Rick Ruffin, satirist

This may well take the cake. I mean, a skyscraper cake with a whole jar of maraschino cherries on top and enough Cool Whip to swim in. What can one say?

History has dealt China a dirty hand. It had famine, it had Mongol invasions, it had British colonization and the Opium War. It had Japanese invasion and the Nanjing Massacre. It is no stranger to atrocity. And it never had enough land. Not good land, anyhow. Fate dealt it the Gobi Desert.

In spite of these limitations, Mao Tse-tung managed to consolidate the country, to kick out the European and Japanese colonizers, to instill a one child policy (which India has yet to do), and to embark on the Great Leap Forward. And what a leap it has been.

Yikes. Could someone in this modern world actually look with a straight face at the Great Leap Backwards and praise it? Could someone actually say, without irony, that Mao’s leadership was so positive it helped balance the “dirty hand” China had been dealt? Could they? (I guess it becomes slightly more believable when the same person claims it was Mao who implemented China’s one-child policy, which began in 1979. I was always of the impression Mao was quite dead by then.)

This is via the Marmot, who caustically remarks,

Classic, Rick. Just classic. As my good friend Hamel asks in the KT comment section, this is satire, right?

Would that it were so.

Absolutely, totally priceless. BWC should post more often. Thank god for people who have the patience and fortitude to do work like this.

Actually a less tedious read than I would have expected. While reflecting on changes in the world since 911, he underscores a point I’ve believed in for a long time: no matter how atrocious the CCP is – and I find them more atrocious now than ever, or at least since the Gang of Four were put down – and no matter how strong America is despite nearly 8 years of slow bleeding under Bush, there’s little doubt that China is rising as America sinks. Now, that may not be forever; Friedman thinks we now have a window to turn that around, and I sure hope he’s right. But the facts speak for themselves, and Friedman lays them out adequately.

As I sat in my seat at the Bird’s Nest, watching thousands of Chinese dancers, drummers, singers and acrobats on stilts perform their magic at the closing ceremony, I couldn’t help but reflect on how China and America have spent the last seven years: China has been preparing for the Olympics; we’ve been preparing for Al Qaeda. They’ve been building better stadiums, subways, airports, roads and parks. And we’ve been building better metal detectors, armored Humvees and pilotless drones.

The difference is starting to show. Just compare arriving at La Guardia’s dumpy terminal in New York City and driving through the crumbling infrastructure into Manhattan with arriving at Shanghai’s sleek airport and taking the 220-mile-per-hour magnetic levitation train, which uses electromagnetic propulsion instead of steel wheels and tracks, to get to town in a blink.

Then ask yourself: Who is living in the third world country?

Yes, if you drive an hour out of Beijing, you meet the vast dirt-poor third world of China. But here’s what’s new: The rich parts of China, the modern parts of Beijing or Shanghai or Dalian, are now more state of the art than rich America. The buildings are architecturally more interesting, the wireless networks more sophisticated, the roads and trains more efficient and nicer. And, I repeat, they did not get all this by discovering oil. They got it by digging inside themselves.

I realize the differences: We were attacked on 9/11; they were not. We have real enemies; theirs are small and mostly domestic. We had to respond to 9/11 at least by eliminating the Al Qaeda base in Afghanistan and investing in tighter homeland security. They could avoid foreign entanglements. Trying to build democracy in Iraq, though, which I supported, was a war of choice and is unlikely to ever produce anything equal to its huge price tag.

But the first rule of holes is that when you’re in one, stop digging. When you see how much modern infrastructure has been built in China since 2001, under the banner of the Olympics, and you see how much infrastructure has been postponed in America since 2001, under the banner of the war on terrorism, it’s clear that the next seven years need to be devoted to nation-building in America.

Yes, I know – the Olympic Green is not China. For all the progress, many are more impoverished than ever. But the progress is nevertheless undeniable, and no one looking at China without Cold War-tinted spectacles can see that China is increasingly a power to be reckoned with as US influence wanes. (Whether this progress is sustainable is a whole different conversation. Still, it has proceeded uninterrupted for decades, something of a miracle in itself.)

In this respect, Mr. Hu, whom I both detest for his stranglehold on power and grudgingly and cautiously admire for his pragmatic ability to broker deals and get things done, has overshadowed Bush (not that that’s so hard to do) and turned traditional views on the balance of power on their head. No small achievement, so credit where due. A pity that a man who can reshape the political universe and move mountains can do nothing to restrain his corrupt officials from terrorizing their citizens and living in obscene and conspicuous wealth off the fat of the land.

And no, that is not “anti-China”; it is anti the plundering and brutalization and exploitation of Chinese people who deserve far better. More on that later when I review Philip Pan’s marvelous new book.

A commenter in the thread below points to an article in the Syndey Morning Herald about how the Sydney Symphony mimed its way through the Opening Ceremony performance for the 2000 Games in their home city. And it’s more than just synching/miming:

Even worse, it admits the backing tape was recorded, in part, by its southern rival, the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra.

So the parallel with the China crooked teeth controversy intensifies. Not just faking it, but taking credit for what was the work of another.

I haven’t said much about this because of mixed feelings. I don’t like the practice of lip-synching because it’s deceptive – no matter how you parse it, you are fooling the viewers. So I understand the critics of Pavarotti and countless caught-lip-synching pop stars who felt they didn’t get what they paid for. At least what they heard was the artist him/herself, even if it was canned and piped in – if that’s any consolation.

It goes to a whole different level when you’re lip-synching and pretending to be the performer when you’re actually not. It’s not the end of the world and it doesn’t ruin the Opening Ceremonies of Sydney or Beijing. It just doesn’t look good, even when they have excellent excuses. It looks even worse when it appears the main factor influencing the decision is the real singer’s teeth. In Sydney, the excuse was lack of time to make a backup tape (or something like that). Whatever. It still looks deceptive, and certainly blows a big hole in the argument that “only China” would go to such lengths to cover up reality in the name of putting on a good show.

Let’s focus more on things that really matter instead of trying to make China look bad for what was a spectacular Opening Ceremony and a very well-hosted Games. There are plenty of other things to criticize China for.

Note: This is a blog post I wrote for another site, cross-posted here. I’ll share the link where it’s cross-posted once I know it myself. I wrote it yesterday afternoon as the rain was clearing up.

The crowds in the Main Press Center have started thinning and there seems to be a general sense of winding down. In just three days they’ll lock down the Olympic Green, which won’t open again until September when the Paralympic Games begin.

One thing I’ve learned about doing Olympic PR is just how top-loaded the 17-day event is. That is to say, there’s an unbelievable amount of effort expended in the days leading up to the Opening Ceremony and the week following. And then, the balloon rapidly deflates. You’ve prepared your materials, held your most important press conferences, run around like a chicken with its head cut off trying to coordinate a seemingly endless stream of interviews with the very highest executives and then…. I don’t want to say it dies, but it sure slows down and gets easier.

I’m on the Olympic Green now and it’s packed. Visitors are lined up at the partner pavilions in spite of the on-again-off-again rain, gray skies and a sudden drop in temperature. BOCOG finally opened up the Green a few days ago after restricting access to non-ticket holders. Last week a number of sponsors were wringing their hands. They’d spent millions of marketing dollars building elaborate pavilions, and for the first few days after the Opening Ceremony the Olympic Green was practically a ghost town. The sight of televised events in stadiums that were clearly full of empty seats added to a sense of gloom among some sponsors and of mystification among the media in town to cover the Games. Every seat was supposed to be sold out.

There’s a lot more people now and the stadiums seem fuller, perhaps in part because BOCOG came up with a creative solution to save face. In any case, things are looking pretty happy at the moment.

I think the lingering question in the weeks (years?) ahead will be whether China saw a good return on its investment of tens of billions of dollars in perhaps the most ambitious positioning/branding project of all time. It was always about PR, about China’s “coming out,” about presenting a new image of China to the world. Instead of a hopelessly polluted Beijing drowning in its own traffic, newcomers would see a manicured city with relatively clean air and fast-moving highways, cops on every corner, smiling volunteers who all speak English, even recycle bins (very conspicuous all over the Green) so people can carefully separate plastics and bio-degradables. Of course, every once in a while we got uncomfortable reminders that perhaps something less delightful lurked behind the carefully constructed montage of happiness and love, but compared to the glitz and the glamor and the gold these and other inconvenient truths received relatively short shrift.

From the spectacular Opening Ceremony to the efficient crowd management to the prettying up of the city, I’d give China very high marks indeed. At the same time, I’m sorry (though not surprised) they didn’t seize on this as an opportunity to show the world they had lightened up, that they could extend some magnanimity to protesters, give reporters truly free access to pursue their stories and open up their Internet 100 percent. Such simple gestures would tell the world that China is truly secure, that it truly believes in itself. When it make grandiose displays and then tries clumsily to stifle all criticism, it leaves itself open to charges of creating a Potemkin Village and raises questions of whether the smiles and air of celebration is real or mere window dressing, to be taken down shortly after the crowds go home. We’ll know soon enough. It’s easy enough to generate a big burst of publicity when you have unlimited resources to create The Greatest Show on Earth. The true PR value can only be measured when we see how sustainable the image of The New China proves to be.

FP has put together their list of the top-10 worst laws on the books in the PRC.  Making the cut were Article 105 of the Criminal Law Code (subversion) and the Law on the Supervision by Standing Committees of the People’s Congress at All Levels, Article 3 (upholding the leadership of the CCP).

The full list and commentary can be found here.  Tell us what you think: Fair or unfair? Which laws should be scrapped, amended, or updated? Did FP interpret the laws correctly? Any on the books that didn’t make this list?

Breaking: A right achilles injury has prematurely ended Liu Xiang’s Beijing Olympic dreams.

Update by Richard: It’s being broadcast live right now on CCTV – his coach Sun Haiping is crying his eyes out explaining his injury. Everyone in my office is huddled around the TV set watching, visibly depressed. All that time training for this, four years, gone.

It’s news to David Brooks. It’s okay for people to express their awe over things they experience for the first time, like Bush I and the bar code reader (a story that was much less newsworthy than made out to be). But Brooks seems to have literally no insight into what he’s writing about nor does he seem to have done any basic research. This piece has a”gee whiz” tone to it that I’d expect to read in a blog by someone visiting China for the first time, but not in a NYT column. At least he acknowledges that he’s completely ignorant.

Nevertheless, the story he tells and his interviews with Sichuan survivors are poignant, and I do tend to agree with his last sentence. The takeaway for me, aside from confirmation of my belief that Brooks should be demoted to beat reporter, is that even the Chinese who are vulnerable, even those with nothing, still look to the government with trusting eyes, knowing that their rulers are doing the right thing, wiling to sacrifice just about everything for what’s perceived as the common good. Thus, no bitterness over the lavish spending on Olympic pyrotechnics as they pick through the rubble of their demolished homes. These people see themselves as cogs in the vast machinery that keeps China functional. Lei Feng would be proud

As reported by Jon Watts and Tania Branigan in The Guardian:

Police in Beijing have detained a British journalist after he covered a Free Tibet protest close to the city’s main Olympic zone. John Ray of ITV News was pushed into a police van by officers and driven away from the scene.

Around a dozen activists from Students for a Free Tibet had gathered outside Ethnic Minorities Park. Police also forcibly removed the protesters after driving away the journalist.

Speaking by telephone from the back of the police van as he was driven away, Ray said: “I have been roughed up. They dragged me, pulled me and knocked me to the ground. Now they are filming me.”

He could then be heard asking the officers with him: “Why are you filming? I am a British journalist. I have all the Olympic accreditation I need.” Police officers could then be heard asking: “What’s your opinion on Tibet?” Ray replied: “I have no opinion on Tibet. I am a journalist.”

A police officer could then be heard telling him he was not allowed to use his telephone. The line went dead.

Police were also filming and taking pictures of other journalists at the scene.

UPDATE 9:19 p.m.

An official from the PSB claims John Ray was detained “by mistake” and that officers had thought Ray was a part of the protest and were unaware that he was an accredited journalist:

Ray, 44, said he was stopped by an officer and a small struggle ensued before things got more violent when more police arrived.

“They bundled me out of the park. They forced me to the floor, dragged me, manhandled me into a restaurant next door,” said Ray, who said he repeatedly told police he was a journalist but was not displaying his official Olympics media accreditation.

Later dragged to the back of a nearby van, a woman asked in English what his views were on Tibet and he repeated that he was a journalist, he said.

“Only at this stage am I able to reach in my pocket and show them my Olympic credential,” Ray said. “The van door opened and I just got out and walked.”

An official from the spokesman’s office of the Beijing Public Security Bureau said officers mistook him for an activist.

“At the time, he was among the protesters,” said the official, who gave only his surname, Zhang. “The police did not understand his identity. So they took him away to check his identity. After that, they let him go.”

No word on whether or not an official apology has been issued.

Unbelievable. But alas, all too believable.