In Case You Missed It: Fragile Superpower

I was in the Chicago O’Hare Airport a few weeks ago and noticed that a re-release of Peter Navarro’s The Coming China Wars: Where They Will Be Fought and How They Can Be Won had made it onto that prized bit of airport-bookstore real estate, the shelf directly below the cash register. Anyone who has followed news on China in the past decade is familiar with the narrative Navarro, a professor of business, spins out here in hyperbolic boldface. His view, as one reviewer put it, is that “the Chinese will eat us for lunch” by building a massive military, manufacturing defective products, and undercutting American foreign policy. If, that is, China doesn’t crumble under the weight of its internal problems—pollution, corruption, disease—first.

The Scary China approach is tired and dangerous. It carries an undertone of glee at China’s potential demise and its proponents have a tendency to talk about “China” and “the Chinese” as a single entity that work in lock-step for the demolition of American power. Books like Susan Shirk’s China: Fragile Superpower are important antidotes to the Scary China Syndrome.

Written, like China Wars, to be read in bite-sized pieces and also loaded up with facts and figures, Fragile Superpower instead portrays a China both strong and weak, preoccupied with its own domestic issues but eager to play a role as a regional and world leader. As Shirk, a political scientist based at UCSD, points out again and again, China has largely built its thirty-year economic miracle by cooperating with its neighbors and not making waves internationally. However, Shirk also outlines the potential trouble spots on the horizon for China, from domestic protests to media control to issues with Taiwan, Japan, and the United States. While outlining the many points where American and Chinese policy positions diverge, Shirk’s approach is one of measured diplomacy, not hyperbole and fear.

Moreover, unlike the propagators of Scary China, Shirk doesn’t make Chinese leaders out to be petulant children throwing food in hopes they’ll be invited to the adult table. Instead, she lays out the strategic reasons that Chinese leaders sometimes issue seemingly-shrill denunciations of the US or Taiwan, even if they don’t believe it wholeheartedly themselves. And Shirk’s diplomatic experience (she was Deputy Assistant Secretary of State from 1997 to 2000) means that the concluding suggestions are not one-sided—she includes lists of recommendations for both China and the U.S.; for Americans the list contains suggestions like “don’t flaunt U.S. military strength,” and “don’t overreact to China’s economic rise.”

As Shirk writes, “everything Americans say and do regarding China reverberates through Chinese domestic politics…China’s people, and its leaders, are listening to what we say and watching what we do.” At a time when there are calls for boycotts of Chinese goods and media emphasis on the supposed powder keg of Chinese nationalism, reminders that the US-China relationship is a two-way street are more necessary than ever.

The Great Diversion

Allegations about money-laundering by former President Chen Shui-bian, his relatives, and his acquaintances have been front page news for three weeks, and, on some TV stations, occupy the first 30-40 minutes of the news hour. As might be imagined, this is also a hot topic on the political talk shows, day after day after day. New reports continue to surface about alleged improprieties, ranging from misusing government funds, to opening shady accounts in Swiss banks and tax havens like Liechtenstein and Aruba, to buying mansions and other properties in the U.S. The media hounds are now hot on the chase of Chen's daughter (Chen Hsing-yu 陳幸妤), trying to goad her into outbursts that play well on the evening news and YouTube.

Is the fact that Taiwan's former president is suspected of corruption newsworthy? Obviously. Do these allegations merit a thorough investigation? Definitely. If the evidence warrants it, should indictments be filed? Unquestionably. Is this the most pressing issue facing Taiwan? That's another matter entirely.

To a certain extent, the saturation reporting of the Chen story reminds one of the second of Sunzi 孫子's Thirty-six Stratagems (三十六計), namely "Besieging Wei to Rescue Zhao" (圍魏救趙), which is based on events during the Warring States Era, when the Qi general Sun Bin 孫臏 (d. 316 BCE; considered a descendent of Sunzi) attacked the Wei capital of Daliang in order to distract Wei troops from the siege of the Zhao capital of Handan (the exhausted Wei army was eventually ambushed and defeated).

Why employ such a strategy?

Perhaps to divert attention away from the fact that the Taiwan stock market has fallen from 9,295 on May 19 to 6,307 on September 5, one of the worst declines percentage-wise worldwide. When asked about losses by investors who had expected the market to soar following President Ma Ying-jeou's inauguration on May 20, Finance Minister Lee Sush-der 李述德 was quoted as saying that investors should have made wiser choices. He has since apologized.

To make matters worse, on Ma recently announced that his "6-3-3" campaign pledge (annual economic growth rate of 6 percent; annual GDP per capita of US$30,000; annual unemployment rate of less than 3 percent) might not be realized until 2016. Ma has also apologized (three times), and explained how his goals might be more reasonably realized, but there has been a stream of plaintive letters to the editor from disappointed citizens, some of whom are also calling their KMT legislators and threatening not to vote for Ma during the next election.

Internationally, Haiti and Panama have joined Paraguay as the latest dominoes to fall in terms of dropping their support for Taiwan's latest proposal to join the UN's auxiliary associations (see previous post).

And then there is the fact that the KMT government is not only hesitating to buy new F-16's (see also previous post), but is now abandoning the development of some indigenous missile projects, to the dismay of both pan-blue and pan-green legislators.

Even Cross-Straits relations, once perceived as the new government's greatest strength, are now a matter of public concern, with Cabinet polls now showing a drop in public confidence from 79.7% in May to a recent low of 49.6%. There has also been a decidedly mixed reaction to Ma's announcement that Cross-Straits links involve a "special non-state relationship" (非國與國特別關係) between two different "regions" (地區).

Whether the diversionary strategy of devoting extensive coverage to Chen's alleged misdeeds will continue to be effective remains to be seen, especially if Taiwan's economic situation continues to deteriorate. In the short run, it seems reasonable to assume that indictments may well be handed down to Chen and/or his relatives/friends for at least something like tax evasion. This should have a positive impact on Taiwan's democratic development by clearly demonstrating that nobody is above the law. However, regardless of what the courts decide, the media feeding frenzy will eventually ease, and the logical next step will be to see if this anti-corruption campaign extends to other leading politicians, regardless of their political affiliation. Even more importantly, the end of this great diversion may prompt people to start focusing less on mistakes made by past leaders and more on how the current government plans to work for the good of the Taiwanese people.

Note: The Chinese media has also used the expression "Besieging Wei to Rescue Zhao" to describe the anti-Ma protest of August 30, implying that this event was designed to deflect attention from Chen's current plight. And, back when it was the ruling party, the DPP proved adept at using identity politics as a diversion from pressing economic issues (see my January 28 and March 2 posts), once again demonstrating that all crows under heaven are black indeed.

Recommended Readings

There was more "strolling" in China this week (see #4), and these are the pieces we enjoyed in our own strolls around the internet this week...

1) Head over to Beijing Sounds for a thoroughly enlightening and entertaining piece by Randy Alexander on spoken Chinglish--and particularly the sort that results from transcribing English using Chinese characters (yep, you read correctly--follow the link for images of the texts that teach using this method and even the amazing audio clips of what English spoken this way sounds like).

2) Victor Cha wonders if the Olympic Games were "too perfect"?

3) China Beat's Jeffrey Wasserstrom has been publishing pieces in a variety of locations, including one in the Chicago Tribune on the parallels between the Chicago World's Fair and the Beijing Games and another in Far Eastern Economic Review titled "Confucius: China's Comeback Kid."

4) The "stroll" lives on as political protest this week, this time in Beijing. Danwei reports.

5) As David Bandurski noted at China Media Project yesterday, much of the mainland coverage of the Chen Shuibian graft case has been posed as an indictment of democracy. But Bandurski has translated an interesting commentary from Cheng Jinfu that argues there are other lessons to draw from it.

Faking Heaven: The Utopian Will to Order in China

By Timothy S. Oakes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Olympic Echoes in Denver and St. Paul

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An Olympic Evaluation

By Eric Setzekorn

With the Olympics already more than a week in the past, life in Beijing is slowly returning to normal. The Chinese government appears to have achieved what it wanted, producing an overwhelming show to awe foreign and domestic audiences and a clutch of gold medal winners to gloat over. The results for two of the more hidden goals of the games look mixed: promoting athletics for personal health along with national pride and using the Olympics to educate a new generation of urban Chinese as confident global citizens. And a negative legacy from 2008 looks to be the expansion of governmental authority in cases of government-proclaimed necessity.

An important legacy of the Olympics was supposed to be its promotion of athletics in Chinese life, but an unintended consequence of China’s growing sports mania is the increasing individualism of sports stars. Promotion of sports and physical activity as a way to regenerate the vitality and health of the Chinese people has been a popular idea for over a century and was heavily promoted during the Maoist period. The need to promote sustainable interest in sports as part of the average lifestyle has become more urgent as a newly affluent urban class is changes their diets to include less healthy food as their wealth increases. Soaring obesity rates among children in coastal regions are not only due to diet but also lifestyle factors such as widespread on-line gaming and near universal access to television, which also inhibits development of peer relationships.

While China’s gold medal count was high in 2008, the overwhelming number of China’s gold medals have come in solo events that emphasize technique and skill rather than strenuous cardiovascular exertion. Commercially viable sports such as soccer and basketball, which have huge numbers of Chinese fans and are available to the poor in a way platform diving or skeet shooting is not, performed extremely poorly in spite of having several world-class players. A generation of Chinese girls now dream of gymnastic glory when a more sustainable and positive habit would be the promotion of soccer, volleyball and basketball for exercise and socialization.

In the quarterfinal basketball game between China and Lithuania, the tiny Baltic country of four million people humiliated China on its home court by a score of 94 to 68. Lithuania defeated a nation over 300 times as populous by playing a solid, team-oriented strategy while China floundered due to a lack of coordination and teamwork among its world-famous NBA stars (a problem that has plagued past US teams as well). China’s most famous athlete, Yao Ming, the perennial NBA All-Star, China’s Olympic flag bearer, and idolized for his accomplishments as a pioneer of Chinese sports abroad, is representative of these new Chinese superstars. Over the past three years, as he has become more comfortable in his status as an elite player, he has become more outspoken, even openly criticizing the centralized sports system's heavy-handed management of the basketball team. In response, one of the older coaches implied Yao had been corrupted by his time in the U.S.

However, minor rebellions by star athletes will likely increase as their popularity and independent sources of income immunizes them from official consequences. In addition to increased independence, athletes are undertaking social action without direction from the central government. (For instance, after the recent earthquake in Sichuan, Yao established his own foundation to collect donations and provide assistance rather than simply donate money to existing government programs.) But Yao’s personal fame worked against China during the Olympics because his popularity means that fans expect him to play almost the entire game, and low status coaches acquiesce to this demand, so that by half-way through the third quarter in the Lithuania game he looked exhausted and hindered any attempt for a comeback.

There are still severe limits for many of China’s cloistered stars in less commercially lucrative sports such as diving and gymnastics. This was shown by the banning of Guo Jingjing’s former boyfriend, gold medal diver Tian Liang, after he challenged the Chinese diving team for greater personal control and freedom. As China becomes more integrated in global sports, athlete-driven pressure for de-centralization will grow.

For foreigners visiting Beijing, especially first-time visitors to China, the Olympic experience was an almost picture-perfect blend of idealized chinoiserie and ultra-modern convenience. Thousands of blue-shirted college volunteers facilitated the tourist hordes' need to navigate the transportation grid, enter sporting events, and even find good restaurants. The Olympics served as a way to groom thousands of volunteers to become comfortable dealing with foreigners in a confident and knowledgeable manner and become the point of the spear in business and government in the new “Chinese Century."

However, real progress in terms of language fluency and cross-cultural understanding was slight due to the controlled and directed nature of foreigner to volunteer interaction. Much of the problem stems from the draconian visa requirements that essentially restricted access to upper-class Europeans and Americans on package tours. With an average age in their forties, these visitors were understandably viewed as safer and more commercially lucrative than twenty-something backpackers.

The carefully screened and prepped volunteers who greeted them were selected by rigorous foreign language exams and forced to undergo weeks of full-time training, and so real interaction between visitors and volunteers was stunted by the seldom-deviated-from official guidelines. Any question regarding politics or international relations was either ignored or directed to one of the many volunteers who are party members, easily identified by the small red hammer-and-sickle pins on their shirts.

The few cases were it was possible to move past conversations centered around reciting the gold medal count, the volunteer’s worldviews were frequently a blend of jingoistic nationalism and conspiracy theories. After a long period of ingratiating small talk with one airport volunteer, after verifying by my ID that I was not French, he told me he was happy to greet people from every country but France and that he and his fellow students would never shop at Carrefour because “they want to split up China.” Another volunteer, a finance student, spoke glowingly of the best-selling book “Currency Wars”(huobi zhanzheng) which identifies the Federal Reserve, Jews and John Hinckley Jr., among others, as attempting to control the world economy and hinder developing countries like China. While the volunteer experience has certainly made life easier for the overwhelming majority of foreign visitors who don’t speak Chinese, the entire process was a controlled exercise which left most Olympic volunteers with a very shallow and un-realistic view of foreigners and likewise the foreign visitors views of the future leaders of China.

Perhaps the largest negative from the 2008 Olympic games has been the expansion in state oversight and control in urban spaces and private life. Like other massive projects such as the controversial Three Gorges Dam or Chinese resettlement in Xinjiang, the Beijing games required massive relocation, personal hardship for many citizens, and an unwanted intrusion into personal lives in pursuit of outside directed goals. Unlike those projects, Beijing is an urban area with an educated and relatively affluent population. The Olympics served as the pretext under which new offices such as the all-powerful city planning department or the ominously named “Civilization Department” rapidly grew in size and scope. Beijing will thus be left with a significant government organizational capacity with experience and the means to continue large-scale planning and development unhindered by oversight mechanisms.

Beijing’s Olympic construction projects have already been integrated into grandiose schemes for 2020 and 2030 which rival the hubris of Le Corbusier’s mid-century visions. The growth of government entities in areas of personal behavior will likely continue due to a political desire to create a vision of Chinese cities and Chinese people who are attractive to foreigners and deferential to authority. Already, Beijing subway posters are replacing the Fuwa with “Wen-Wen” and “Ming-Ming” shown as a small boy and girl reminding residents of acceptable behavior and personal standards of conduct. Many of the public campaigns against behavior deemed to be “un-civilized” and promoting top-down prestige driven development have already been copied by Shanghai as it prepares for the 2010 World Expo.

In 2001, I felt incredibly fortunate to be in Tiananmen Square when the announcement came that Beijing had won the Olympic games. However, that night my foreign friends and I all wore running shoes because we believed if Beijing did not win the games we should leave the Square as quickly and directly as possible to avoid trouble. At that time, I believed the Olympics would help Beijing become more open, cosmopolitan, cleaner, and a more enjoyable place for both foreigners and Chinese to live. While Beijing has changed incredibly since 2001, the earlier hope that the Beijing Games would have any sort of similar political effect to the 1988 Seoul games has long since evaporated. The events of this August have been exciting and entertaining, but the overall legacy of securit outside airports and surveillance microphones in taxis seem mixed and to this long-time resident of what is one of the world’s great cities, 2008 feels like a missed opportunity.

Beijing à la Jasper Becker

By Pierre Fuller

A Financial Times news brief lay buried in an inside page: At the very moment a few weeks ago when Olympic medals were awarded in front of adoring crowds, "two elderly women" were jailed for seeking permission to demonstrate against “being forcibly evicted from their Beijing homes” back in 2001. And who knows what now stands in the place of these pensioners’ loss – faux Italianate villas? an IKEA? pavement?

Stories like this make a timely book of journalist Jasper Becker’s history of the Chinese capital, City of Heavenly Tranquility: Beijing in the History of China from Oxford University Press (and from a division of Penguin in the U.K.) – not the news of the razing of much of old Beijing, which largely began in the 1950s, but its near completion by a “new” China stepping ceremoniously onto the world stage.

Becker’s premise of the near total destruction of Beijing’s charm – and the rise of phony Ming-throwback facades for tourists – is impossible to dispute. His book bounces back and forth from episodes in Yuan or Ming Beijing to a real estate agent called Sunshine showcasing a $400,000 penthouse in the Middle Sea Purple Gold Garden, a forestry professor eager to talk about stock options, and “The casual ugliness of so much of the Yuanming Yuan… the tacky funfair, a dreary zoo, a so-called ‘primitive people’s totem park’ and amusement rides featuring Snow White.” (84)

But just as media coverage leading up to the recent Olympics suggested China was the inventor of smog, Becker would have it that the Chinese also founded kitsch.

Even if much of Beijing’s facelift is hideous and in many ways tragic, reporting on China – on anywhere – is troubling when uninformed and unhumbled by a comparative look at one’s origins – in Becker’s case, Britain. But apart from a section on Le Corbusier’s efforts to hyper-modernize elsewhere in the world, his passing hypotheticals to the Anglo-American experience are so poorly chosen you wonder if he’s put any thought to it at all. Becker writes as though he descends from the heavens.

Exasperated by China’s facelift, he asks what “if Wall Street, Central Park… the Bronx…were to be leveled.” (9) The Bronx? Either Becker’s never heard of Robert Moses, New York City’s automobile champion and unelected executor of countless concrete scars, among them the infamous Cross-Bronx Expressway, which razed and diced many a poor South Bronx community (incidentally spawning the rap-hip hop movement) just so suburbanites could drive right over them… either that or Becker is too caught up in putting the Chinese to the fire to even bother.

What, Becker again asks, “if every landmark – Times Square, Madison Square Gardens, Radio City – were to disappear at once.” MSG? Again, either Becker doesn’t realize 1) that the monstrosity that is Madison Square Gardens is a concrete and glass bubble for ticketed events named, in good Orwellian fashion, after the public gardens it supplanted and 2) that MSG was also built on the ruins of landmark Penn Station, another blow to the once-majestic railway in favor of cars or entertainment… either that or making such a connection just isn’t in the spirit of his treatise.

The real issue is not whether old Beijing is lost for good – there is little doubt about it – but whether Becker puts Beijing’s experience into its proper historical and global context. Here he fails, and it is little surprise why. The career China commentator and publisher of Asia Weekly is also among those outside observers who position themselves as concerned friends of China while finding nothing right with the place, past or present.

No matter that any claimed continuity between the Han, Tang or Qing dynasties is largely cosmetic, or that Ming and Qing power was many times lighter on the ground (in the form of the magistrate presiding over hundreds of thousands) than, say, that of the French ancien régime. No matter at all. In 2000, Becker opened his tome The Chinese with the proclamation – which informed the rest of his narrative – that “The Chinese state is probably the oldest functioning organ in the world, dating back more than 2,000 years… exercising a tighter grip over its subjects than any other comparable government in the last two millennia.”

No matter that the High Qing state drew from a Classical statecraft inheritance to provide its subjects with far more extensive disaster relief – policy and execution – than any of its European peers. Becker launched his 1996 study on the Great Leap Forward famine, Hungry Ghosts, with a Chinese “people” who have “always… prostrated themselves before the wayward power of the Emperor,” with “young girls…cast into the rivers to prevent floods,” with the Qing vainly ordering “local officials to build temples and pray” for rain, with the “slaughtering (of) animals to bring rain,” with officials who “sold grain for profit” as people ate their won children to survive.

And all this by page two.

So it is with little surprise that Becker’s latest offering rises no higher in analytical nuance. To give some idea of the style of his narrative, Becker opens his first chapter “In Xanadu” with “watchful secret police” in the “vast totalitarian space” of Tiananman Square before presenting a remarkably bloodless account of the Mongol exploits leading to the Yuan dynasty, later reminding us that some “50,000 ethnic Mongolians” were purged during the Cultural Revolution. The Mongol invasions today are “a reminder that the Chinese were not supreme throughout history,” he writes, “as they claim was the case before the defeats in the Opium Wars.” (15-16, 29)

Hold on. “As they claim”? Who, all 1.3 billion Chinese? Or the People’s Daily? Maybe the Chinese Ministry of Education? Rarely do Western observers apply such categorical attributions to their own: what would “as the British claim” mean in a story on, say, Cromwell’s rape of Ireland? Assigning a “they” to all Chinese suggests that a cookie-cutter Chinese population has it wrong and has it coming to them. So much for telling it like it is.

Karl Marx is later employed by Becker to argue that the Ming-era “Great Wall symbolized the stagnation of the whole Chinese social and economic system.” (63) Not only is this is a very tired narrative (can Becker find no better than a Victorian-era Eurocentric classical economist?) but on what stagnant “social and economic system” did the Qing construct a buoyant empire for centuries to come? Perhaps Becker meant the ailing Ming regime, which was soon to fall. Well, then say so much.

Even more disappointing is Becker’s treatment of the resident Foreign Powers, who are assigned a noblesse oblige worthy of saints. “Had they wished,” Becker assures us, “the Western powers could have gone on to take control of China as they did in India, Africa and the Americas.” (90) To boot, Becker paints this as noble restraint as their envoys are “seized and tortured” by Beijing and “fixed sums” are offered by the emperor “for the heads of the barbarians” – all when Lord Macartney, we hear, had only approached China to get his sovereign to be “treated as an equal.” (87-88)

Another chapter opens with the execution of six reformers in 1898 and the execution calendar of the Qing state; yet another starts with “Beijing people” spending “much of their lives forced to live next door to neighbors who had taken part in their persecution and the death of their family members” (183); still another with “the violent events that led in 1966 to the suicide or murder of Lao She.” (196)

This is not to say that none of these events happened, only that when summing the Chinese experience Becker likes leading with gore – and with a title (City of Heavenly Tranquility?) that is totally tongue-in-cheek.

But the pea of Becker’s thought lies at the Ming tombs at the outskirts of the capital. There, he explains, “Far from Beijing’s ugly pretensions to modernity, one felt a little freer and in such a haunt of ancient peace could savour an unchanging China fixed for ever in romantic decay.” (71)

First off, Beijing’s ugliness, its conveniences, its empty renewals, its state surveillance of people’s lives, these things are no “pretensions to modernity.” These things are modernity.

Second, we find that Becker is no further along in his thinking than turn-of-the-century French writer Pierre Loti and other foreigners who were “romantically involved in the mystery of China,” as he puts it, seeking a changeless Orient while also seeing romance in a civilization’s decay. (109)

Becker, we learn in his closing thoughts, had “arrived in search of exoticism, of girls with almond eyes and slender necks, and found a totalitarian state of spies and informers.” (316)

No wonder the man was disappointed.

A Little Post-Games Analysis

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

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

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

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

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

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

“同一个世界，同一个梦想”还是 “同会异梦”?

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

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

By James Farrer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Faking the Olympics

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

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

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

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

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

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

"One World" (revisited): Flexible Olympic citizenship

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

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

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

"One Dream" (revisited): Olympic Eros

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Olympic Echoes

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

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

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

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

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

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

The KMT Backstroke

Now that the Beijing Olympiad has reached its glorious conclusion, people in Taiwan are starting to turn their attentions back to the home front. The Olympics did not go very well for Taiwan, which ended up winning only 4 bronze medals, its worst result in 20 years. Even the baseball team could only mange a fifth-place finish, including a shocking 8-7 loss to China in extra innings. One of the few bright spots was the competitive spirit of athletes like Su Li-wen 蘇麗文, who fought to the bitter end while losing her bronze medal match by a single point in extra time, despite having suffered a painful injury. The dedication that these men and women displayed is particularly impressive in light of the fact that they are not permitted to compete in their country's name, but rather under the odd moniker of "Chinese Taipei" (中華台北).

On the domestic front, things look grim as well. The stock market has plummeted, real wages are declining, exports are in a tailspin, and GDP estimates continue to be revised downwards. About the only things going up are unemployment and prices. These are worldwide problems, and the KMT government has numerous experts who are working on solutions. At the same time, however, the KMT also seems to be devoting considerable effort to restoring its ideological hegemony, attacking its enemies, promoting party loyalists cronies, and pursuing a pro-China agenda.

One prominent example of the first phenomenon concerns the controversy over the proposed renaming of the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall as the National Taiwan Democracy Memorial Hall, which was the subject of a post on this website in January 2008. At a recent Cabinet meeting, Premier Liu Chao-shiuan 劉兆玄 instructed the Executive Yuan to withdraw the former DPP government's request to abolish the Organic Statue of the CKS Memorial Hall (國立中正紀念堂管理處組織條例廢止案), while also approving the abolition of the Organic Statute of the National Taiwan Democracy Memorial Hall (國立台灣民主紀念館組織規程), thereby condemning the latter name to the dustbin of history and signifying the imminent return of hero worship of the former dictator. As for the issue of whether to restore the inscription 大中至正 on the Hall's entry arch, Minister of Education Cheng Jei-cheng 鄭瑞城 said that this would be discussed in a series of public forums.

Another sign of the revival of KMT ideology may be found in reports that the armed forces plan to reinstate the singing of "I Love China" (我愛中華), which features a line about "5,000 years since the nation was founded" (開國五千年), at evening assemblies of soldiers stationed at all military bases.

Efforts at purging DPP-appointed officials (拔綠官) are also continuing apace, including the effective demotion of Executive Yuan Deputy Secretary-General Chen Mei-ling 陳美伶, and the dismissal of Parris Chang (張旭成) as representative to Bahrain. Perhaps even more striking are the unrelenting attempts to convict former president Chen Shui-bian 陳水扁 of corruption, which have included the declassification of secret documents relating to Chen's use of the state affairs fund (國務機要費), a decision that may impact national interests. More recently, the KMT government has launched a wide-ranging investigation of Chen and his relatives on charges of laundering excess campaign funds. Such allegations have shocked, disappointed, and broken the hearts of many DPP supporters, but their legal implications remain unclear (Like the U.S., Taiwan has only recently begun to address the problem of campaign finance reform, and current laws contain numerous loopholes).

There is no doubt that the rooting out of corruption is an essential element of any democracy. Chen has admitted that he and his wife made mistakes, and both have withdrawn from the DPP. If he or members of his family have in fact broken the law, they should face justice for their actions. Nonetheless, one cannot help but wonder if the current anti-Chen campaign is motivated by more than concerns over corruption, and might also constitute a means of currying favor with pan-blue hardliners while also diverting attention from the new government's problems. Moreover, the tone of some attacks on Chen, his relatives, and even his acquaintances has at times taken on a chilling and even vindictive tenor, which suggests that some KMT leaders have never forgiven the son of a tenant farmer for snatching away the power that they had been groomed to assume. All this, combined with the above-mentioned weeding out of former DPP officials, seems to be sending a clear message to any Taiwanese elites who might have doubts about professing their loyalty to the new government.

It also remains to be seen how diligent the KMT will be about tackling irregularities in its own ranks. For example, despite President Ma Ying-jeou 馬英九's promises of clean government, the KMT-dominated parliament has so far failed to pass any significant legislation related to this issue, and has continued to obstruct the passage of so-called "sunshine laws" (陽光法案). Another thorny problem involves charges of dual citizenship among KMT elites, the most prominent being Legislator Diane Lee (李慶安), who has been accused of holding U.S. citizenship while serving in a number of elected offices. Nearly six months have passed since Next Magazine (壹週刊) broke the story, but the Legislative Yuan has yet to divulge any details of its ongoing investigation, while the Central Election Commission seems unable to reach any consensus on how to deal with the issue.

Eyebrows has also been raised over the decision by Taipei Mayor Hau Lung-pin 郝龍斌 (son of former Premier Hau Pei-tsun 郝柏村) to appoint Sean Lien 連勝文 (son of former Premier and Vice President Lien Chan 連戰) to serve as an EasyCard board member. Qualifications aside, the younger Lien's reported monthly salary of NT$300,000 seems particularly galling to recent college graduates, many of whom are starting at jobs paying only NT$25,000 a month. Hau's decision prompted the Apple Daily (蘋果日報) to issue a scathing editorial, which included the observation that "The specter of the old KMT has been haunting the land since even before the Ghost Month" (老國民黨幽靈早在鬼月之前，就已經四處作怪).

Of greatest concern to many Taiwanese, however, is the new government's pro-China stance. While the current "low key", "practical", and "rational" approach to questions of national identity has gone a long way towards reducing tensions, the long-term benefits and costs for Taiwan remain to be seen. While the Cross-Strait atmosphere has improved, direct flights have as yet failed to result in large groups of Chinese tourists traveling to Taiwan (visitor numbers average 212 per day, and are dropping). Moreover, Beijing has yet to agree to direct cargo flights, and continues to deploy hundreds of missiles aimed at the island.

On the diplomatic front, the government has decided not to apply for full UN membership this year (as either the "Republic of China" or "Taiwan"), opting instead to seek "meaningful participation" in the august organization's auxiliary associations. Accordingly, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs has prepared a proposal for the General Assembly asking it to support "the fundamental rights of the 23 million people of the Republic of China (Taiwan) to participate meaningfully in the activities of the United Nations specialized agencies". The main goal of these efforts seems to be joining the WHO, but prospects seem dim indeed, especially since Wang Yi 王毅, head of China's Taiwan Affairs Office, indicated that China would never accept Taiwan becoming a member of that organization, but would look instead into forming an international network to share data with Taiwan in cases of disease outbreaks. More recently, in spite of Ma's calls for a "diplomatic truce", in an August 18 letter to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, Chinese Ambassador to the UN Wang Guangya 王光亞 stated that, "Taiwan is not a sovereign state. The claim by a very few countries that specialized agencies should allow the Taiwan region to 'participate' in their activities under the 'principle of universality' is unfounded", essentially splashing ice-cold water on the KMT plan. The government's next course of action is unclear.

It also seems significant that key allies such as the Vatican, Haiti, Guatemala, Paraguay, Panama and the Dominican Republic have chosen not to cosponsor the above-mentioned resolution. The actions of these allies are understandable, however, as some have begun to wonder whether the new government's position includes the possibilty of dual recognition, a point that Ma has been at pains to deny. Other allies have reached a different conclusion, as can be seen in the decision by the Dominican Republic to refer to the delegation led by Ma on his state visit as "China, Taiwan". This did not seem to raise concerns among Taiwan's new crop of diplomats and National Security Council officials, however, who argued that according to the 1992 Consensus (九二共識) Taiwan could be referred to as China, since each side had agreed to its own definition of the term (一中各表). The trend of renaming Taiwan is now spreading to countries like Australia and Thailand, both of which have referred to the nation as "Chinese Taipei" on government websites.

Current trends have caused some concern in U.S. diplomatic circles, with recent reports indicating that officials who visited Taiwan earlier this month informed the KMT government of a "Two No's" (二不) position, namely no hinting that China has sovereignty over Taiwan and no acceptance of China having final say over Taiwan's participation in international organizations. This suggests that the U.S. government, once concerned about Chen's government upsetting the status quo, may now have similar worries about the Ma government.

Anxiety on the diplomatic front, combined with the restoration of the name "Chunghwa Post" (中華郵政), confusion over China's attempts to use the title "Taipei, China" (中國台北) for the Olympic team instead of "Chinese Taipei", and uncertainty over whether the new government will push for the purchase of the F-16 C/D fighter, have caused many to wonder about the KMT government's long-term intentions. For its part, KMT elites in favor of unification continue to visit China as often as they can, and some are said to be pushing for the new government to restore the Guidelines for National Unification (國家統一綱領). While the pace at which the KMT government will edge towards this goal remains to be seen, these issues may well continue to occupy worldwide attention for many months to come.

Reading Recommendations

The Olympics have ended, but the news continues. Here are a few of our favorite end-of-the-Olylmpics stories:

1. Danwei notes that last Friday, Google news searches for "China" (done via the Chinese language version of the search engine) returned no results.

2. In case you missed any Olympic highlights, check out Shanghaiist's nod to the ultra-brief Mime Olympics. They also ran a "report card" on the Beijing Olympics, loaded with links for recommended reading.

3. August 18-22, the comic strip Candorville skewered the holier than thou aspects of some human rights protests against China. Though while doing this, some panels do still effectively work in sharp criticisms of Beijing's policies.

4. A "Letter from Beijing" by Anthony Lane in The New Yorker on the first week at the Olympics.

5. At the Christian Science Monitor, former Beijing bureau chief Robert Marquand tells the story of Chiu Teng Hiok, China's "first Olympic hero," who played basketball for England at the 1924 Olympics and has, according to Marquand, been largely forgotten in Chinese sports history.