At Opening Ceremonies, China writes its own story

Mark Sappenfield | 08.08.08

For four hours Friday night, China chose the story that it would tell the world.

After a half-year of torch-relay protests, Tibetan unrest, criticism of human rights, and concern about Beijing skies as opaque as custard, the Opening Ceremonies were a glimpse of China as it sees itself.

From the Olympic Stadium to thronged public squares equipped with big screens, it was one enormous exhalation – the moment when years of anticipation became a night of unconditional joy.

Chinese athletes giggled like schoolchildren as they entered the stadium, spectators stopped every few feet outside the Bird’s Nest, snapping photo after photo of themselves in front of it, astonished at what their country had accomplished.

From the moment these Games were awarded to China seven years ago, the sports have always seemed likely to be eclipsed by the story. Determined to take its place among the world’s great political and economic powers, China took these Games as a way to make a statement.

Even before the Games have begun, it is making that statement. Spending $43 billion will do that. Athens spent $12 billion, and workers were still painting on opening day. The level of preparation and efficiency evident in the Beijing Games is unprecedented and very possibly unrepeatable.

“I don’t think there’s a US city that could match this at this time,” says Peter Ueberroth, head of the United States Olympic Committee.

But the Opening Ceremonies were about more than plaudits for architecture and organization. They were China’s chance to write its own narrative. Appropriately enough, in a performance built upon the theme of traditional Chinese writing, the pen was at last in China’s own hand.

China’s martial beginnings, recalled in menacing drumbeats and guttural war cries, provided a suitable tableau for the sort of epic imagery that has become the staple of the country’s increasingly confident view of itself. The opening half hour of the Opening Ceremonies was an unalloyed expression of the power of the collective organism – an artistic oriental Communism – with intricately choreographed movements of masses of people anonymously subsumed in the spectacular whole.

Drummers rattled in the pitch dark, their neon red sticks flashing in military time. Blocks of pale gray rose and fell in ever-shifting Escher patterns – the audience unsure if the motions were human or mechanical until, at the end, men emerged from beneath them like Jack-in-the-boxes.

As the ceremonies progressed, however, they took a more human face, coming – like China itself – to the world. Amid forests of sheer fabric on which shifting images of water and light skittered, Tai-chi dancers offered a glimpse of a peculiarly Chinese environmentalism – the unity of mankind and nature. No belching smokestacks here…

And like all great showmen, Beijing saved the best for last. In Olympic terms, it set the new gold-standard in torch-lighting ceremonies – former gymnast Li Ning circling the stadium while suspended more than a hundred feet above the stadium floor.

Bold. Innovative. Breathtaking. Precisely how the new China sees itself.

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