Olympics 2008: China leaps onto world stage in style

Comment: This also applies to India which has produced 4 billionaires out of top 10 in Forbes list in 18 years of globalization compared to only one by UK or USA or Germany or France, where modern industrialization started 150 years ago

 

Five rings, one party

Posted online: Friday, August 08, 2008 at 0108 hrs Print Email

China’s Olympics are a great achievement, but what do they conceal?

The Indian Express

: According to an old story, when Empress Catherine the Great of Russia took foreign ambassadors to visit the devastated Crimea, her general, Grigori Potemkin, put up fake villages along the path to present a false front of prosperity. Ever since, authoritarian regimes everywhere have found it difficult to resist the lure of building Potemkin villages. As the eyes of the global village turn to China, and its journalists and sportspeople descend on the media and Olympic villages, the question will be inevitable: has the stupendous makeover that the government of the People’s Republic has given Beijing turned it into just another Potemkin village?

In some ways, of course, the question is unfair. Urban China’s prosperity is not completely mythical, and the very scale of the Chinese effort reveals that whatever else China conceals, it is not hiding a cash-flow problem. That large sections of the Chinese mainstream aggressively support the Communist Party’s method of using the games as a means of forcing the world to acknowledge that China deserves respect for its size, history and achievements is also not in doubt. In other ways, however, the question is entirely apposite. Rural China simmers with discontent, and the edges of Chinese society have never been so marginalised. Tibet has erupted already, and Xinjiang might be doing so now. And, as in any authoritarian society, we can never really tell the degree to which individual dissent is crushed daily by the government’s long and powerful arm: American President George W. Bush pointed out recently in Bangkok that openness and justice must be realities before the Chinese people can express themselves.

So, as we marvel at the architectural wonders of the new Beijing, let us not believe that they represent a new China, as its propagandists would have us believe. Let us remember that only an ideology such as the one to which it subscribes — infinitely malleable in its details but consistently dismissive of individual rights — can pull off an endeavour that requires razing at short notice vast parts of an old, crowded city, or banning almost all private vehicle traffic for a month. As we smile at proud Chinese faces on our televisions, let us remember that such governments use exuberant nationalistic pride to control their populations. The Olympics will cost China $50 billion. We can but hope that when the ideology that props them up presents its bill to the rest of the world it will be as affordable.

 

Olympics 2008: China leaps onto world stage in style

Reuters

Posted online: Friday, August 08, 2008 at 1923 hrs Print Email

 

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Beijing, August 8:: Resurgent China opened the Olympics on Friday with a burst of fireworks at a spectacular ceremony that wove ancient Chinese history with modern wizardry and aimed to draw a line under months of political controversy.

Drums thundered, strobe lights flickered and 14,000 performers poured through the Bird's Nest stadium in a dazzling extravaganza that offered up a vision of global harmony in line with the Games' motto 'One World One Dream'.

Around 80 world leaders watched the show which celebrated imperial China, and skipped the fraught 20th century, when civil war, the Japanese invasion and hardline Communist rule left the nation mired in poverty.

"Friends have come from afar, how happy we are," an army of 2,008 drummers chanted, quoting the celebrated sage Confucius.

Friday's ceremony caps seven years of work that has reshaped Beijing and sets the seal on an industrial boom that has turned the country into the world's fourth largest economy.

However, the Olympic spotlight has also cast a harsh glare on the vast Asian nation, bringing the unrest in its Tibetan region to a wide audience and showing that China's leadership is not ready to brook any internal dissent.

Deafening firecrackers launched Friday's ceremony before a series of giant fireworks in the form of footsteps were set off, blasting above the heart of the capital, crossing Tiananmen Square as they progressed to the steel-latticed Bird's Nest.

The authorities opened the vast square, scene of a student uprising in 1989, to let people watch the pyrotechnics, prompting thousands of delighted Beijing residents to rush into the esplanade screaming 'Go China!'.

RECORD COST

The Games carry a $43 billion price tag, dwarfing the previous record of $15 billion splashed out by Athens in 2004, sweeping thousands of people out of their homes to make way for a host of state-of-the art stadiums.

National pride at the transformation of China has built steadily and the crowd roared its approval when high-stepping soldiers took the nation's red flag from the hands of a group of small children and hoisted it above the stadium.

The Games were due to be formally opened at around 11 p.m. by the president of the International Olympic Committee, Jacques Rogge. They run until Aug. 24, with 10,500 athletes from a record 204 nations chasing 302 gold medals in 28 sports.

Locals expect Chinese athletes to underscore their country's newfound strength by heading the medals table for the first time.

Friday's show, directed by local film maker Zhang Yimou, reached its climax before the athletes' parade, when a gigantic sphere representing the earth rose from the floor of the stadium, which filled with twinkling starlight.

Signs flashed up warning of the dangers of global warming.

The world's most populous nation has thus far resisted calls to curb its carbon emissions as it concentrates on growth, and its promise to stage a 'Green Games' has been belied by the hazy pollution which has clogged Beijing in recent days.

The careful choreography of the ceremony extended well beyond the stadium and 100,000 police fanned out to prevent attacks and protests, while dissidents have been kept out of sight.

Though US President George W Bush said he was coming for sport not politics, he reiterated on Friday 'our belief that all people should have the freedom to say what they think and worship as they choose'.

CALL FOR TRUCE

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon issued a video appeal at the ceremony calling on warring nations to honour a traditional truce during the Games. "I call on all those engaged in hostilities to respect it."

Unfortunately for the Olympic ideal of global harmony, the two Koreas failed to agree to march at the opening as a unified team even though they managed that in 2004 and 2000.

The best-known face of Chinese sport, 7ft 6in NBA basketball player Yao Ming, will lead his team at the ceremony.

US athletes chose former Sudanese refugee Lopez Lomong to carry their flag around the track. Lomong was a victim of government-sponsored Arab militias who fled Sudan aged 6 and spent 10 years in a refugee camp before settling in America.

China is a major oil investor in Sudan and earlier this year Hollywood director Steven Spielberg quit as an adviser on the opening ceremony to protest at China's ties with the country.

The Games are centred in Beijing, but will stretch more than 2,000-km, with equestrian events in Hong Kong, soccer dotted around the country and yachting in the eastern city of Qingdao.

The sporting action gets into top gear on Saturday with competition underway in 18 disciplines, including swimming and gymnastics, and seven gold medals up for grabs.

Among the early competitors is US swimmer Michael Phelps, who could become the first athlete to win eight golds in a single Games and the most titled Olympian ever.

Record crowds are expected to cheer on the athletes, with 7 million tickets sold guaranteeing capacity audiences -- a stark contrast to Athens when some sports played out to empty stands.

But as in 2004, the build up to the Beijing Games has been marred by drug taking. A number of athletes have failed tests in the weeks leading up to the Olympics and officials have promised about 4,500 doping checks in Beijing to root out the cheats.