How to promote the Chinese language? By setting up a cultural corner in the Olympic village where volunteers teach athletes 你好 or making delegations enter the stadium not in alphabetical order, but according to the order of the simplified Chinese characters. The organisers announced this yesterday. I’m not exactly sure what it means. But I assume it refers to the number of strokes in a character and delegatios will enter in ascending order. So the first country to grace the Bird’s Nest should be 日本. Who is the last besides China?  On this topic, I really like the logo of the Beijing games. It resembles a person in running motion but also the character 京.

For a complete list of countries in both alphabetical and simplified Chinese character oder (and much more), check the ChinesePod Olympics site.

http://chinesepod.com/olympics/

These photos feature some of the most iconic places in China. However, what catches most people’s eyes is the naked man doing push ups. How scandalous! The naked man is a TV host from Guangdong. He claims that the series of naked photos display his pride of China and his body. 

You can probably figure out that such brave actions would scandalise China. But interestingly the focus is not so much on nudity in China’s ‘sacred’ sites. But whether the photos are genuine.  I call this the ‘tiger syndrome’, aka the fake tiger photo fiasco which happened earlier this year. 华南虎/hua2 nan2 hu3/ South China Tiger is a breed near extinction. And as its name suggests, the tiger is an important cultural symbol (the real-life counterpart of the mythical dragon). Therefore, when a farmer presented a photo of the tiger taken it in the forest near where he lives, it ignited national excitement. He was rewarded money and made multiple TV appearances to describe his close encounter with the tiger. But a surprising sequence of developemnt ensued. The authenticity of the photo was challenged by the zealous internet community, China’s de facto civil society. And it turns out that the tiger was a superimposed image. As a result, no great photos go without the suspicion of photoshop. And quite good photos these are.   

Nothing displays the extreme wealth, hype and excess in China better than the price tag of the Olympics opening ceremony.  On ganji.com, the hottest cyber market for trading Olympics tickets, several sellers have the neck to charge 100,000 RMB for a ticket originally priced at 5,000, the highest of the opening ceremony. This is extreme and might even be a publicity stunt more than anything else, but in general, the tickets resold on the market go for 10 times the original value.  The organisers have regulated against exorbitant profiteering through measures like ID check for ticket buyers and only one resell is allowed at no more than twice the price, but rules are often hardly more than a mere guide line for behaviors.  As China is fast becoming the world’s largest market for luxury products where million-dollar Maybachs sell like hotcakes, the outlandishly rich might just drop 100,000 RMB on the game of a life time.

Organisers of the 2008 Games recently announced a standard, four-part Olympic Cheer. It is a series of hand motions and slogans that’s being promoted as THE way to cheer. See the video clip and illustration for reference. This doesn’t mean spectators’ can’t cheer in their own ways, but the authorities hope to rally a uniform, powerful and 文明/wen2 ming2/’civilised’ audience to showcase China’s image to the world.

This might seem ridiculous. And many of us in China think it is. But China is used to such ‘engineering’. Much like the idea of making peasants into Frenchmen in Post Revolution France, the authorities have always been concerned with the issue of 文明/wen2 ming2/’civilised’ or ‘proper conduct’ in post 1949 China. And there is indeed a lot of 不文明/improper conduct around. Spitting, littering and flamboyantly speaking on the phone in cinema are starters. The Shanghai government even has a七不/qi1 bu4/seven don’ts for its residents. Amongst them are ‘don’t spit’ and ‘don’t litter’.

You can imagine how the organisers feel about those entrenched behaviours during the Olympics. Therefore, a national ‘be a civilised spectator’ campaign/文明观众/wen2 ming2 guan1 zhong4/ was launched. It features basic rules like ’switch off phone during the match’ to specific rules of the sports and how to watch and cheer appropriately. 

How do people respond to the authoritarian ‘do’s and don’ts’? Well, for a people so accustomed to and almost immune to rules and regulations, we take whatever we deem to be useful or make sense and shrug off the rest. This is how a lot of poeple feel about the official cheer: the idea is a bit absurd, but the actual practice is fun and energising. Besides, when you are immersed in the collective hype, why not?

But of course uniform action and thinking conjure up rather negative associations in the rest of the world. A subtlety which we’ve yet to learn to handle. The slogan of the Beijing Games is ‘one world, one dream’/同一个世界，同一个梦想/tong2 yi1 ge4 shi4 jie4, tong2 yi1 ge4 meng4 xiang3, which resonates with the talk of harmony, a theme of this administration. But I guess what would be even more valuable is the recognition and respect for ‘one world, different dreams’, 同一个世界，不同的梦想／tong2 yi1 ge4 shi4 jie4, bu4 tong2 de meng4 xiang3.