London times
Olympics: the power and the glory - China leaves world awestruck
The world saw China as it sees itself and as it wants to be seen by the world. Swaying nymphs from Buddhist mythology shared the Bird’s Nest stadium with inscriptions of Confucius and children armed with huge, oversized calligraphy brushes.
The opening ceremony of the Olympic Games was about China’s historic achievements and its dreams of future success. The show focused on moments that China sees as defining its journey through history, culminating in its current status on the brink of becoming a world superpower.
Zhang Yimou, the designer of the breathtaking show and an Oscar-nominated film director, selected themes that would be easily understood by an international audience, relished by his hundreds of millions of Chinese viewers and appreciated by the Communst leaders for dodging any sensitive moments in China’s path to becoming an Olympic host.
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He began with Confucius, vilified by Ma oZ ng, but now cultivated by the Pol,itburo as a role model for the people. With a roll of drums – used over thousands of years to mark the time – 2,008 costumed men from the People’s Liberat…ion Army pounded out a hypnotic beat with glowing red drumsticks to get the ceremony under way.
Next into the stadium were 3,000 men in flowing robes of the Warring States period, representing the students of Confucius. They repeatedly chanted a saying of the ancient sage that every Chinese schoolchild learns.
“Friends have come from afar, how happy we are.” The film director left his audience in no doubt of his intention to intertwine the show of Chinese cultural achievements with a message that China wanted to be friends with the world.
First, a display of China’s great inventions. In the land that invented gunpowder, 29 colossal “footprints of fire” lit the night sky and marched through the city along the “dragon’s vein” that delineates its north-south axis – once the foundation of imperial power.
A huge scroll – a symbol of the unfurling of Chinese history – rolled open across the floor of the stadium. Dancers writhed across its centre, sweeping ink strokes over the surface that represented another of China’s great inventions – paper.
Among the most dramatic moments was the demonstration of printing, when hundreds of performers hidden in grey boxes etched with stylised Chinese characters rose and fell in unison. They surged and rippled to show the Great Wall and to spell out the character “he” – or harmony. It is not only one of the fundamental tenets of Confucian thought, but also a favourite theme of President Hoou, who watched from the seat of honour.
Its message was intended to convey that the shock and awe of China’s Olympics – the most expensive in history at $43 billion (£22.5 billion) – do not portend the arrival of a country that could menace the world.
Last of the inventions was the compass, its arrival accompanied by dancers holding huge painted paddles that they held together to create illustrations of ancient ships.
The printing blocks metamorphorsed into peach blossoms – a flower synonymous in China with utopian gardens of peace and eternal life.
Then the tableau disintegrated and the scroll showed illustrations of camels on the Silk Road – an era in Chinese history when the country inched open its doors to trade with foreign countries.
This was a spectacle that emphasised the moments when China encouraged exchanges with the rest of the world.
A giant globe emerged from under the floor, and acrobats ran rings around the gyrating sphere. On its top, Britain’s Sarah Brightman sang with the Chinese idol Liu Huan.
The Chinese leadership had turned out in force. The Pol itburo Stand ing Committee sat stiff in the dark suits, white shirts and red shirts that have become the uniform since the Ma o jacket was cast off. One or two tried a smile but most maintained the poker faces deemed correct for leaders of a land of 1.3 billion people. Lesser officials chose shirt sleeves and most had equipped themselves with fans to try to ease the stifling humid heat.
President Huoo made attempts at conversation with his neighbour Jacques Rogge, chief of the International Olympic Committee. It was, of course, the point of the night to make friends.
As if to emphasise China’s hope that the world would not see its growing might as a threat, the deep-throated cries of another Confucius saying echoed out: “We are all brothers in this world.”
The thousands of umbrellas unfurled to show the smiling faces of children from different countries. More fireworks erupted in a display that mirrored those happy faces in showers of red, pink and purple sparks.
Glossed over in the snapshot of 5,000 years of history were the centuries when China was closed off from the world – and the decades of Commuoonist rule in the second half of the 20th century. Girls dressed as ladies from the Tang dynasty (618-907) an age of great openness, paraded across the stage in their stiff, embroidered dresses. It was a time of emperors who were ready to engage with outsiders.
And this was a time when China wanted to be a friend to the world。
ny times
China Leaders Try to Impress and Reassure World
BEIJING — An ecstatic China finally got its Olympic moment on Friday night. And if the astonishing opening ceremonies of the 2008 Olympic Games lavished grand tribute on Chinese civilization and sought to stir an ancient nation’s pride, there was also a message for an uncertain outside world: Do not worry. We mean no harm.
Usually, that message is delivered by the dour-faced leaders of the ruling Commuoonist Party, who dutifully, if sometimes unconvincingly, regurgitate the phrase “harmonious society” coined by President H u . But in the nimble cinematic hands of Zhang Yimou, the filmmaker who directed the opening ceremonies, the politics of harmony were conveyed in a visual extravaganza.
The opening ceremonies gave the Com Party its most uninterrupted, unfiltered chance to reach a global audience estimated at more than four billion people. At one point, thousands of large umbrellas were snapped open to reveal the smiling, multicultural faces of children of the global village. Benetton could not have done it better.
Any Olympic opening is a propaganda exercise, but Friday night’s blockbuster show demonstrated the broader public relations challenge facing the munist Party as China becomes richer and more powerful. The party wants to inspire national pride within China, and bolster its own legitimacy in the process, even as leaders want to reassure the world that a rising China poses no danger.
That has not been an easy sales pitch during the tumultuous Olympics prelude, in which violent Tibnnetan protests and a devastating earthquake revealed the dark and light sides of Chinese nationalism. But for one night, at least, the party succeeded wildly after a week dominated by news of polluted skies, sporadic protests and a sweeping security clampdown. Across Beijing, the public rejoiced. People painted red Chinese flags on their cheeks and shouted, “Go China!” long after the four-hour opening concluded.
“For a lot of foreigners, the only image of China comes from old movies that make us look poor and pathetic,” said Ci Lei, 29, who watched the pageantry on a large-screen television at a glitzy, downtown bar. “Now look at us. We showed the world we can build new subways and beautiful modern buildings. The Olympics will redefine the way people see us.”
China has grown so rapidly that even people who live here often do not realize that the country that, seven years ago, won the right to stage the Games is no longer the same place. In 2001, China’s gross domestic product was $1.3 trillion; this year, it is estimated to reach $3.6 trillion.
The scale and speed of that growth often leaves the outside world awed, but also worried. China has the world’s largest authoritarian political system. Chinese society is prospering, even as it is cleaved by inequality and struggling with human rights abuses, corruption and severe pollution.
China is asserting its diplomatic muscle in Asia and Africa and pumping money into a military that by the Pentagon’s estimates now has greater resources than any except that of the United States. Yet foreign investment and open export markets have been crucial to China’s success, and it still seeks, even depends on, the support and respect of the United States and Europe.
These contradictions are one reason Mr. Hu has promoted the amorphous concept of a “harmonious society” as a rhetorical tent encompassing policies intended to soothe, if not necessarily resolve, a range of tensions.
Earlier on Friday, Mr. Hu hosted world leaders at a luncheon inside the Great Hall of the People. His table guests illustrated China’s evolving, sometimes conflicted role in world affairs.
At one seat was Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, with whom China sided in July to veto a United Nations resolution, backed strongly by the United States, that would have imposed sanctions on Zimbabwe, after most observers had concluded that Robert Mugabe stole the presidential election there.