Hidden Harmonies China Blog

As China Re-Awakens, Finding New Harmonies in a Brave New World...

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  1. China has come to represent our most intensified fears, of runaway eco-destruction, rampant consumerism and unfettered expansion … Perfect example of “seeing the speck in others eyes and missing the log in ones’ own eye.”
    Bashing China will not help us feel better about ourselves — and will only entrench an unhealthy outlook — while doing absolutely nothing to aid any democratic developments in China. It is time we stopped with this pc-version of western moral superiority and conducted our discussions about China in a somewhat more balanced manner….That’ll be the day. These “KIll them all and let God sort ’em out” bunch of fearmongers. As they like to say, “It’s easier to ask for forgiveness later than to get permission in the first place.”

  2. Looking forward to the Next 4 years of UK bashing … now this one is the father of all lies.

    August 1st, 2008 at 6:39 pm Charles Liu Says: @Anon, I’ll take the “the Games is not helping the poor” point…….Did the Atlanta Games help the poor? Housing projects where torn down, homeless people were arrested, poverty among African Americans were hidden from the visitors. Is that helping the poor? What hypocrisy that we are faulting China now:

    “Atlanta’s Olympic Legacy: More Poverty, Less Freedom”

    http://www.cohre.org/store/attachments/Atlanta_background_paper.pdf

    http://action.web.ca/home/housing/resources.shtml?x=66836&AA_EX_Session=2ad3c2e6a9bf9d3f54250e3e021294ba

    The same thing happened during Sydney:

    http://www.abc.net.au/news/olympics/features/homeless.htm

  3. I think someone has already mentioned before that even though a lot of the unpleasent of China is in a sense not that new, but since the attention is coming due to Olympics…it’s not a surprise why there will be much noise surrounding it. On the other hand, what happens afterwards could be another matter. Maybe.

  4. TB, feel free to take it up with Center On Housing Rights and Evictions, ABC Australia…

  5. @Charles Liu – Errrmmm . . . Random guess . . . . Because the Chinese government arranged a sporting event which 22,000+ foreign journos have been invited to only to discover (Shock! Horror!) that some sites were blocked at the media centre . . . . which it now seems have been unblocked.

    As for US politicians, if they weren’t going after China for “stealing jobs”, they would be going after NAFTA or the EU.

  6. China basher he might be, but that Ai Weiwei does certainly have a mouth on him:

    “”It looks like China is becoming more distant from the rest of the world, but actually it is becoming closer. Before, we lacked communication and it seemed everything was all right. But the Olympics is a wonderful thing for China. It shows all the problems. The Chinese government are very willing to learn from it.”

    Rather than covering up its faults, Ai says the government needs to show the reality of modern China. “To show your weakness is power. You don’t need to pretend. No one is perfect in this world. Telling people the old system is not working is not shameful. We all know that.”

    But other countries also need to learn. “It is the same for the outside world. For a long time there was a lack of communication, so there are a lot of cliches about China [that] are outdated. But before they find something else they can relate to, they have nothing else to use.”

    http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/aug/02/china.olympicgames2008

  7. Charles Liu,

    There are some people trying to get their 3 minutes under the sun. After Olympics, no one will notice them, so they have all come out of the woodwork before the Olympics. After 2 weeks, we will have a quieter time.

  9. @FOARP

    AiWeiWei is a nutjob and jerk in noway he’s ” one of China’s most influential intellectuals”, but hes right this time.

  10. Theo, great question. I for one would not have felt the need to defend a billion people who are voiceless in my society, had our media not painted China in such a negative, unreal tone.

    In effect these China-bashing has not only generated the backlash, and support for the Chinese government domestically, they also elicited sympathy and alternative voice to the “mainstream views” maintained by our military-industrial-media-complex in America.

  11. Is Ai Weiwei trying to get a share of the credit on the Bird’s Nest? He seemed to be a consultant for the project, but on official papers, he is not credited for anything. See following (from Arup.com):

    Design consortium:
    Herzog & de Meuron Architekten AG
    Arup
    China Architectural Design and Research Group.

    In new articles based on interviews with him, it hinted he had a more prominent role in the design. But it is not recognized officially. Ai is famous for his antics to draw attention. Once he dropped some precious pottery on film.

  13. This NYT article named different designers for the Bird’s Nest:

    “Designed by the Swiss architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, the stadium lives up to its aspiration as a global landmark. Its elliptical latticework shell, which has earned it the nickname Bird’s Nest, has an intoxicating beauty that lingers in the imagination. Its allure is only likely to deepen once the enormous crowds disperse and the Olympic Games fade into memory.”

    http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/05/sports/olympics/05nest.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin

  14. Beyong China-Bashing, by Fareed Zakaria

    ‘China bashing is not just a right-wing phenomenon. The left-of-center New
    Republic ran a cover story last month with the headline, “Meet the New
    China (Same as the Old).” Inside, the magazine thundered that “our ultimate
    solidarity” should lie not with the “odious government” in Beijing but “the
    billion long-suffering men and women of the world’s largest dictatorship.”

    Except that Chinese people (who, by the way, number 1.3 billion, not 1
    billion) seem to disagree. About the same time as the New Republic hit the
    stands, the Pew Research Center released the findings of its 2008 Global
    Attitudes Survey. Of the 24 countries surveyed, the Chinese people
    expressed the highest level of support for the direction in which their
    country was heading — 86 percent. Nearly two out of three said the
    government was doing a good job on issues that mattered to them. The survey
    questioned more than 3,212 Chinese, face to face, in 16 dialects across the
    country. And while it could be argued that people might not speak freely to
    pollsters in China, there are many indications that these numbers express
    something real. Such polls have been done for years, and the numbers
    approving of the Chinese government have risen as the economy has grown (as
    should be expected).’

    http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/postglobal/fareed_zakaria/2008/08/beyond_china-bashing.html

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