, urban, middle class, often have a university education, and have benefited greatly under the current political system. For a variety of reasons--strong economic growth, a tightly controlled education system, and no memory of 1989--the younger generation is generally optimistic and supportive of current policies, which means bands that inject politics into their music risk isolating themselves. In addition, some Chinese musicians are highly sensitive to criticism they are “acting like foreigners” by playing rock or punk music. At a recent show at D-22, a lead singer prefaced his set by appealing to the audience to remember that even though he wore western style clothing and his band used western style guitars and drums they remained wholly Chinese in spirit.

More than any other event, the now infamous Bjork concert in Shanghai on March 4th, where the Icelandic singer closed her song “Declare Independence” by shouting "Tibet," has deeply affected Beijing’s music scene prior to the Olympic games. For fear of other political disturbances by foreign acts, the always-cautious Beijing city government postponed until October the widely anticipated annual Midi rock music festival that normally draws over 10,000 rock fans.

There is also a fear of violence by Chinese fans directed towards any band that might make a political statement about Tibet or Darfur. Even without provocation, Chinese fans can be highly temperamental; in 2003 and 2005, nationalistic young Chinese pelted Japanese bands with beer bottles during the music festival. The Tibet protests this spring have also encouraged nationalistic tendencies and a more belligerent attitude among many young Chinese, musicians included. In one of the small CD stores catering to underground and local rock groups, one of the most prominent DVDs is a brutally graphic account of the Lhasa riots showing charred bodies and graphic violence captured by security cameras. The video’s narration continuously denounces the rioters as traitors who serve the Dalai Lama and his foreign sponsors and stresses the need for firm action to regain control. Adjacent to this grisly and apparently popular documentary, shop workers sat on the floor with guitars strumming along to a Nirvana Unplugged CD.

However, not all musicians are in step with the party line and many do succeed in hiding political and social criticisms in their lyrics. The wildly popular Carsick Cars song “Zhongnanhai” has a chorus of,

“Zhongnanhai, Zhongnanhai, if you smoke just smoke Zhongnanhai
Zhongnanhai, Zhongnanhai, can’t live without Zhongnanhai,
Zhongnanhai, Zhongnanhai, who the fuck smoked my Zhongnanhai?”

The subtly of the double meaning (Zhongnanhai is both a brand of cheap cigarettes and the senior government housing area adjacent the Forbidden City) no doubt overshoots many listeners, but vagueness is necessary when every recorded lyric must be vetted by the Ministry of Culture. In a recent Time Magazine article that listed Beijing band PK14 as one of its five bands to watch in 2008, lead singer Yang Haisong listed American protest singers Woody Guthrie, Phil Ochs and Bob Dylan as his inspirations. While not every band will go to the extreme of the hip-hop group Pan-Gu, which is currently in exile in Sweden due to their anti-party message, the growing cross-pollination of foreign and Chinese bands could possibly increase the desire for musicians to become more vocal social critics.

To eliminate the possibility of disruptions during the Olympic Games, the Ministry of Culture has issued guidelines stating that acts that "undermine national unity, endanger state security, stir up ethnic hatred, violate religious policy and ethnic customs, publicize pornography and superstition will be barred," with offenders likely being blacklisted but not arrested. Like many other socially undesirable facilities such as Beijing’s infamous Maggie’s bar, police have mostly used indirect tactics to halt activity. At present D-22 is closed due to “licensing issues” but hopes to re-open before the games. Other clubs have had problems getting visas for foreign groups to enter China. While the authorities will likely get their wish and eliminate any potential trouble spots during the games, the growth of live music in Beijing coupled with a more outspoken artistic community could be a potential source of future conflict and friction.

Eric Setzekorn is a graduate student at UC Irvine specializing in military history and is currently finishing an exchange semester with the Beijing University history department.

Beijing's New Flame

Currently the London correspondent for NPR, Rob Gifford also covered China for six years and his recently published China Road continues to receive positive reviews. Here, Gifford has allowed China Beat to reprint a piece reflecting on Beijing’s renewed building boom that originally appeared in Condé Nast Traveler.

By Rob Gifford

The essence of Beijing has always been found in its buildings. The city has no major river, no coastline. There are some hills to the west and the north, with the Great Wall stretched across them, but there is none of the geographic razzle-dazzle that created towns like Hong Kong or San Francisco or Sydney or Istanbul. As the historian Arnold Toynbee noted when he visited in the 1930s, Beijing as a city owes little to nature and everything to art.

The art of which Toynbee wrote was contained within the ancient walls of the Forbidden City, where the emperor resided at the heart of old Beijing. But the art was also the buildings themselves: beautiful, angular structures that suffused the dusty soil beneath them with an imperial significance, sanctifying an otherwise unremarkable spot on the North China Plain.

The man responsible for creating Beijing was the third emperor of the Ming dynasty, known as Yongle. On his orders, between 1405 and 1421 thousands of workers constructed a new city, a city that would be the new capital not just of China but of the world, and indeed the universe. In traditional thinking, all under heaven belonged to Yongle, and all the world revolved around his domain, a belief made explicit by the country's name for itself: Zhong Guo, the Middle Kingdom.

There was a reason for the Chinese to believe this, too. At the time, China, though a little past its heyday, was still the world's economic superpower. With no competitors (Europe had yet to rise), China was confident of its moral and financial superiority, and Yongle's capital was appropriately grand, fit for the throne of the Son of Heaven. Built according to ancient rules of geomancy and surrounded by suffocating layers of walls, its design reflected the cosmic symmetry that the emperor sought to keep in balance through his just and harmonious rule.

But such cosmic (and terrestrial) equilibrium is hard to maintain indefinitely. After a final, fatal flowering under the Qing dynasty in the eighteenth century, China fell into a death spiral of humiliation and semi-colonization. By the late nineteenth century, Western incursions had transformed it from Alpha Male Middle Kingdom to Sick Man of Asia, struggling on the periphery of the modern world.

Now, though, the wheel is once again turning.

When China's current ruler, President Hu Jintao, declares the Games of the XXIX Olympiad open in August 2008, he will be looking out upon a city that, like the entire country, bears little resemblance to the one Yongle knew. The stadium where he will be standing—modern Beijing's own imperial palace—is one of the most talked-about buildings in Asia. Swiss architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron have dubbed their creation the Bird's Nest, an allusion to the strands of steel that weave around its frame, but it looks more like a shiny silver spaceship that has landed amid the browns and grays of northern Beijing. Certainly its design is alien to any Chinese architectural tradition. But that's the point: Beijing is being rebuilt along Western lines—not weighed down with the heavy symbolism of Chinese tradition but exploding with the sparks of Western postmodernism. Now it is the Bird's Nest that is suffusing the dusty soil, this time with a twenty-first-century significance.

Adjacent to the Bird's Nest is another example of this new aesthetic—an angular, rectangular structure whose exterior is a honeycomb of blue bubbles. Known as the Water Cube and designed by the Australian firm PTW Architects, it will be the stage for the Olympic swimming and diving events. Farther south, in the Central Business District—not far from Tiananmen Square—looms another monument to the changed Chinese psyche: the new headquarters of China Central Television (CCTV). Dutch maestro Rem Koolhaas's $600 million project has twisted twin towers that seem to leap from the earth, embracing each other in midair. Beside the square itself is the titanium egg that is the National Theater, its smooth lines clashing with the ancient Greece-meets-Soviet Union angles and pillars of Tiananmen. There, eyed warily by the twenty-five-foot portrait of Chairman Mao, a forty-three-foot-high clock counts down the minutes to the Opening Ceremony on August 8.

These new architectural masterpieces are testaments to the rule-flouting individualism that is changing China's cities, symbols of the break the country has made with its past, and celebrations of the country's brave new post-Mao world. They speak of the psychological transformation, not to mention the confusion, in the Chinese mind. And they speak of the eagerness of the Chinese people to leap into a postmodern world, even as huge parts of the country are only just learning what it means to be modern. Nowhere is the metamorphosis more evident than in Beijing, a city of fourteen million that has changed more in fifteen years than it did in the previous five hundred. The capital is still discovering its new identity, and in its quest, walls have become windows as a vertical city rises from the carcass of the old horizontal one.

This rebirth has come at a price. You can still visit the heart of Yongle's spectacular Forbidden City, with its maze of rich red walls and its yellow roof tiles heavy with history, but much of the rest of the city has been destroyed. Many of Beijing's ancient hutongs, or alleyways, some of which date to the fourteenth century, have been demolished, and their sense of community has died with them. The sounds and smells of old Beijing have disappeared. Traditional courtyard houses have been knocked down to make way for unremarkable apartment buildings and office blocks. The cosmic balance has been lost, replaced by a capitalist iconoclasm that has proved as destructive as Communist iconoclasm was in its day. Many people have complained about the destruction of Beijing's heritage, but their complaints have run up against one of Beijing's few remaining walls: the wall of Communist party power.

Who knows if that wall, too, will crumble? For now, though, this and many other questions about the future have been put on hold, suspended in time until after the Olympics. The shiny ziggurats of Beijing issue a welcome as outsiders—both Chinese and foreign—hasten to observe and participate in the transformation. The glass and metal, the curved edges and winking windows, all whisper of something more than just the gentle shock of a new architectural order. They proclaim a new cosmic order: that China is open, that it is looking forward and outward as never before. And they declare that Beijing—the imperial city, the capital city, and now the Olympic city—has once again become the center of the world.

Photo by Matt Merkel-Hess

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.