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CHINA NEWS SECTION: Beijing Olympics 2008

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After the Summer Olympics, Empty Shells in Beijing
A year and a half after the Olympics in Beijing, the impressive structures built for the event are left without a purpose. From the New York Times:
In 2008, the Chinese built a ball field — boy, what a ball field — known worldwide for its lattice-like architecture as the Bird’s Nest. Alas, after the 2008 Olympics, the ticket buyers haven’t come. Right now, the Bird’s Nest serves as a winter amusement park known as the Happy Ice and Snow Season. In April, a promoter may stage a celebrity rock concert to “establish China as a world leader for global peace and a healthier planet.” Or not.
After that, the government says it may build a shopping center there.
The accompanying photographs, shot at locales for the 2008 Beijing Olympics, succinctly depict the loneliness of where the long-distance runner once strode. In a week when the United States contemplates how long its future will be spent deep in debt, they also hint at how much its greatest creditor is pinning its own hopes of building wealth on dreams.
Two summers ago, China’s Olympic extravaganza was recognized worldwide, and especially here, as a barely disguised metaphor for this nation’s rise to worldwide importance. Eighteen months later, China is more important than its leaders could have imagined.
The Times also includes a slideshow of the buildings in their current incarnations.
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- February 6, 2010 6:39 PM
China Relishes Olympics Legacy
On the one year anniversary of the opening of the Olympics in Beijing, journalists are reflecting on the legacy of the Games for Beijing and for China. From the Christian Science Monitor:
One year after Beijing hosted the Summer Games, its impact can be seen in the city’s sporting venues, shiny new infrastructure, and improved air quality, notwithstanding the latest smog. As the world watched, China radiated efficiency, sportsmanship, and pluck, on and off the field.
But any hopes that the Beijing Olympics would spur more political openness, as members of the Olympics movement had claimed, were short-lived. In the run-up, China tightened its grip on domestic criticism and lashed out at the world for “meddling” in Tibet during an ill-fated international torch relay. Since then, there have been more clampdowns.
Far from easing China into a world of human rights and obligations, the Olympics may have had the opposite effect. Its Communist leaders used the reflected glory to tighten their grip and hammer home a message of unflinching national superiority, says Russell Moses, a political analyst in Beijing.
“Beijing made it plain. This wasn’t China coming out to the world. This was the world coming round to China,” he says.
The Seattle Post-Intelligencer writes, “A year later, Beijing Olympic legacy remains vague” while Xinhua reports that, “China moving ahead with confidence gained during Olympics.”
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- August 9, 2009 9:44 PM
Michael Meyer: One World, One Dream One Year Later
“By many measures the 2008 Olympics were a smashing success, but for the people of Beijing, the Games have left a mixed legacy” From CNN.com:
Beijing’s Olympic legacy doesn’t compare with that of Seoul, whose 1988 Games cajoled the then one-party government to allow direct elections and liberalization. No such defrosting is taking place in Beijing, where plainclothes police are everywhere, including outside the studio of Ai Weiwei.
The bearded, portly Ai was chosen by the Swiss firm Herzog & de Mueron to collaborate on the design of the National Stadium. “The government would never ask me. Never,” he says. Ai’s father was a famous poet exiled to the country’s far west during the Cultural Revolution, and the 51-year-old Ai forged a career as an avant-garde artist who bristled against the state. After the earthquake in Sichuan killed 70,000 people in 2008, Ai began a project on his popular blog that challenged the reported death toll of children, most of whom perished in schools that were allegedly poorly constructed because of shoddy building materials and misappropriated funds. Officials shut the blog down, but not until Ai’s volunteers had posted the names and profiles of more than 5,000 victims.
Ai points across the street to a poplar. “When the road was widened, trees were cut down. One day I found a magpie’s nest sitting on the ground. I was really worried about the unhatched eggs in it, so I carried it inside here and then placed it in that tree. But of course, the mother never returned to the nest. I had ruined it.” The magpie’s nest was not the origin of his stadium design, Ai says, but the story illustrates what followed its completion. “I wasn’t invited to the opening ceremonies, and I wouldn’t have gone,” he says. “I have disassociated myself from every act associated with the state. Look at this city now; the empty new buildings along Qianmen are the latest example of officials and developers shamelessly chasing profit and more profit.”
I fish an official Bird’s Nest key chain from my pocket, one of the hundreds of trinkets branded with his design on sale at the stadium. “I’ve never been inside it,” Ai says. “I love the building. I’m Chinese, after all, and it’s good for China. Maybe young kids can see there is such a thing as graceful design, that it’s O.K. to have dreams, that they can come true.” Ai fingers the key chain and shakes his head. “But for now, my name is permanently associated with the country’s biggest propaganda item.”
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- August 8, 2009 4:08 PM
Detained Activist’s Kafkaesque Nightmare
Der Spiegel revisits the case of legal activist Ji Sizun, who was detained during the Olympics a year ago after applying to stage a protest in the government-established “protest parks,” and the lawyer, Liu, who is defending him:
Liu, 45, a small man, has been a member of the Communist Party for 19 years — an apparent but not necessarily inevitable contradiction to his commitment to civil rights. He feels a deep bond with people who are treated unjustly, he says, and he advocates on their behalf on the Internet, in police stations and in courtrooms, for which he has earned a reputation with the powers that be. When German broadcaster Deutsche Welle awarded him a prize the government refused to grant him an exit visa, thus preventing him from traveling to Germany to accept it in person. The incident was yet another episode in the cat-and-mouse game with the government that shapes his daily life.
Since February he has been handling a particularly complicated case. It revolves around his fifth, and most prominent, client in Fujian, the man who disappeared during the Olympic Games in Beijing almost a year ago, all because he had applied for a permit to protest in one of the “protest parks” the government had designated for that purpose. It was the man whose case overshadowed the daily press conferences given by the International Olympic Committee (IOC), the man whose story was reported by the world news media, partly because he had shattered the IOC’s and Chinese government’s grand promises when it came to democracy in China.
That man is Ji Sizun, whose disappearance SPIEGEL reported a year ago and whose fate was long unknown. Today, he is still in detention, but at least his whereabouts are known. He is being held at the Wuyishan prison, a seven-hour train journey northwest of Fuzhou, in Section 6, Cell 207. The prison is located in the midst of a wild, magnificent landscape declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site, but visiting him there is out of the question. “You can try submitting an application,” says Liu. He laughs, but his laugh sounds more combative than bitter.
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- August 5, 2009 9:28 PM
Detentions Illustrate Limits of Free Speech in China
In the run-up to the Olympic Games in Beijing a year ago, there was much talk that playing host to the Games would force China to become more open and respectful of human rights, especially freedom of expression. Yet, as the New York Times reports, a year later little has changed for one petitioner who traveled to Beijing last September and was detained in a “black jail”:
Ms. Huang was released from the hotel, the Lizhou Cement Factory Rest House, on July 17. She said she expected to remain under a form of house arrest for one year in her hometown, under police surveillance. The case is one of several that starkly illustrate how the Summer Olympics and the Paralympics in Beijing last year failed to expand freedom of speech in China, despite assertions by the international organizers of those games that the events would push the Chinese government toward more democratic policies.
Ms. Huang traveled with 10 others from the town of Liuzhou in Guangxi Province to Beijing last September to protest four cases of property seizure involving local officials. But after being interviewed by an American journalist, they were seized by plainclothes police officers who had followed them from Guangxi. Ms. Huang, two older sisters and their 79-year-old mother, all of whom had traveled to Beijing, were arrested.
The mother was soon released, but Ms. Huang and her infant son were kept for 314 days in a hotel in Liuzhou. Her two sisters were held in a detention center.
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- July 30, 2009 12:57 PM
Study: Beijing’s Air Worse Than At Past Olympics
From AP:
Beijing’s notoriously dirty air was cleaner during last summer’s Olympic games, but pollution levels were still much worse than at recent Olympics, despite a massive Chinese cleanup campaign, a new report said.
Athletes in Beijing faced pollution levels that were up to 3.5 times higher than those in recent Olympic cities like Athens, Atlanta and Sydney, said the study published Friday in the journal Environmental Science and Technology. The pollution often exceeded what the World Health Organization considers safe.
The joint American-Chinese study — the first major one published on air pollution during the Olympics — also found that the weather, and not the Chinese government’s strict controls imposed in the run-up to the games, played the largest role in clearing the air.
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- June 22, 2009 3:03 AM
Beijing Claims Profit On Olympic Hosting
From AP:
Beijing Olympic organizers say they made a profit out of hosting last year’s Summer Games.
According to figures released Friday by the government audit bureau, $2.8 billion was spent on organizing and staging the Games, including the Paralympic Summer Games that followed.
That compares to income of $3 billion thus far, leaving a profit of $176 million, the bureau said. The biggest chunk, accounting for 40 percent, came from broadcast and marketing rights, along with sales of tickets, souvenirs, and commemorative coins and stamps.
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- June 20, 2009 2:59 AM
Beijing’s Olympic Building Boom Becomes a Bust
From the LA Times:
The Beijing Municipal Bureau of Statistics reported this month that housing sales in the city dropped 40% last year. Chinese economists have predicted that housing prices will drop 15% to 20% in Beijing this year. Shanghai has experienced a similar decline.
“You can look at this perhaps as a healthy correction in the market,” Kuijs said.
In the longer term, he said, “China’s urbanization and overall development is going to lead to a very large additional demand for housing in the city.”
Before that happens, the situation could get worse. Most of the real estate has been financed by Chinese banks, which have avoided writing down the loans. Eventually, they will be forced to, and that probably will have a ripple effect throughout the economy.
“At the end, somebody is going to have to pay the piper,” real estate expert Rodman said.
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- February 22, 2009 11:19 AM
Susan Brownell: Was There a Master Plan to Use the Olympic Games to Promote a Positive Image of China to the World ?
The China Beat has reprinted a version of a paper on the 2008 Beijing Olympics and China’s image, presented at a recent conference at the University of Southern California in January 2009. Below is an excerpt:
There was a common perception outside China that the Beijing Olympic Games involved a master plan to promote a positive image of China to the outside world and that this was one of the major goals of hosting the Olympic Games, if not the major goal. I want to argue that while there was widespread agreement in China that the Olympics were an excellent opportunity to promote an image of China to the world, the vast majority of the attention and effort was focused on the domestic audience; that there was never a concrete communication strategy for dealing with the human rights issue; and that in both instances, China’s ability to communicate a positive international image was hindered by the domestic political structure.
…
Olympic China National Image Ad
If there had been a master plan for using the Olympics to promote China’s image, it would have been developed by the Central Propaganda Department. The single person most responsible for coordinating everything would have been Li Dongsheng, who was simultaneously a member of the Party Central Committee, Vice Minister of the State Administration for Industry and Commerce, and – more to the point here – Deputy Director of the Central Propaganda Department, chief of BOCOG’s Media and Communications Coordination Group, and president of the China Advertising Association. Western media tended to make a big deal out of the American (Hill and Knowlton) and British (Weber Shandwick) PR firms that had worked for BOCOG, but in fact the non-Chinese viewpoint that they provided to BOCOG was only one among many collected, and probably not the most influential – and in any case, BOCOG was not empowered to discuss “political” issues.

So the major reason that there was no master PR plan was due to the strict division of labor with regard to communications with the outside world, with only the organs under the Central Propaganda Department empowered to speak about “political” issues. While the sport, educational, and cultural systems were crafting their “cultural” messages, the Information Office was engaged in a completely independent effort to produce a television commercial for “China” at the end of 2007. The difficult eight-month birthing process of the “Olympic China National Image Ad” indicates that if Li Dongsheng were trying to develop more proactive communications with the outside world, he may have had his opponents. The ad had been approved at the start of 2007, but it was not finally pushed through until just before the end of the fiscal year. Pressure was exerted via a long article entitled “Raise China’s Face – Where is China’s National Image Ad?” （《扬起中国脸—中国国家形象广告在哪里》）which appeared in November 2007 in Modern Advertising Magazine, a publication of the China Advertising Association of which Li was president. The article was written with the help of scholars at the Communication University of China and demonstrated the widespread support of the heads of China’s major advertising firms. One section, “Using the Opportunity of the Olympics to Build a National Image,” reviews the risk of negative media coverage but, like the other publications discussed, it does not develop a communication strategy for responding to it.

See also CDT’s stories on Olympic business and publicity.
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- February 3, 2009 11:22 PM
Documentary: World’s Biggest Airport – Beijing Capital International Airport
Discovery Channel’s documentary “Beijing Airport” tells the story of why and how China vowed to build the world’s biggest airport in Beijing, posted by Chinasuperpower via Youtube. Below is a description of the airport from Wikipedia:
Beijing Capital International Airport is the main international airport of Beijing, China. It is located 32 km northeast of Beijing’s city center in an enclave of Chaoyang District that is surrounded by rural Shunyi District. The airport is owned and operated by the Beijing Capital International Airport Company Limited, a state-controlled company. The airport’s IATA Airport Code, PEK, is based on the city’s former romanized name, Peking.
Part 1:

Part 2:

Part 3:

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Part 5:

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- February 2, 2009 9:21 PM
Video: Naked China
It has been five months since the 2008 Beijing Olympics. China considered the Games as a symbol of the rising of a great nation. Over five nights leading to the opening ceremony, News and multimedia website Current.com came up with a series of documentaries with five parts: Busting Out; The Good, the Bad and the Ugly; Out of Control; Fighting for Freedom; Let the Party Begin. These video series, anchored by Laura Ling, a Current journalist, summarize Current’s former news videos to explore China’s economic growth, how China prepared for the Games, social ills in China’s society – sex workers, freedom of religion and the press, and the transition of China’s culture, via Current.com:
Naked China: Busting Out

Naked China: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

Naked China: Out of Control

Naked China: Fighting for Freedom

Naked China: Let the Party Begin

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- January 28, 2009 3:09 PM
Tania Branigan: China’s Momentous 2008
Tania Branigan recounts extraordinary events from the last 12 months in China and introduces video highlights of the year. Click here to see the videos on the Guardian blog:
This autumn, the chill winds of the world’s economic crisis reached Chinese shores, leaving millions jobless. As the year ends, celebrations of the 30th anniversary of its economic reforms – which have lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty – are muted by the outlook for 2009. The country will enter this new year with rather more trepidation than the last.
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- December 25, 2008 1:44 PM
Photo: The Search
People search the rubble in Dujiangyan following the Sichuan earthquake in May, 2008, by thenez.
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- December 22, 2008 9:21 PM
Time Magazine on Zhang Yimou
Time Magazine has named Zhang Yimou as a runner-up to Person of the Year, citing his work for the Olympics ceremonies:
In telling China’s story, Zhang explored the character he, or peaceful harmony — an ideal critical to Chinese culture. This level of thematic and creative artistry is rare in the controlled realm of filmmaking, let alone in a multidimensional arena with thousands of performers and visual set pieces that seemed to border on the impossible — yet it was all happening live, before the eyes of the world.
There is much mythologizing surrounding Zhang’s rise to prominence, given that his first job was as a farmhand and then a laborer in a cotton mill. But the story I enjoy most is that he gave blood over a period of months to earn enough money to purchase his first camera. He was 25. When the Beijing Film Academy reopened in 1978 after the Cultural Revolution, he was 27, already considered too old to become a filmmaker and lacking many of the necessary credits. Undaunted, he offered his portfolio of photographic works and was admitted to the department of cinematography.
Zhang became a filmmaker, and for the past two decades, he has inspired the world’s fascination with China through his cinematic vision.
Read an interview with Zhang about the creation of the Olympics opening ceremony, and more coverage of Zhang Yimou via CDT.
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- December 17, 2008 10:15 PM
China Listed U.S. Athletes As Possible Troublemakers
From USA Today:
China’s government was so concerned about the possibility of athlete demonstrations in the Beijing Olympics that it created a list of nine U.S. athletes and one assistant coach it thought might cause trouble at the Games, according to an internal U.S. Olympic Committee e-mail obtained by USA TODAY.
The names included softball players Jennie Finch and Jessica Mendoza and soccer player Abby Wambach, who broke her leg and missed the Olympic Games. It also included two Paralympians, one athlete who wasn’t a member of the 2008 softball team and a top female collegiate golfer. Golf is not an Olympic sport.
“We viewed these concerns as being entirely unjustified and unwarranted,” USOC spokesman Darryl Seibel said in an e-mail Wednesday. “As such, we rejected the request to address this with our athletes or transmit the letter to them. We saw absolutely no need to burden the athletes with this.”
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- October 30, 2008 7:26 PM