The bigger story behind the Beijing Games is the way it has brought a spot-light to Chinese ultra-nationalism. Everything the PRC government has done on organizing the Games - starting from spending an estimated $50B, to hiding away the poorer sections of the city behind 3-meter high "Culture Walls", to broadcasting computer-generated "fireworks", to a Politburo member preventing a little 7 year old girl from singing in the opening ceremony because her buck-teeth made her "not cute enough" to represent China on TV, to allegedly forging false passports for underage gymnasts - points to a desperate attempt to win recognition from the world for its Great Power status.
Anyone else find the parallels between Berlin 1936 and Beijing 2008 alarming? Btw the New York Review of Books has an article about this that attributes this to a national narrative of the "Century of Humiliation" propagated by the government from Mao onward: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/21715 ---------------------------------------------snip A particularly important element in the formation of China's modern identity has been the legacy of the country's "humiliation" at the hands of foreigners, beginning with China's defeat in the Opium Wars in the mid-nineteenth century and the shameful treatment of Chinese in America. The process reached an understandable high point with Japan's successful industrialization and subsequent invasion and occupation of China during World War II, which was in many ways psychologically more devastating than Western interventions, because Japan was an Asian power that had succeeded in modernizing, while China had failed. In the early twentieth century, a new literature, with a new historical narrative to match, arose around the idea of bainian guochi, "100 years of national humiliation." By taking up its own victimization as a theme and making it a fundamental element in its evolving collective identity, China ensured that certain traits would express themselves again and again as it responded under stress to the outside world. Highlighting their country's history as a victim of foreign aggression led Chinese leaders to rely on what Gries calls "the moral authority of their past suffering." Indeed, China's suffering at the hands of foreigners became a badge of distinction, especially during the period in the 1960s in which non-Western countries vied with one another to appear the most "oppressed" by imperialism, and thus the most incipiently revolutionary. -raghu. -- Eagles may soar but weasels aren't sucked into jet engines! On Tue, Aug 19, 2008 at 1:11 PM, Jim Devine <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > In his recent New York TIMES article titled "Let the Games Be Doped" > (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/12/science/12tier.html), John Tierney > argues that we should let athletes take any drugs -- or use any > artificial means -- in athletic contests. I was going to write a > letter to the TIMES, but got lazy and/or busy. Now, in today's > "Science" section, there are two anemic letters criticizing Tierney's > perspective. So I'm provoked to write.
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