Via a link this great blogger left on Facebook, I found this very entertaining article. Is it based in any reality? I have no idea. My first instinct is to believe BOCOG and their PR people (my competitors) could never begin to have the PR acumen to choreograph such a delicate operation, but who knows? Definitely read it, especially if you are interested in the PR, Olympics and fairy tales.

The final section made me smile; the picture it paints is awfully rosy:

....China now has stakes in some of the great symbols of the western corporate world - such as Merrill Lynch and BP. China is starting to push back. Many young Chinese know that the likeliest outcome for the short-to-mid-term future is for Chinese companies and organisations to initiate a fresh and startling process of globalisation. More and more of the international agenda is now in China's hands to shape.

So as western journalists write the Olympic stories they had already planned months before, delivering them to an audience who are already suspecting them - and thus deprived of their element of surprise and shock - the Chinese people, like sensible people anywhere, will be relaxing, sitting back, looking at this event and seeing it for what it is - a mere three weeks of corporate frenzy, redeemed by a few sublime moments of sporting excitement, which will dissolve almost as soon as it is over. When it is, the Chinese people will be able to continue the remarkable journey they began many decades ago - and which, unlike the Olympics, really can and will change the world.

No doubt their journey has been remarkable, and it's already changed the world, painful as that is for some to acknowledge. Whether it's sustainable or ultimately built on sand no one can say. What I can say with authority is that the author is a little bit giddy about China's rise, which, as much as I want it to go on, is a lot more tenuous than you'd know from reading this article.

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As a lot of you know, I've been too busy and in too many airports and hotels to give this site any attention the past few weeks and my heart definitely isn't in it. I'm trying to get back into it, but it just can't be a high priority for me right now.

A good read, from someone who's been quite critical of China himself. Of course, all the candidates will bash China, as it makes an all-too-tempting target. Granted, there's plenty there to bash, but the casual branding of China as the root of all evil is as absurd as when Marxists say the same about the US. Thanks to Pomfret for fisking Clinton's sloppy charges.

It looks like my hosting company fixed the problem. Still, I am in the process of divorcing myself from Movable Type and hope to have a new and improved site for you in the very near future.

Even though you can comment again, I can't post for another day or two. All of your comments from last week that you thought were gone have been restored. See you soon.

I am out of town and I will try to get the problem fixed when I am back in China. First I need to find someone who can help me port the whole site off of MT and into a more user-friendly environment like Wordpress. For now the comments are hopelessly screwed up, and without comments this blog isn't very interesting. Any site designers out there?

I'm afraid I don't know how to fix the problem, but in the meantime, here is another open thread to use until it gets FUBAR'd too...

No comments for nearly 8 hours - sorry, something happened to corrupt the last thread. Let's hope it's only a temporary problem. Let's try to resume here.

There have been several posts here recently about the problems China's overly passionate, overly nationalistic youth are causing for their country, and how their tendency to over-react to what they perceive to be overly harsh criticisms of their country gives the world an even worse impression of China. (And yes, I know, thats a lot of "overs" for one sentence.) It is painful to read about this, because as all of us know, there is at least some validity to these students' viewpoints - on some topics the outside world really is overly harsh and at times misinformed - but the way they go about expressing themselves only adds fuel to the fire and diminishes their argument.

Articles like this from today's Times underscore the vicious circle:

When the time came for the smiling Tibetan monk at the front of the University of Southern California lecture hall to answer questions, the Chinese students who packed the audience for the talk last Tuesday had plenty to lob at their guest:

If Tibet was not part of China, why had the Chinese emperor been the one to give the Dalai Lama his title? How did the tenets of Buddhism jibe with the 'slavery system' in Tibet before China's modernization efforts? What about the Dalai Lama's connection to Hitler?

As the monk tried to rebut the students, they grew more hostile. They brandished photographs and statistics to support their claims. 'Stop lying! Stop lying!' one young man said. A plastic bottle of water hit the wall behind the monk, and campus police officers hustled the person who threw it out of the room.

Scenes like this, ranging from civil to aggressive, have played out at colleges across the country over the past month, as Chinese students in the United States have been forced to confront an image of their homeland that they neither recognize nor appreciate. Since the riots last month in Tibet, the disrupted Olympic torch relays and calls to boycott the opening ceremony of the Games in Beijing, Chinese students, traditionally silent on political issues, have begun to lash out at what they perceive as a pervasive anti-Chinese bias.

Clearly, this kind of reaction - throwing bottles in a USC classroom or throwing rocks in Korea - is not the best strategy for winning hearts and minds. But at least this article tells us where these students are coming from. Too rarely in the Western media do we see any meaningful insights into why the young people feel so frustrated and filled with pent-up anger. The article, however, also exposes their weakness, such as emotional but factually challenged "documentation" of Tibet's progress. (And I'm not saying Tibet hasn't progressed since its "liberation"; in many ways it has. But the materials the students are brandishing, described on page two of the article, do little to further this argument.) And a shaky grasp of history. And a childish manner of self-expression.

While I sympathize with the students frustration at what they see as the world's refusal to listen to reason, I also know they are using exactly the wrong strategy to get their message out. With each new horror story I wonder, why can't they take a step back and see how the Antichrist the Dalai Lama has managed to arouse global sympathy? He didn't do it by throwing rocks. He didn't do it by scowling and chanting furious slogans.

I am traveling and will have to cut it short. But let me just finish by qualifying a point I've made in earlier posts, namely that nearly all of the young Chinese I know, no matter how intelligent and urbane, are adopting the anti-CNN mentality. Since I wrote that, I've talked with at least a few who have voiced genuine concern over their friends' un-thought-through approach to speaking out. Most of them are a bit older than my angry friends, mainly in their 30s, and they are in despair over the immature and ineffective tactics employed by their younger countrymen. "Why do they always have to show the world their anger? Do they think that helps?" bemoaned a business friend of mine earlier today, and I felt his pain.

Maybe the 20-somethings will grow out of it. I think most of us can look back to our 20s and cringe at some of the things we did back then. But I fear the anger may be too ingrained, a strain of disease the Party cultivated to protect itself that has now run amok. No matter how grounded in fact some of their arguments may be, as long as they present themselves like over-testosteroned adolescents, China has yet another big problem on its hands. This image of a nation overrun by strident, violent youth who threaten to once again turn China inward is exactly what the country doesn't need on the eve of it's long-awaited and very expensive coming-out party. It could really damage the big show. And it isn't doing much to further China's image on college campuses outside of China.

If this post rambled or appeared more incoherent than usual, apologies in advance. I'm on the road and as sleep-starved as usual.

In every way, as I again head for the airport. I'm afraid my schedule will bring the recent party over here to an end, but here's another open thread in case anyone has something to say.