Unfortunately, this new craze comes too late to be included as one of China’s native sports for the Olympics.

Joking aside, this trend is emblematic of how urban women in China are changing. Not only are women in the cities beginning to have greater purchasing power, but images like this suggest that they are beginning to take ownership of their sexuality, too, instead of merely being sex objects. Given the enormous popularity of Sex and the City with younger Chinese women over the last five years, I’d say that this development has been building for some time.

Most of attention here seems to be indignation concerning the Chinese government’s concern for image over individuals. It’s a good (though hardly new) point about the government, but also surprisingly unworthy of all the attention it is receiving: no one was really harmed by the dubbing or the faked fireworks, after all, and the decisions seemed to be mostly artistic ones, with little real political significance. At any rate, it’s not the first time that a singer’s performance was dubbed in an Olympic opening ceremony, just two years ago Pavarotti lip-synced to a recorded track at the Turin games.

What Beijing wants the world to see is different than what they’d like it to hear.

Much more significant–and relatively unreported–was the snubbing that the high-profile Hong Kong celebrities slated to perform at the ceremony, including Jacky Chan, Karen Mok, Andy Lau, Joey Yung and Nicholas Tse, received when organizers turned on the lights and began herding people out to the exits as the performers took the stage. The performance, which the singers troopered on with, despite having only a token audience, was not broadcast and got recorded, apparently, only on the personal cameras of a few attendees.

To be fair the ceremony had gone overtime and the performance seemed, from reports, intended to serve as primarily an after show, not as part of the main attraction. However, it is noteworthy that all but two of the performers were from Hong Kong and some of them (like Jackie Chan) had taken a lot of flak for decisions to participate in the Olympics in precisely this capacity. Moreover, from an interview on a Hong Kong radio station with Jackie’s son, Jaycee, it would seem that the performers had been under the impression they would be the closing event of the ceremony, rather than the exit music.

A reasonable analysis here would suggest that a mistake had been made, for which the Hong Kong performers got left by the wayside. Regardless, the significance is glaring. In a ceremony that was so obviously important that officials decided to use one aesthetically child’s face and another’s singing (though both were experienced performers) to convey just the right image, to simply forget the entire contingent of Hong Kong performers shows, at best, the the mainland thinks its entertainment industry has overtaken Hong Kong’s and, at worse, that Hong Kong has lost its special status in China as a model for culture, democracy and economics (however poor a model it may be on some of these fronts). Either way, it’s an ill portent for the former British colony.

Jackie Chan has stated that he is just happy to have had the chance to perform at the ceremony. One wonders if he is still, pleased seeing as nobody seems to care.

Snubbed, but nobody cares.

First, the Uyghurs. Homemade explosives killed 11 in hotels, supermarkets and government offices in the town of Kuqa. A few days earlier 35-year-old Mehmet Dursun Uygurturkoglu set himself on fire in front of the Chinese Embassy in Turkey, as part of a protest.

It seems, from reading what little is available on the Uyghur movement, that their thinking is the same as that of the Tibetans–if you want the world to really notice and take action, the time is now (when all eyes are on China for the Olympics) or never. Unfortunately, it may be the case that a redress within China to their plight, combined with a lack attention outside China, is fostering extremist elements in the once-passive Uyghur autonomy movement. China certainly won’t forget these slaps in the face, either, so things are likely to only get worse from here in the short term.

Then, there’s basketball, touted here as being a particularly strong medium for fostering Sino-American relations. This theory got put to the test on Sunday, when America and China faced off in what was, by some estimates, the most watched basketball game in history. American players, according to reports, played a far more aggressive game than their counterparts and quickly widened the point gap after halftime before winning. Even Bush got up and left the stadium at halftime. So: it’s a mixed result. The huge attention the game received is certainly hopeful, though, and it should be kept in mind that cross cultural understanding is a process–rarely a result.

Next, China’s sovereign wealth fund. An anonymous poster over at the China Economics Forum had this interesting response to the post on CIC, the national sovereign wealth fund, on that blog:

I thought your analysis of the CIC was right to highlight the corporatists risks created by large sovereign investments domestically. But the CIC’s ability to invest domestically is limited, as it primarily is a vehicle for helping to sterilize China’s rapid reserve growth and thus it has to use the proceeds of its rmb bonds to invest abroad (its purchase of Huijin/ recapitalization of the CDB is a bit misleading … there are limits to what it can do here if it wants to help move funds out of China and thus slow reserve growth). Moreover, it isn’t — unlike Alaska’s fund — financed out of a fiscal surplus but rather is financed by borrowing, and borrowing in rmb to buy $ produces losses, not gains in most scenarios. as a result, it isn’t a vehicle for creating wealth. And as it was created to manage the fx that China’s government is accumulating as a result of a policy of resisting market pressure for currency adjustment, in my view it represents a move away from capitalism, not a move toward it — China’s state is accumulating large funds and investing them (in ways that may or may not reflect state goals other than limiting china’s financial losses), reinforcing state power in the global economy as a byproduct of a government policy to limit the adjustment in a key market price.

We’re not entirely convinced of the argument, yet, but thought that its merits attention.

And, last–for those disappointed not to be hearing more about Beijing’s smog–it would appear that the reason is because it has lifted somewhat. Recently thunderstorms have knocked much of the pollution out of the air, giving relatively clear skies. Hopefully, it won’t be the last breath of fresh air the 2008 Olympics brings into China.

Let’s recap the Olympic run-up with a little photo album:

First of all, there was the official Beijing Olympic marketing campaign, put in place to inspire and strike fear into the hearts of Chinese children all across the country with its haunting panda ghosts. These color-themed monsters were named Beibei, Jingjing, Huanhuan, Yingying, and Nini–meant to replicate the sound, in Chinese, of “Beijing Welcomes You” but really coming out like “Beibei Jingjing Welwel Comescomes Youyou”. These critters even starred in their own line of “Olympic adventures” on VCD. Things did not appear to be off to a good start.

“Eat at official Olympic sponsor McDonald’s, or we’ll come haunt you in your sleep!”

Then there was the infamous torch relay around the world. To China, this was a time to show off just how far the country had come by lining the torch procession with a group of hand-picked thugs. To hundreds of disgruntled protesters, this became a moment to embarrass China on international television and show what a really good heart they have. It was a journalist’s dream showdown, spoiled only by the fact that, when the torch got to San Francisco, organizers made sure that it ran on a shortened route that nobody could find.

Stealing a torch from a one-legged girl in a wheelchair–what class!

This, of course, deeply offended the Chinese, who saw it as an attack on their country by Western powers bent on spoiling the fun. Suddenly, everybody started feeling to need to show how much they hate Western media and love the Olympics. Also, it led China–which had been excluded from the Olympics until 1980 because of politics, and was wagering an increase in political leverage on a successful Olympics–to claim that the Olympics is not political.

Actually, this is how people prepared for the Olympics in ancient Greece, too.

And then the advertisers went crazy. Everybody and anybody in business who had had a nighttime fantasy about one billion customers decided that they needed to throw some money at the Olympics to curry favor. “Official Sponsor of the 2008 Beijing Olympics” logos popped up so often in China that most people began assuming if a business didn’t have one it had been stolen by a young patriot. NBC sold over $1 billion in Olympic ad time. Every celebrity in China, from Jackie Chan to Zhang Yimou, became representatives of the Games. It was the beginning of the decent into chaos.

Mess with China and get hit by a dumb bell(e): Lucy Liu shows China’s fashion muscle in a feature in Bazaar.

But for those that thought the old China was disappearing forever, sighs of relief followed when nobody could get tickets through the bureaucracy set up to distribute them. An internet system designed to sell the tickets repeatedly crashed, overwhelmed by the “technical problem” of, uh, lots of people wanting to buy tickets. People waited days in long lines in the Beijing heat to buy at ticket counters. Riots began when some tried to jump the line. Men cried when they couldn’t get seats for their favorite sports. In the end, of course, a few simple adjustments to the bureaucratic process fixed all the chaos.

Ah… the China we all remember and love.

But now it’s finally all happened. The opening ceremony went off with a hitch, 17,000 Chinese were married, and, though there are two weeks of Olympics still ahead, it’s pretty much all a comedown from here. In fact, one begins to wonder whether, with this being the most political, most commercial and otherwise most generally hyped Olympics of all time, if the opening ceremony wasn’t just a climax for China’s modern history, but turn in the history of the Olympics as a whole.

Will the public begin to lose interest in the whole sporting event, after such an overwhelming Olympic run-up? With all the news coverage and advertising involved, this Olympics has become more of a reality TV show than an amateur sporting event aimed at fostering international cooperation. And–as we all know about television and reality–no matter how good it is, the public always loses interest in it, eventually.

A climax for Beijing–but also for the Olympics as a whole?

Change in China will arrive on its own terms and in keeping with its own history and its own traditions. Yet change will arrive. And it will be clear for all to see that those who aspire to speak their conscience and worship their God are no threat to the future of China.

The first two sentences are, obviously, platitudes–of course China will change and that it will do so in a “Chinese way”. Duh.

The other part is more interesting, as it’s obviously a shot at China’s protest-fearing leadership. China has been letting out one big sigh of relief at Bush’s apparent eagerness to attend the Olympics despite many potential political reasons not to, so this will probably come off a more serious rebuke than it otherwise would have. And, to an extent, it’s an admirable one–unlike Joey Cheek, Bush isn’t likely to get his visa revoked anytime soon, putting him in a unique position to support and be friendly the Olympics and China while also using that positive energy to massage change into the country. It’s hard to tell whether Bush or anybody on his staff actually gets this point (according to reports Bush just really, really wants to attend the Olympics, which may the underlying logic of his entire strategy), but this is precisely the way encourage change in the Chinese leadership: give them face and stoke their egos but, at the same time, apply constant, light pressure on key issues. This is certainly better than the “media attack” approach popular in the West right now, which revolves around embarrassing China and does get some results, but often ends up creating a huge backlash of nationalism that knocks the country even further back than it was before (as happened with the torch protests in Paris and London, for example).

But notice, too, what Bush is advocating in this speech. On the one hand he’s pushing for freedom of speech–obviously a noble cause. But then he advocates freedom to “worship [one's] God”? It sounds very much here like Bush (a born-again Christian) has a particular god in mind.

Freedom of belief, of course, is a noble thing and seems to be the bigger idea that Bush is advocating here. But the devil (or, in this case, God) is in the details. Of the major religious affiliations existing in China right now, after all, only two of them recognize a single god. It sounds like Bush is only supporting one of these monotheistic religions in China, and I doubt that it’s Islam.

The hidden evangelistic hopes behind Bush’s (and many Americans’) push to liberalism in China are problematic. If you tell somebody that you want to bring them greater freedom, awesome, but if they think (in this case, correctly) that your motivation for doing is to have more freedom to push your own thinking, culture, and values on them and their children–then resistance to the change is likely to crop up. And that resistance is more reasonable than it sounds–missionaries are chomping at the bit to have free reign in China again and, though the point is certainly up for debate, it seems that there has never been a documented historical case of sudden missionary fervor in some part of the world that didn’t cause as much or more harm to the local people as it did benefit to them.

If Americans really want liberalism and democracy in China, then, they’d stand a better chance of selling the Chinese on these ideas if they stopped trying to force-feed them Christianity at the same time.

You don’t have to know English to see what’s behind Bush’s speech.

The reasons for the shift are the usual culprits. Ping pong is an individualized, stand-in-place sport, while basketball is played with a team on a court, providing opportunities for strategy, sweaty bodies, showmanship and other things that young men hope will attract feminine attention. Basketball, too, has all the allure of something foreign–a big draw in China’s current state of social and economic xenophilia. Though the common impression among Chinese that they invented ping pong is, apparently, incorrect, the sport is still associated with China’s older generations and, because of its role in détente, the Communist Party. Being “old” or associated with government, as one might imagine, doesn’t help the sport’s image with young people.

Even Hu Jintao has lost his enthusiasm for ping pong.

Perhaps most important to basketball’s success are Yao Ming–now a national hero for his status as a first-string player in America’s NBA–and “Slam Dunk”, a Japanese manga and TV cartoon that has wildfire popularity among Chinese pre-teens.

It is, of course, sad to see the sport that helped thaw the Cold War slip past its prime, but basketball certainly has a lot of promise of its own, on this front. Basketball, after all, has all the potential to do for Sino-American diplomacy what baseball does for America’s relationship with Japan and Taiwan–provide a common cultural medium for discussion and exchange that is unlikely to be politicized and can be shared and enjoyed at all levels in both societies.

In other words, while Olympic fever may certainly be overheating Beijing at the moment, it’s good to pause and remember that the longer-brewing, less event-of-a-lifetime Chinese interest in the sport of basketball is probably likely to have the longer, and larger, effect on China’s future role in the world.

Here comes the next Chinese delegation to the U.S.

As they eagerly await the Beijing Olympics, the Chinese people express extraordinary levels of satisfaction with the way things are going in their country and with their nation’s economy. With more than eight-in-ten having a positive view of both, China ranks number one among 24 countries on both measures in the 2008 survey by the Pew Research Center’s Pew Global Attitudes Project. These findings represent a dramatic improvement in national contentment from earlier in the decade when the Chinese people were not nearly as positive about the course of their nation and its economy.

The Chinese people’s puffed chests are understandable. It only took a quarter of a century, after all, for them to go from citizens of one of the world’s most backward countries to members of an emerging world superpower. The Olympics is the symbol of this achievement, and it’s one that must be credited to the Chinese people–as well as to the government, whatever you may think of it. Both groups certainly deserve their moment in the spotlight.

There’s something else at work here, though. Part of reason that Chinese people are so satisfied with their country right now is due to the fact that they not aware of the reasons not to be. Beyond the nationalism and Olympic fever is the hard fact that censorship is a way of life in China. Take, for example, the protests at Western coverage of the Tibet issue. Certainly, Western media distorts and overplays the Tibetan independence movement, but Chinese perception of this bias was itself exaggerated by the fact that the Tibetan independence issue is so rarely engaged on a deeper level–the media isn’t allowed to report on it, pro-independence Tibetan sites are blocked, and generally, few Chinese ever come in contact with people able (or willing) to defend the pro-independence position intelligibly. It was something of a shock to Chinese people, then, to find that the issue got so much attention in the West and, because they simply lacked the tools to get a nuanced view of the other side of the debate, they chalked it all up to bias. Hence sites like “Anti CNN“.

There’s no proof, of course, that China wouldn’t still have satisfaction rates of 82% (in the economy) and 86% (in the general direction of the country) if the media had more freedom to report, but there’s certainly a strong argument to be made that, when the media devotes the majority of its energy to putting positive spins on a single topic, such satisfaction levels are more likely to occur than if they had freer range for reporting. These elevated satisfaction rates then, though impressive, are unfortunate. A feature of any strong country is an acute sense of dissatisfaction–an understanding of what is going wrong and that needs to be fixed.

If the Chinese people are willing to ignore their country’s pressing problems for a few days of basking in the Olympic glow it’s certainly their right to so, but they exercise that right at their own risk. Things like inflation, corruption, and a widening gap between rich and poor, after all, don’t get solved when everyone’s happy.

Obviously, this is a quick fix. The changes are short-term and, after the Olympics, we can expect Beijing to go back to its smog-churning ways (not to mention whining about how China is a developing country when richer nations ask for emissions to be cut). There has been no change in the governance, law, enforcement, political culture, or official party policy behind these cuts–they’re merely in place so that Beijing can put on a good face for the Olympics.

Communists have never liked looking at things in shades of gray.

But will there be a social change? Will Beijingers, seeing that some purposeful community action can make a huge change (assuming, of course, that the skies will clear up), get to have a taste for blue skies, once they see them again? Might this trial in Olympic face-saving make Chinese citizens more environmentally sensitive, and bring about a positive, long-term change?

It would be nice to give an optimistic “yes!”, but the Chinese people have proven to be a lot less predictable than that. The Western world thought, after all, that the democracy walls and Tiananmen protests would foster a similar long-term desire for democracy–hopes that were, infamously, dashed.

So, don’t hold out hope for anything more than temporary change: As a whole, Chinese people will go back to buying cars and redecorating their apartments and otherwise securing their own piece of the Chinese development dream. The government will go back to talking tougher on the environment than they can practically enforce. Developed nations will return to blaming global heating on cheap Chinese goods.

But, again, maybe that’s the much-vaunted Olympic spirit: to provide a glimpse of a bright, cooperative future set against a background of blue skies. Let’s hope that, however fleeting it may be, it’ll be an image that we can return to, and draw hope from.

It is tempting to react to this news as the Western media sources have: the Telegraph (UK), labels Tian a “political victim” and NPR characterizes his fate as “symptomatic of deeper problems”. Certainly, from the perspective of a country like the U.S., where Olympians are competitively selected on their performative merits alone, this is an undue invasion of government into the a non-governmental sphere–a policy all too easily labeled as “fascist”

Or is it? The issue, upon consideration, isn’t so clean cut. Certainly China exerts a great (and, perhaps, stifling) deal of centralized control over athletics, but is that what has really occurred in here? Is this undue government influence?

Perhaps not. Of the reasons given for Tian getting booted from the national team, the biggest seems to be that, after Athens, he over-capitalized on his Olympic success. Tian, praised as a “diving prince”, has sold his fame to advertise everything from seafood snacks to running machines to hardwood floors. Moreover, his high-profile liaisons with other diving stars (or rising stars) have, one way or another, turned him in a major tabloid item. While, by American standards certainly, these don’t seem like very major transgressions, in largely conservative China, where Hong Kong tabloids come about as close as you can get to legalized porn, Tian’s actions can be seen as having rubbed against the grain of values.

If, in the U.S., a basketball team were to boot a player for a season for womanizing or drug-use, there would certainly be a crowd that would praise the decision, especially because noteworthy sports players have long been recognized as social role models. Using another example, it seems very likely that the U.S. would remove an athlete from the Olympic team if s/he made pornographic materials while wearing a U.S. Olympic jersey before the games. At least such actions would engender a great deal of anger and debate in America. Given that Olympians are supposed to be representatives of their countries–and that the Olympics is meant to foster international understanding, cultural exchange, and peace–I fail to see significant differences, except in degree, between these scenarios and Tian’s particular case.

Certainly, there’s no denying that China’s rules for its athletes are draconian and easily manipulated for hidden agendas. But, given that China has announced big hopes to win at least 40 gold medals this year, cutting Tian for the sake of preserving values doesn’t seem to be so obviously authoritarian: it could just as easily be regarded as a respect-worthy act of cultural values promotion in line with the Olympics spirit.

Though there are no clear-cut answers here, it would be nice to see Western media outlets address (if not fully engage) the more textured debate that surrounds the issue.

Money can’t buy him gold.

“Things got rough at 4 a.m. and a fight broke out,” said Gao, a 34-year-old real estate agent, in an interview. “Some of the barriers were wrecked and it got scary at one point.”

Huang Dong, a 23-year-old civil servant who queued for almost 24 hours, said thousands were involved in the disturbance caused when some people tried jumping the line.

Mile-long lines certainly show the Chinese enthusiasm for the Olympics, which many are viewing as something likes China’s debutante party. Things like this, however, have made it a rather rocky “coming out” for China, which the Western media has already seen fit to put to the fire for everything from pollution to human rights to trading with Sudan. Nobody wants to be reminded, I’m sure, of the notorious lack of manners in China’s urban centers.

The “queuing scuffles” however, happened nearly three days ago, why bring it up again here? Because of this interesting item that appeared recently in Variety Asia:

After the melee, Games organizers made “appropriate adjustments” to the sales schedule to cut waiting time.

Apparently, then, a few simple bureaucratic adjustments solved the worst of the problems.

Nothing could be a more painful reminder of why China might not be quite ready to be introduced the polite society of the first world. Under the many other things that Western countries want to embarrass China for is the simple fact of bureaucratic inefficiency, one that makes it tough for civil servants to make decisions and get things done. Government employees in China are often so burdened by rules and layers of bureaucracy that they are simply uninspired to do their jobs–which leads to all sorts of creative ways for people to try to get things done, from aggressive line-cutting to various forms of breaking the rules (like bribes and favors).

So, certainly, China’s notoriously bad etiquette is partly socially ingrained and, as such, will also likely subside as the country continues to develop but, if the P.R.C. really wants to change the world’s opinion of China and it’s people, it should start by reforming its very bureaucracy that the Communist Party runs on.

Scuffling–the first competitive event of the 2008 Olympics.