After Glow of Games, What Next for China?

Another well articulated article from NY Times. Read on, I say.

After Glow of Games, What Next for China?
By JIM YARDLEY
Published: August 24, 2008

BEIJING — The elaborate closing ceremony that ended the Olympic Games on Sunday also ended nearly a decade in which the ruling Communist Party had made the Games an organizing principle in national life. Almost nothing has superseded the Olympics as a political priority in China.

For Chinese leaders, all that effort paid off. The Games were seen as an unparalleled success by most Chinese — a record medal count inspired nationwide excitement, and Beijing impressed foreign visitors with its hospitality and efficiency. And while the government’s uncompromising suppression of dissent drew criticism, China also demonstrated to a global audience that it is a rising economic and political power.

But a new, post-Olympic era has begun. The question now is whether a deepening self-confidence arising from the Olympic experience will lead China to further its engagement with the world and pursue deeper political reform, or whether the success of the Games and the muted Western response to repression will convince leaders that their current model is working.

“China was eager to present something that shows it is a new power that has its own might,” said Shen Dingli, a professor at Fudan University in Shanghai. “It has problems, but it is able to manage them. It has weaknesses in its institutions, but also strengths in those same institutions.”

Jacques Rogge, the president of the International Olympic Committee, declared Sunday afternoon that selecting Beijing as a host had been the “right choice” and that the event had been a bridge between China and the rest of the world. “The world has learned about China, and China has learned about the world,” Mr. Rogge said. “I believe this is something that will have positive effects for the long term.”

To a large degree, the Beijing Games reflected the might of the centralized power of China’s authoritarian system: The stunning sports stadiums contributed to a $43 billion price tag for the Games that was almost completely absorbed by the state. China’s 51 gold medals, the most of any nation, were the product of a state-controlled sports machine. Those successes are one reason that some analysts doubt Chinese leaders will rush to change the status quo.

“They have earned a tremendous amount of face because of the Olympics,” said Hung Huang, a media executive in Beijing. “They are going to ride on that for a while. We don’t have a culture that is pro-change. China, by nature, has got to be provoked to make changes. The economic reforms came about because we were desperately poor.”

Indeed, for all the attention to the Olympics, 2008 also marks the 30th anniversary of China’s initial embrace of the market reforms that have powered the country’s rapid economic rise. As the population becomes more urban and wealthy, the leadership will probably have to contend with rising expectations and demands for better services. Liberals in China have hoped this anniversary would inspire new reforms, especially to a political system still marred by corruption and a lack of transparency.

But critics say that the Olympics have underscored the deep resistance within the Communist Party to becoming more tolerant of dissent. The party had faced a procession of crises during the prelude to the Olympics: the violent Tibetan protests that began in March, the protests during the international Olympic torch relay, and the devastating May earthquake in Sichuan Province.

Protests seemed inevitable during the Games, and the authorities initially seemed to signal more openness toward legal dissent when they announced three designated protest zones in city parks.

But those zones remained empty. Chinese citizens made formal applications to protest, but none were approved during the Games. Two elderly women who applied to protest about a land dispute were sentenced to a labor and re-education prison camp. Meanwhile, eight Americans were among a group of foreigners jailed after they tried to demonstrate about China’s Tibet policies. The authorities released the Americans on Sunday and placed them on a flight to Los Angeles as the closing ceremony began.

“For the Chinese authorities to sentence them at all shows the government’s insecurity and intolerance of even the most peaceful challenges to its authoritarian control,” Students for a Free Tibet, a New York-based advocacy group, said in a statement.

Even so, the Communist Party most likely won the overall public relations battle, given the enormous television coverage, largely positive, that the Olympics brought to Beijing. David Shambaugh, a China specialist at George Washington University in Washington, said the Games were a “win-win” for the party and bolstered its international image. But Mr. Shambaugh said that success would be more meaningful if it increased national confidence in a way that allowed China to move past simmering historical grievances that erupted this year, especially during the Tibet crises.

He said the Games should help China put a symbolic end to its self-described “century of humiliation” that saw the country weakened by foreign intervention that began during the second half of the 19th century. “I would hope that we would look back at this as a major threshold of when China ditched all its baggage of the historical narrative of aggrieved nationalism,” Mr. Shambaugh said, “and just rewrote that narrative and began to act with more confidence about itself and its role in the world.”

No issue poses a more immediate test than Tibet. In October, the Chinese authorities are expected to meet with representatives of the Dalai Lama, the Tibetan spiritual leader. The Communist Party renewed that dialogue after the March crisis, but some analysts questioned whether Chinese officials had agreed to the talks merely to defuse international criticism in advance of the Games. With the Olympics now concluded, China’s willingness to engage in real negotiations will be closely watched.

“That’s going to be a really good test case,” Mr. Shambaugh said.

Beneath the sphere of geopolitics, many analysts were impressed with ordinary citizens in Beijing during the Games. The authorities had worried that the angry strain of nationalism that erupted during the Tibet crisis might mar the Games with local crowds jeering other teams. But little of that came to pass.

Fans even enthusiastically greeted the return of Lang Ping, a volleyball legend in China who now lives in the United States and coaches the United States women’s volleyball team — and guided the United States to a victory over the Chinese team.

Yu Zhou, a Beijing native who is now a professor of geography at Vassar College, returned for the Games and described the positive public mood and welcoming attitude as proof that enhanced national self-esteem would serve as a moderating influence on China. “I would like China to be more confident,” Ms. Yu said. “I think that would make China and Chinese become more tolerant and open.”

Any Olympic host city experiences a blend of letdown and relief once the torch is extinguished, and Beijing is likely to be no different. Major problems will need attention. The relatively blue skies during the Games were achieved only by restrictions that removed two million vehicles from the streets of Beijing and forced the temporary shutdown of many factories around the region. The city’s air pollution, which ranks among the worst in the world, will return when the restrictions are lifted after the conclusion of the Paralympics in late September.

“Beijing will return to being, well, cloudy — full of smog,” said Mr. Shen, the Fudan University professor.

He predicted that the Olympics would raise public expectations. He said Beijing residents, having enjoyed startlingly nice weather during the Games, will demand that officials find ways to keep the skies clearer.

He said the Games would bolster national confidence and help “make China a more normal country.” But he added that the country still had many problems and should not try to hide them or pretend they did not exist.

“With its increase of wealth, China is entering a stage where it needs to have better transparency, good governance and more accountability,” Mr. Shen said. “This Olympics is a good start for us to think about how China is strong — and where we are weak.”

Viva La Vida - Coldplay

It's here! The official Viva La Vida video from Coldplay. :D

If you are interested in the original post, go here.

Is Beijing cheating its way throughout the Olympics?

How could they do that? Being an honest host and all, and abide by the regulation and standard set by the I.O.C.? But with nationalism, pride and arrogance seriously endangered, a little bit of Chinese tweaking wouldn't hurt at all. Especially after miming at the opening ceremony, you would have thought Beijing would have learned a lesson. But, hey, if they can go by once without suspicion and detection, why not do it all the way? Especially considering the advantage of being the authoritarian host. Cover-up is just a piece of cake and could happen without a stir from the critics.

Why do they cheat? I seriously doubt on the effectiveness of cheating when you consider China trains its athlete as young as 4 on his/hers designated sport! In any case, Beijing may have not rigged the Game, but then someone is saying otherwise.

Is He Kexin really underage? That would be extremely hard to prove, given it is "a walk in the park" for the authoritarian regime to rigged the Game. Truth shall be told, 20 years from now. Just like the good ol' Soviet days when taking steroids is a sport. :P

Too Old and Frail to Re-educate? Not in China

Once again, I've been quite busy in recent weeks so don't have time to digest the news and present a more meaningful view of what's happening in China. In any case, here's a decent article on the recent event in Beijing regarding the erosion of rights. China has yet to fulfill and abide by what it has argued so fervently prior to bidding for the Olympics in Beijing - that of alleviating suppression and enhancing individual rights, the rights to congregate, the rights to religious freedom and the rights to freedom of speech and assembly. Has it done that? You be the judge!

Too Old and Frail to Re-educate? Not in China
By ANDREW JACOBS
Published: August 20, 2008

BEIJING — In the annals of people who have struggled against Communist Party rule, Wu Dianyuan and Wang Xiuying are unlikely to merit even a footnote.

The two women, both in their late 70s, have never spoken out against China's authoritarian government. Both walk with the help of a cane, and Ms. Wang is blind in one eye. Their grievance, receiving insufficient compensation when their homes were seized for redevelopment, is perhaps the most common complaint among Chinese displaced during the country’s long streak of fast economic growth.

But the Beijing police still sentenced the two women to an extrajudicial term of “re-education through labor” this week for applying to hold a legal protest in a designated area in Beijing, where officials promised that Chinese could hold demonstrations during the Olympic Games.

They became the most recent examples of people punished for submitting applications to protest. A few would-be demonstrators have simply disappeared, at least for the duration of the Games, squelching already diminished hopes that the influx of foreigners and the prestige of holding the Games would push China’s leaders to relax their tight grip on political expression.

“Can you imagine two old ladies in their 70s being re-educated through labor?” asked Li Xuehui, Ms. Wu’s son, who said the police told the two women that their sentence might remain in suspension if they stayed at home and stopped asking for permission to protest.

“I feel very sad and angry because we’re only asking for the basic right of living and it’s been six years, but nobody will do anything to help,” Mr. Li said.

It is unclear why the police have detained people who sought permission to protest. Some political analysts say the police may be refusing to enforce the government’s order, announced last month, to allow protest zones. Chinese lawyers and human rights advocates also suggested a more cynical motivation — that the authorities were using the possibility of legal demonstrations as a ploy to lure restive citizens into declaring their intention to protest, allowing the police to take action against them.

When the International Olympic Committee awarded the Games to Beijing in 2001, ignoring critics who said China should not be rewarded for repression, its president, Jacques Rogge, offered assurances that the Games would invariably spur China toward greater openness.

But prospects dimmed even before the opening ceremony, when overseas journalists arrived to discover that China’s promise to provide uncensored Internet access was riddled with caveats. The ensuing uproar did persuade the government to unblock some politically sensitive Web sites, but many others, including those that discuss Tibet and the banned spiritual group Falun Gong, remain inaccessible at the Olympic press center.

The announcement that the police had set up protest zones was first greeted as a positive if modest step that could allow Chinese a new channel to voice grievances otherwise ignored by party officials and the state media.

“In order to ensure smooth traffic flow, a nice environment and good social order, we will invite these participants to hold their demonstrations in designated places,” Liu Shaowu, the security director for Beijing’s Olympic organizing committee, said at a news conference. He described the creation of three so-called protest zones and suggested that a simple application process would provide Chinese citizens an avenue for free expression, a right that has long been enshrined in China’s Constitution but in reality is rarely granted.

But with four days left before the closing ceremony, the authorities acknowledge that they have yet to allow a single protest. They claim that most of the people who filed applications had their grievances addressed, obviating the need for a public expression of discontent.

Chinese activists say they are not surprised that the promise proved illusory. Li Fangping, a lawyer who has been arrested and beaten for his dogged representation of rights advocates, said there was no way the government would allow protesters to expose some of China’s most vexing problems, among them systemic corruption, environmental degradation and the forced relocation of hundreds of thousands of residents for projects related to the Olympics.

“For Chinese petitioners, if their protest applications were approved, it would lead to a chain reaction of others seeking to voice their problems as well,” Mr. Li said.

During the past two decades, China has embraced a market economy and shed some of the more onerous restrictions that dictated where people could live, whom they could marry and whether they could leave the country. But with political dissent and religious freedom, the government has been unrelenting.

In theory, the Communist Party allows citizens to lobby the central government on matters of local corruption, the illegal seizure of land and extralegal detentions. In reality, those who arrive at Beijing’s petition office are often met at the door by plainclothes officers who stop them from filing their complaints and then bundle them back to their hometowns. Intimidation, beatings and administrative detentions are often enough to prevent them from trying again.

Daniel A. Bell, who teaches political theory at Tsinghua University in Beijing, suggested that Western political leaders and rights advocates were naïve to think that the Olympics would lead to looser restrictions. Although Chinese have come to enjoy greater freedoms in the past two decades, progress has been largely stalled in the years leading up to the Olympics as officials worked to ensure that nothing would interfere with them.

In recent months, the pressure has only intensified: scores of rights lawyers and political dissenters have been detained, and even the armies of migrant workers who built the Olympic stadiums have been encouraged to leave town, lest their disheveled appearances detract from the image of a clean, modern nation.

“When you have guests coming over for dinner, you clean up the house and tell the children not to argue,” Mr. Bell said.

While the demands of Ms. Wu, 79, and Ms. Wang, 77, the protest applicants, might be seen as harmless, they threatened to expose the systemic problems that bedevil the lives of millions of Chinese. Like many disenchanted citizens, the two women, former neighbors, were seeking to draw attention to a government-backed real estate deal that promised to give them apartments in the new development that replaced their homes not far from Tiananmen Square. Six years later, they are living in ramshackle apartments on the outskirts of the city, and their demands for compensation have gone unanswered.

On Monday, when they returned to the police station to follow up on their protest applications, the women were told they had been sentenced to one year at a labor camp for “disturbing public order.” For the moment, the women have been allowed to return to their homes, but they have been warned that they could be sent to a detention center at any moment, relatives said.

Officials say that they received 77 protest applications but that nearly all of them were dropped after the complaints were “properly addressed by relevant authorities or departments through consultations.”

At a news conference on Wednesday, Wang Wei, the vice president of Beijing’s Olympic organizing committee, was asked about the lack of protests. He said it showed the system was working. “I’m glad to hear that over 70 protest issues have been solved through consultation, dialogue,” he said. “This is a part of Chinese culture.”

But human rights advocates say that instead of pointing the way toward a more open society, the Olympics have put China’s political controls on display.

“Given this moment when the international spotlight is shining on China, when so much of the international media are in Beijing, it’s unfathomable why the authorities are intensifying social control,” said Sharon Hom, the executive director of Human Rights in China. “The truth is they’re sending a clear and disturbing message, one they’re not even trying to hide, which is we’re not even interested in hearing dissenting voices.”

Let the games be doped, why not?

With China dominating over other competitors in the Beijing Olympics, the fervent training routines and massive investment of its domestic athletes has finally paid off. It is no longer a game of spirit and sportsmanship, but rather a mockery of sports investment and budgetary overhauls, with more fundings more returns and vice versa. The reigning champions, China and USA, are a showcase of this glorious system. Especially China, with its 1.3 billion potential participants and a wealth of bank roll, it can afford multitudes of 24/7 militaristic training per athlete for over 600 athletes, without putting a dent on its national budget. So are the athletes really amateurs? Or, are they whole bunch of hormone-driven chimpanzees synchronized to the movements of a specific sport after gazillion rehearsals? Sadly this is the reality, so do not be surprised at the outcome of the XXIX Summer Olympiad.

Let the games be doped? I say why not? At least it'll be more balanced this way, don't you think so? ;)

China's Leaders Are Resilient in Face of Change

Another well articulated article from NY Times on the changing face of China and the inherent problem of a one state system. For those of you who can't go around NY Times' impulsive registration, I'm quoting this article in full. Hopefully it is not plagiarism since I'm too lazy to summarize. :)

One thing to note. No wonder you see people from China coming abroad with a wealth of substance. The upper echelon has already siphoned off enough materialistic goods from the lower that they're no longer deemed useful. The exploitation of the lower class is nothing new and exists since the very beginning when a civilization emerges. However, as civilization progresses, you would've thought the exploitation would diminish, as is happening across the North America and Europe. Unfortunately, it becomes a healthy norm when everybody does it, as is evident in China.

Sadly, even the educated class is turning a blind eye, ignoring rights and being spoon-fed by the party. The day they wake up is the day when TRUE freedom arrives in China.

China's Leaders Are Resilient in Face of Change

BEIJING — As Beijing was starting construction on its main Olympic stadiums four years ago, China’s vice president and leading political fixer, Zeng Qinghong, warned the 70 million members of the ruling Communist Party that the party itself could use some reconstruction.

Mr. Zeng argued that the “painful lessons” from the collapse of other Communist parties in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe could not be ignored. He said China’s cadres needed to “wake up” and realize that “a party’s status as a party in power does not necessarily last as long as the party does.”

Mr. Zeng, who is now retired, was alluding to the pressures of economic liberalization, political stagnation and globalization that many analysts have argued would ultimately topple one-party rule in China. The Olympics also posed a pressure point as some analysts wondered whether the expectations and international scrutiny brought by the Games might help crack open another authoritarian political system — as happened in Seoul in 1988.

But if the Olympics have presented unmistakable challenges and crises, the Communist Party has proved resilient. Public appetite for reform has not waned, but the short-term byproduct of the Olympics has been a surge in Chinese patriotism that bolstered the party against international criticism after its crackdown on Tibetan protesters in March and the controversy over the international Olympic torch relay.

Economic and social change is so rapid in China that the Communist Party is sometimes depicted as an overwhelmed caretaker. But in the seven years since Beijing was awarded the Games, the party has adapted and navigated its way forward, loosening its grip on elements of society even as it crushes or co-opts threats to its hold on political power.

The party has absorbed entrepreneurs, urban professionals and university students into an elite class that is invested in the political status quo, if not necessarily enthralled with it. Private capitalists may be symbols of a changing China. But the party has also clung tenaciously to the most profitable pillar industries and the financial system, and it is not always easy to distinguish the biggest private companies from their state-run counterparts in China’s hybrid economy.

Faced with public anger over corruption, Chinese officials are now required to attend annual training sessions in a nationwide, if not always successful, program to raise competency. And if officials have long since abandoned efforts at Maoist-style thought control, the propaganda machine can still stir up nationalist passions, or shut them off, depending on the party’s priorities.

“This is a very reflective party,” said David Shambaugh, a political scientist at George Washington University and author of “China’s Communist Party: Atrophy and Adaptation.” “They are adaptive, reflective and open, within limits. But survival is the bottom line. And they see survival as an outcome of adaptation.”

The ultimate question is whether adaptation alone is enough. Many analysts say that the lack of democratic reform is inhibiting China’s economic efficiency and that reforms are needed to confront issues like stark inequality and environmental degradation. Thousands of protests erupt every year over illegal land seizures and official corruption. The Tibet crisis revealed Chinese nationalism as a major political force, even as it exposed unresolved domestic issues about freedom of religion and minority rights. To some analysts, the harsh official response to Tibet revealed an insecure, defensive leadership.

“The party doesn’t have self-confidence in its legitimacy,” said Zhang Xianyang, a liberal political analyst in Beijing. “So the government overreacts in the face of social turbulence. I think the regime is not as strong as outsiders and the common people think.

“But they are not as weak as they feel themselves.”

Party Business

For the Communist Party, China’s selection in July 2001 as host of the 2008 Olympics was a political and historic coup: a gift they could deliver to a thrilled citizenry and a new focal point, seven years in the distant future, that could be used to rally national pride.

Inside the party, leaders were intently focused on the viability of their system. The party faced no organized opposition; none is allowed. But the leadership, fretting about historical trends, had commissioned exhaustive autopsies of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Eastern European governments. By June 2001, a month before the Olympic announcement, the Communist Party’s Central Committee organization department, which oversees party promotions and training, had published a blunt report that revealed deep public anger and recommended “system reforms” to address problems of official corruption and incompetence.

China’s economy was soaring, and the country was preparing for entrance into the World Trade Organization. But if free trade could boost China’s exports, the party report also warned that deeper integration into the world economy “may bring growing dangers and pressures, and it can be predicted that in the ensuing period the number” of public protests “may jump, severely harming social stability.”

The dismantling of the planned economy had already presented an ideological challenge: What to do about the emerging class of capitalists who were rapidly accruing wealth? Admitting capitalists struck old-guard Marxists as apostasy, but it made smart politics for a party leery of any group’s emerging as a rival for power. Less than two weeks before the Olympic announcement, Jiang Zemin, who was president at the time, chose the party’s 80th anniversary to declare that capitalists should be invited to join its ranks.

Reformers hoped private businesspeople might one day prove a force for democratization. But today, together with the flow of party officials into the business sector, the mixing of money and power has rendered sharp distinctions about the state and private sectors less meaningful than they seem in the West. Businessmen have established closer links to the government and the party to get access to state bank loans and tap into the network of officials who control land and government contracts. College students eyeing a career in government or academia often make the same calculation.

“The party seems happy with that,” said Bruce Dickson, a China scholar at George Washington University and author of the new book, “Wealth Into Power: The Communist Party’s Embrace of China’s Private Sector.” “They are not looking for die-hard ideologues. They want to co-opt people into their system. And they’ve been far more successful than people realize.”

Beyond managing the rise of private enterprise, the party also faced the collapse of much of the state-owned economy.

The state’s share of the economy fell to about 35 percent in 2006 from 80 percent in 1997, according to a recent analysis in China Economic Quarterly. But that declining share does not reflect declining influence. The party’s analysis of the collapse of the Soviet bloc faulted post-Communist countries for rushing too recklessly into privatization. To preserve the party’s pre-eminence, senior officials adopted a policy of selling off small enterprises with lower profit margins while keeping a grip on the biggest industries.

Today, the state still exercises effective control over natural resources like oil, gas and coal; oil refining; production of steel and ferrous metals; telecommunications, transportation and power generation; and the financial system.

Arthur Kroeber, managing editor of China Economic Quarterly, said officials had injected competition into the state sector by pitting state-owned entities against one another without surrendering control over strategic industries.

“They have retained all the industries that have huge scale and large cash flow,” he said.

Change Agent

If anything has been a change agent in Chinese society, it has been the Internet. In 2001, China had 26.5 million Internet users. Today the figure is 253 million, the most in the world. One of those millions is a software engineer named Lu Yunfei, who joined the crowds at Tiananmen Square on the night Beijing won the Olympics.

The next year, Mr. Lu began surfing the Web and soon stumbled across news accounts of a visit by Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi of Japan to a war shrine honoring Japanese soldiers, including some accused of atrocities in China. Infuriated, he became one of the legion of the country’s cybernationalists.

“I made a U-turn in my life as a result of the Internet, as a result of freedom of information,” said Mr. Lu, now 33. “The patriotism movement is a result of the development of the Internet.”

Freedom of information always has been considered essential in liberalizing China, and the Internet has disseminated amounts of information once unthinkable. Despite an Internet fire wall and tens of thousands of censors, dissidents still post petitions that once would have gone unheard. Farmers post videos of demonstrations on YouTube.

But nationalism also has flowered online into a complicated force that the party has often managed to cultivate for its own purposes. In 2005, amid a diplomatic standoff between China and Japan, thousands of Chinese protesters held raucous anti-Japan demonstrations in Beijing, Shanghai and other cities. Initially, the government condoned the outbursts, even though such protests are illegal. But eventually, as the protests expanded, the police shut them down.

This year’s Olympic controversies pushed Chinese nationalism onto a world stage. In the days after the Tibetan riots, state media carried hours of coverage of ethnic Tibetans assaulting Han Chinese as well as television documentaries praising economic policies in Tibet. When Western leaders began calling on China to show restraint as it suppressed the uprising, Chinese nationalists rallied to the party’s defense online.

The patriotic anger intensified in April after the ugly anti-China protests that marred the Olympic torch relay in London and Paris. Voices preaching moderation, or questioning the government’s responsibility in the Tibet crisis, were drowned out. As happened three years earlier during the anti-Japan protests, officials initially gave tacit approval to the fervor and even a boycott of the French retailer Carrefour before reining things in to create a more harmonious image ahead of the Games.

Harnessing Pride

For the Communist Party, nationalism has always been a central justification of its rule. Schoolchildren are taught a heroic narrative of the party as the savior of China in 1949 and the savior of Tibet from feudalism and economic backwardness. If Westerners often view China through the prism of the Cultural Revolution and the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown, Chinese are taught about the Opium War and the colonialist advances into China by Japan and the West.

“Nationalism and patriotism mean love your country,” said Mr. Zhang, the political analyst. “The Communist Party was so clever because they linked nationalism to loving the party. They said the party was the same as the country.”

Li Datong, a former editor of a top state-run magazine who lost his job after clashing with propaganda authorities, said officials in charge of mass media and the Internet try to leave little to chance. He said the country’s army of censors dipped anonymously into the Internet debate by paying part-time writers 5 mao, or about 7 cents, to steer public opinion and monitor the tone of debate online.

“Their job is to post articles on the B.B.S. to balance public opinion,” Mr. Li said, referring to the Bulletin Board System where many Internet users interact. “The netizens call them the 5 mao party. If they get a post on a B.B.S., they get 5 mao.”

Mr. Lu, the cybernationalist, said Chinese patriots made distinctions between country and party. During the Tibet crisis, he used his Web site to highlight provocative postings criticizing the Western news media or Tibet separatism, as part of the nationalist outpouring backing the party. But in recent weeks, the Internet has also been filled with angry posts — many later censored — blaming the government for a recent energy agreement with Japan.

When it comes to the Olympics, though, Mr. Lu’s interests and the party’s seem inseparable.

“For ordinary Chinese, even if they can’t really articulate it, they feel the Olympics are a very important opportunity for China to demonstrate state power,” Mr. Lu said.

Beijing welcomes you (not!)

With a glamorous image and an extravaganza ready to unroll at 8:00 PM Beijing time (5:00 AM PST) today, everything in the Chinese capital is deemed to overwhelmingly exceed anticipation from worldwide audience and foreign dignitaries. Who can argue with that? With over 40 billion spending, a polished face is what the P.R.C. is aiming for and that's exactly what we will get. Partly thanks to the numerous visa denials to foreigners perceived as potential troublemakers, and the evictions of domestic low-income laborers, Beijing 2008 will be a memorable, yet restricted sport event enjoyable by some but mostly rejected by the conscience few.

Is the door to Beijing really wide open? Or, will it be selectively permitted only to the "friends" of China? The answer to this question will emerge as the Game unrolls... ;)

A hooray of broken promises

With less than one week to go, we are now witnessing Beijing at its finest. With a total mockery of the incompetent I.O.C. and a hooray of broken promises, Beijing has truly outdone its predecessors. It has achieved the impossible, combining nationalism, political hypocrisy, landscape transformation and dissidents purge, all within a mere span of seven years. The unprecedented nationalism, parallel to Hitler and his 1936 Olympics parade, surfaced during the international leg of the Olympics torch rely, when pro-Tibet supporters clashed fiercely with die-hard Chinese patriots in an attempt to disrupt the rely. The torch incident, together with the continuous foreign media criticisms of China, spawns a new generation of nationalists, perceiving China to be amongst hostile powers, when it is in fact not. China's political hypocrisy, illustrated over its attempt to impose sovereignty on both Tibet and Taiwan during the rely, further contradicts its promise not to politicize the game. Its unique landscape transformation of a million projects over Beijing, similar to how the Communists Russia pulled off its 1980 extravaganza, is yet another superficial showcase boasting at how great P.R.C. is, when it is in reality riddled with corruption, scandal, unjust, oppression and exploitation, so to benefit the elite few. Finally, the decades of comprehensive dissident purging campaign and limited political freedom will for sure guarantee an effective, yet smooth, running game. Seriously, with missiles overcasting on the sky above the Olympic venues, networks of surveillance cameras scanning the city, hidden microphones eavesdropping on unsuspected tourists, thousands of undercover police officers searching thousands of cars and trucks entering the city, what can possibly go wrong? Especially when Red Guard lookalike civilians have been called on to defend the motherland, the odds of going wrong is nearly as infinitesimally small.

Despite the hooray of broken promises, is the "true" Olympics spirit still in existence ? When you consider the overwhelming commercialization of the Game and the fight over who wins what, the spirit is long gone even before the Game begins. Olympics is no longer a celebration of the human body and form, but a vehicle for the multinationals to mass disseminate their products and a lucrative tourism opportunity for the hosting country. In the end, isn't a profitable bottom line and personal wealth the final goal to attain to?

Why China Has the Torch? That is a good question. Let us hope the hooray of broken promises will one day be amended, so the people of China may enjoy the true meaning of Olympic Games - that of freedom, equality, and unequivocal human rights.