Did the Olympics change our perception of China?

[indraadnan]

There seemed to be two conflicting narratives running through the media reporting on China during the Beijing Olympics. The "you don't fool me!" pieces which focus on continuing human rights issues and the 'outrage' of substituting a prettier girl for a plainer one in the Opening Ceremony (we never do that of course). And the "gosh, Chinese people are human" pieces, which show a young superpower struggling to find its feet on a global stage.

Which do you buy? Were the Olympics a good example of soft power - opening the way for a better relationship with China - or not?

[pat kane]

I heard Damon Albarn talk the other day on Radio Four's Front Row, being interviewed about his Monkey opera and album. What he said he wanted his work to do was to get people to think about whether they wanted to "engage with Chinese civilization, or not - that's the big question. We have to ask ourselves how we want to relate to it". I'm sure we Westerners are beginning a very long process towards seeing how China's new prosperity will inflect what we regard as the basics of modern life - democracy, markets, education, governance, popular culture. I recently saw a movie from an underground Chinese filmmaker Ying Liang, called The Other Half, which brilliantly showed everyday life in a furiously over-productive and over-polluted province. The fact that that such a gloomy, grumpy movie got made in China, and is seen through samizdat DVD distribution, was encouraging enough news. There's clearly an active realist cultural movement going on there, trying to bear witness to the struggles of aspirant Chinese, which reminds me more of Czechslovakia pre-1989, than some nation of programmed worker-citizens (the impression I got, personally, from all those startlingly synchronised masses in the opening Olympic ceremonies). If this kind of free expression is possible, then I have some hope that diverse cultural expression will actually seep upwards into Chinese governance. "Soft power" as government propaganda (a la the cruder definitions from Nye, and sometimes the official endorsement from the Chinese leadership) is pretty ho-hum. Soft power as a multiplication of stories and visions, and hybrid artforms like Albarn's opera, which swarm across borders, weakening the fussy grip of Communist-party authoritarians, is a pretty exciting prospect.