Excited: Spectators watched fireworks explode last Saturday over the National Aquatics Center (l) and National Stadium (r), during a rehearsal for this Friday’s Olympics opening ceremony. (Robert F. Bukaty/AP)
For Chinese, it’s the teflon Olympics
The Beijing Games have been dogged with global criticism on everything from censorship to pollution. But Chinese people still see them as their government does: a great coming-out party.
Peter Ford | Staff writer / August 3, 2008 edition
Reporter Peter Ford talks about why a successful Beijing Games is in everyone’s interest, not just China’s.
Beijing
Forget the Forbidden City, the Temple of Heaven, or Beijing’s other historic sights. The hottest tourist draw today for Chinese visitors to the capital is the Olympic Green, which boasts key competition venues such as the “Bird’s Nest” National Stadium and the “Water Cube” swimming pool.
For weeks, special buses have been leaving an Olympic terminal every few minutes, ferrying Beijingers and tourists for a glimpse of the iconic structures. Thousands more thronged the perimeter fence this weekend, snapping pictures and soaking up the pre-Olympic atmosphere in glorious sunshine.
“I feel very emotional about these Games,” said Li Chunfeng, a young nurse, as she prepared to walk around the edge of the green, which is as close as the public can get to the venues. “China has suffered in history, and this is a moment of glory.”
While the Chinese government fends off criticism from abroad about its human rights record, its foreign policy, and Beijing’s air quality, Chinese people appear overwhelmingly proud and excited about the Olympic Games that open here next Friday.
“This is going to be the biggest festival ever in China,” said Qi Jianlan, as she finished taking photos of her husband with the stadium in the far distance. “It’s going to be even more ‘re nao’ than the New Year,” she added, using the phrase Chinese use to describe their favorite atmosphere – “warm and noisy.”
At another level, Ms. Qi hoped, “this will help the world to understand China, and help China become part of the world.”
The state drums up support
It would be easy to ascribe the near universal popular enthusiasm to the single-minded importance that the state-run media has laid on the 2008 Olympic Games ever since they were awarded to Beijing seven years ago.
Certainly the steady drumbeat of the official windup to the Games has reached an unbroken roll: For the past month every aspect of life in the capital, from transport to shopping to entertainment, has been subordinated to Olympic needs in a way no other host city has attempted in recent history.
Nor have Chinese newspapers or TV given their public any hint of the criticism that has been leveled at Beijing in the run-up to the Games, as international reporters complain of Internet censorship at Olympic press centers and human rights groups accuse China of betraying Olympic pledges to improve its record.
‘It’s a big thing for me’
But the people’s ardor seems sincere and deeply felt: nearly 80 percent of Chinese nationwide feel the Olympics are important to them personally, and 96 percent believe the Games will be a success, according to a recent survey by the Pew Research Center.
“This is the first time in a hundred years that China has hosted the Olympics,” said Xu Minghai, a businesswoman from Inner Mongolia stopping over on a business trip to admire the Olympic venues. “It’s very exciting because it’s a matter of national pride.”
“We won’t benefit as individuals,” added her husband, Li Ruibing. “But if China grows and becomes strong, our children and our grandchildren will enjoy greater hope.
“The history of the last 100 years has been a history of humiliation for the Chinese. Finally we are standing up, so this is a big moment for all Chinese,” he said.
It has become common for ordinary Chinese to read such historical meaning into an event that in other cities has usually been simply a grand sporting spectacle and a chance to indulge a little civic pride.
“The Olympics mean much more to China than to previous host countries because they have been stressed as the opportunity to showcase … the country’s achievements,” says Fu Yuanyuan, a young PR consultant. “I think it’s a milestone.”
“It’s a big thing for China, so it’s a big thing for me,” explained Hu Jinan, a businessman from Hubei Province, 500 miles south of Beijing, who had brought his two daughters to the capital to show them the Olympic venues. He rested in the shade Saturday while his girls walked along the fence surrounding the Olympic Green.
Putting up with daily disruptions
Skeptics have raised their voices, but more often in the anonymity of the Internet than on the streets.
As at previous Olympics, some critics are angered by the high costs of the Games: Beijing’s are estimated at around $40 billion, in a country where many citizens remain rooted in poverty. They also point out that many of the city’s poorest residents have lost their homes, as the government seized land for Olympics-related structures.
Others are bothered by the disruptions to daily life in Beijing that the Games have brought. “The five Olympic rings felt like five nooses, slipping one by one onto his neck,” reads a passage in an anonymous satirical short story about current life in China’s capital that has proved enormously popular on the Web.
Most Beijing residents, though, seem prepared to put up with security arrangements that would seem oppressive in most capitals, and with draconian traffic regulations, in order to ensure the Games’ safety and success.
“Tight security is necessary,” says Yao Jiawei, a young journalist. “It keeps foreigners safe, and that’s needed to maintain China’s international image, and the Olympics are also a test of the government’s ability to guarantee ordinary people’s safety.”
“The policies certainly have an impact on our lives,” says an accountant with an IT company who identified herself as Mrs. Wu, complaining about new traffic rules designed to reduce pollution. “But since they are for the Olympics I can put up with them.”
Meanwhile, all billboards in the capital have been taken down and replaced with “Beijing 2008” posters; every lamppost on every major thoroughfare is draped with “Beijing 2008” banners, and from every pedestrian bridge hang proclamations of “One World, One Dream,” China’s Olympic slogan.
Shoppers looking for a souvenir of China’s “once in a century event” jammed counters at the Olympic Flagship Store on Wangfujing, a popular pedestrian precinct, Saturday, choosing between plush toys, pens, playing cards, jade pendants, hats, teapots, and a thousand other items, all decorated with the Beijing 2008 logo.
Was the Olympic obsession not a little excessive, one shopper was asked. “Oh no,” said Tang Nan, a student who said she had already bought all the Beijing 2008 souvenirs she could afford. “It just shows the Chinese people’s enthusiasm.
“I haven’t met anyone who isn’t excited,” she added.
Comments
2. Peter | 08.04.08
Wisdom and actions of the Tibetan Youth Congress? Hahahahaha! Tell that to the jobless exiles awaiting lotteries or the suppressed religious sect of the Shugden. Your in house religious and political wranglings are hardly a good example to the rest of the humanity despite the popular Holiness image.
Stop with the non-sense of a complete hunger strike. The human body will perish without water in 3 days. A political act with tricks such as feeding at night, rotations, etc.. is not going to garner anymore sympathy than previous acts. The failed Exile Olympic already a proof. Continous self-torture will not bring you any closer to your goals.
3. Richard Harris | 08.04.08
Clearly China has made great progress and continues to make progress. No matter where you are there is always better. The idea is to continue to improve and become ever stronger and better. Praise to chinese success thus
far and may China continue to progress and become an example to the world.
4. Bill Lu | 08.04.08
Stop this kind of idiotic “news reporting”! Enough of this media garbage of linking Olympics with politics! Aren’t you tired of this never ending of parroting of the so-called “Freedom”? What’s wrong with the media in the west? Do you have to find some fault with anything China does? When the Olympics is staged in the US, glowing reports were all over the media: “national heroes”, “glory of sports”, etc., were slatted all over the media coverage, yet with the Olympics in China, now the title to the Olympic is “Teflon”.
“dogged with global criticism”? Who is this “global”? Com’on, we know it’s only the western media, who does nothing about objective news reporting but acting like a more controlled media than communism because all you western “journalists” have been copying from each other with the single voice of linking Olympics sports with geo-politics. Don’t you feel any shame of no independent thinking, but just parroting after one another? Since when the western option become the “global” opinion? What’s the percentage of the world population live in the west? How dare are you to claim you represent the “global” opinion?
Are the so-called “journalists” in the west media like this Peter Ford have too much of this inferior complex that you just had to “report news” this way to make the people in the west feel good and proud? How pathetic this kind of propaganda in the west “free media” has become!
5. Lee E | 08.06.08
Your political diatribe is nothing more than a smokescreen to try and deflect attention to the obscene human rights record of the Chinese Communist Govt. The Olympics, since its inception, has been about peace, equality, and freedom during the games. All China is about is repression, censorship, and absolute control of all aspects of expression.
You state the freedom of the press is nothing but propaganda in the West? Well at least when western governments are involved with wrong doings, the press reports and acts on them. There is no freedom of the press, or for that matter, freedom of the people! The massacre of a hopeful young generation of students at Tienanmen Square is a prime example and will never be forgotten.
The Olympics being held in China is on par with the Olympics that were held in Berlin in 1936 by another despotic government to the utter shame of the international community. And what happened? We went to war and cleansed the world of Nazism. Communism is a failed form of government! Just look around! One day soon, the need to submit a blind eye to the abuses of China for capitalistic gains will arrive. And when it does, the subjugated peoples of Tibet and other groups seeking religious and political freedom will win out as the the rural Chinese become more educated and informed as they continue to flock to the cities. When the scales tip from repression to freedom, those who maintained control and despotism will perish.
6. TT | 08.07.08
Lee E,
Gee, one wonders if those are your own words or are you merely parroting the words of others? Are you projecting your own paranoia onto others? You are viewing China through a Cold War lens upon the self-inflicted Cultural Revolution and the Tienanmen incident with a rehash of bygone language. On the other hand, the Chinese view the West through a historical lens of the Opium Wars and the Western Imperial predations.
Have you ever been to China and spoken to the average Chinese? You would be surprised how much more aware they are than those who live in the “bastion of freedom” aka the West. An unspoken social contract is that the people are free to do almost anything except challenge the Central Government’s rule. So long as their lives are improving, they are content with the status quo. They recognise the present shortcomings, but leery of revolutionary upheavals, are willing to go along for the time being with an eye on the long term goal (long as in decades, not just the next election). One reason why the Tienanmen incident never got much traction was not simply because of the government clampdown (which it did) but because the students were never supported by the population at large who deemed them as misguided children at best and agitators with foreign backing at worst trying to stir chaos (”luan”) and break up the country.
Just in case it slipped your notice, the most fervent supporters of China are not the old guard but the students who have greater than before access to the world plus the fact that they are now living in the West away from any central control. The people have long been aware that the news in China is heavily biased and not place too much trust in it. They were under the impression that the Western media was as objective as it claimed to be. However, what the Western media has done is to disabuse them of the belief that the Western media is objective and hence they now see the term “Freedom of the Press” as a smokescreen for the West to put China down. So they are now disillusioned and gravitate to flag and country, seeing that the West has no desire to allow them a rightful place under the sun. Now, thanks to the Western media, they see any criticism as shades of intervention a la 19th century.
The comparison with 1936 Berlin is superficial and if pursued can become a dangerous self-fulfilling prophecy. In case you miss out on the history lesson, Hitler was elected. Asking China to give up Tibet is like asking the USA to give up California. As for democratization, they have seen how the West abandoned Russia after it gave up communism and decided 2 things. 1) Shock therapy is bad, hence their gradual change; and 2) The West cannot be trusted, reinforcing their prior historical experience.
Anyway, China bears watching but leave it alone well enough and let its people decide for themselves. China will change and evolve into something less than you hope but more than you expect.
7. Brian | 08.15.08
To all people who chant Free Tibet every time there is an opportunity:
No body in the West cared about your view before China emerged as a global power. No body. How many of them can point out on a map where Tibet is?
You are being used as tools to spread the western media’s propaganda. And many readers of these articles love to see and believe this kind of reporting, because it fits perfectly with the belief that the western beliefs are ’superior’ and always ‘correct’.
But all of you knew that already, didn’t you? How else would such an uneducated and uninformed group get such attention and monetary support?
I would suggest all of you learn some real skills, do some hard work, and earn an honest living like the most of us. And then if you truly care about those who live in Tibet, maybe you can teach them that while maybe there should be religious freedom, more people have been killed than any other causes, in the name of religion.
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1. Ivona Vujica | 08.03.08
Time to listen to wisdom and actions of the Tibetan Youth Congress and Stand up for Burma and hundreds of millions of virtual peasant Slaves in China-who become the Global Sweat Shop to the World…
DAY 6 – “NOT ONLY FOOD BUT ALSO NOT A SINGLE DROP OF WATER”
Date: 02/08/2008
The sixth day of the TYC led Indefinite Fast for Tibet without food and water started as a calm morning, with the rising sun, growing heat and humidity taking its effect on the hunger strikers. The early morning weight check showed that they have lost an average of over 10 kgs as they continue their fast without not only food but also not a single drop of water. more…
BRAVE, HONOURABLE, AND COMPASSIONATE EVERYONE ONE OF YOU
http://www.tibetanyouthcongress.org/