Brendan O’Neill worked for the journal of the Revolutionary Communist Party, LM magazine. He is now the editor of Spiked online:
There was a flag-waving, camera-clicking party atmosphere in Chinatown yesterday. Once you negotiated your way past the rows of bag-searching police officers posted at both entrances to Gerrard Street – ‘What’s this?’ asked a 12-year-old cop as he spotted a book about China inside my bag; ‘It’s a book about China’, I replied – you found yourself in a glittering Mini-Beijing.
There were dancing red-and-gold dragons, Chinese drummers, beautiful young women handing out Beijing 2008 flags for everyone to wave when the torch finally arrived. ‘It will be here in 20 minutes or so’, a policewoman assured an impatient Chinese boy. ‘That’s what she said 20 minutes ago’, the boy complained to his father. Kitchen workers in crisp white jackets, fags hanging from the corners of their mouths, stood precariously on the railings outside restaurants. The staff of Everwell, a Chinese medicine store, held up a small, makeshift placard saying: ‘Everwell supports the Beijing 2008 Olympics.’ That’s a radical political statement these days.
