08/12/2007 / CHINA
Beijing is burning under a magnifying glass.
The 2008 Olympic Games have put the city in the international media spotlight and it will be embarrassing if our guests arrive to see crumbling facades. The roads, the
shopping centres, the corner stores; everything must be renovated.
All the buildings in my area are being renovated for the Olympic Games. However, I live
in zone five of Beijing, and there's not much chance that tourists will come here. It's just in case. That said, compared with Emperor Yang of the Sui reign, who insisted that all the trees were wrapped in luxury silks, the renovation doesn't seem so bad.
The situation is ironic. While the Chinese authorities are trying to use the Olympic Games to show the strength of their nation, they're also moaning about the political questions it brings from outside countries.
The new Olympic stadium (in the Beijing Olympic Games Park) has a complicated steel
structure, but is simply not high enough. On bright days, the structure will
shadow the ground and stop the audience from seeing the athletes properly.
Olympic mania: post-party blues, already
Material compiled by Zhang, our regional editor for China.
The Olympic Games will open in Beijing Aug. 8, 2008. For the Chinese authorities and the public, this is more than just a sporting event. In 2001, when the International Olympic Committee selected China to host the games, it was greeted by genuine and overwhelming jubilation across the country. But six years later, there are subdued, but persistent rumblings of discontent. Beijing residents have faced evictions to make way for Olympic construction or by businesses intent on impressing foreigners. The city's Olympic face-lift has left a lot of people homeless. Bloggers are wondering whether the games are good for the people, or for the ‘People's Party,' as the Communist Party is called.
Post your questions to contributing bloggers: Wang Xiaofeng, Doubleleaf Chen and Zhebao Pavilion.
Bloggers redisgn the Beijing motifs
The original posters and video of the Beijing Olympics.
The motifs redesigned by bloggers.
(images: www.crd-net.org/ http://blog.sina.com.cn)
The Olympic Games: it’s like a romantic date gone sour
Wang Xiaofeng is a famous blogger who works for the weekly magazine Sanlian Life.
Beijing is burning under a magnifying glass.
The 2008 Olympic Games have put the city in the international media spotlight and it will be embarrassing if our guests arrive to see crumbling facades. The roads, the
shopping centres, the corner stores; everything must be renovated.
Even the restaurant menus and the street signs must be made clearer, glossier, more fitting for the sensitivities of the foreigners. For example, we no longer admonish people with ‘do not lie on the grass', or ‘photography not allowed' signs. Instead, we invite them to, ‘please stretch out on the grass' or ‘please take some photos'. What's the limit? Will the ‘secret' city become the ‘open' city? Oh the sacrifices we must make!
(...)
Beijing wants to seem civilised and modern. But can it change its culture in a few months? It's like an untidy young man clearing up his room for a girlfriend's visit. Imagine her surprise when she moves in with him!
The Olympic Games: it's a bit like a romantic date gone sour. "
(posted 8 september 2007)‘The Olympic Games are never just a sporting event'
Doubleleaf is a young man who lives in the Jiangsu province and works in Beijing. He describes himself as ‘homeless, bankrupt, carless and without girlfriend'.
All the buildings in my area are being renovated for the Olympic Games. However, I live
in zone five of Beijing, and there's not much chance that tourists will come here. It's just in case. That said, compared with Emperor Yang of the Sui reign, who insisted that all the trees were wrapped in luxury silks, the renovation doesn't seem so bad.
When I learnt that we were going to be hosting the Olympic Games in six years, I jumped for joy. But today, I'm disillusioned, like the authorities. The Olympics have become very politicised. There are loads of special interest groups waiting for improvements in human rights, democracy, environment etc. If, for example, the government breaks under pressure from occidental countries over Darfour, it's because the Olympics are approaching. The editor of a[Chinese] newspaper even declared today that if the government had known what would happen, it wouldn't have asked to host the event."
© http://ko-htike.blogspot.com
The situation is ironic. While the Chinese authorities are trying to use the Olympic Games to show the strength of their nation, they're also moaning about the political questions it brings from outside countries.
The Olympic Games are never just a sporting event. Hitler used the games in 1936 for his nationalist propaganda. In 1988, the games in Seoul sped up the democratisation of South Korea.
It's estimated that more than 30,000 foreign journalists will be In Beijing at the time of the games. If something important happens in another part of the country, in Shangai or Nanjing or Xinjiang, then all those reporters will go to where the event's taking place. For the government, as for the citizens, the games are not just a way of winning gold medals."
(posted 7 october 2007 © pimpmycountry.com)
The Beijing stadium is an architectural mess
This text was posted on the blog of a young engineer, 'Zhebao Pavilion'.
The new Olympic stadium (in the Beijing Olympic Games Park) has a complicated steel
structure, but is simply not high enough. On bright days, the structure will
shadow the ground and stop the audience from seeing the athletes properly.
Moreover,the stadium doesn't have a roof to protect from the rain. And we can't add one, because the metal structure is not strong enough. Basically, the architecture's beautiful but not practical.
The members of the work evaluation group are all famous architects or officials. The first are only interested in the political impact of the event. The second are only after glory. And this type of problem hasn't only affected the stadium. The same thing has happened with all the big, recent projects, like CCTV [a national television chain], the grand opera in Beijing: they're impressive and expensive, but not functional.
And all this is for the vanity of the government."
(posted 27 september 2007)
“Leave the streets to the foreigners”
This photo, taken in Beijing, was posted by Boxun, a human-rights specialised site based in the U.S. A banner hung up in the street displaying the message: ‘Avoid going out too much so that our foreign friends can get around town more quickly'.
(posted 7 october 2007 © Boxun News )
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Soumis par auto glass (non vérifié) le lun, 01/09/2008 - 12:57.I read some of the analysis of the meaning and symbology used in the advertising and I highly doubt most Chinese have noticed any of the symbolism. I've been seeing the "Dancing Beijing" everywhere for months and didn't associate it at all with Beijing until I read the article
Utilisateur non inscrit
So far so good...
Soumis par Olympic Glory (non vérifié) le dim, 10/08/2008 - 20:05.As an Olympic sports fan, I've been very impressed with the Games so far. Beijing had a lot of negatives going into it... the human rights issues, Tibet, earthquake, pollution, doping scandal and the last minute terrorist attack on the Afghan border. But all that faded into the background with the Opening Ceremonies. There you got to see how well prepared, how organized the Chinese were. And good on them, because I can well understand how many people WANTED them to fail.
So far, I've only heard about the death of the American tourist to mar what has been a successfully operated Olympics so far. But a very tragic isolated incident that shouldn't be held against the host country.
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How activists have hijacked the symbols of the Olympic Games ?
Soumis par 2008 Olympic Games (non vérifié) le jeu, 03/04/2008 - 05:15.Look here :
http://www.flickr.com/photos/graphiste/2328400675/in/set-721576041085111...
and read :
There is an article from The Sydney Morning Herald
The Sydney Morning Herald
Link of article :
http://www.smh.com.au/news/web/beijing-bash-shame-game-tactics-target-ol...
______________________________________...
A broad coalition of professional activists, anarchists and freelance stirrers is rolling out a series of shaming campaigns intended to fuel the cacophony of complaint against China's hosting of the 2008 Olympic Games.
In addition to the usual physical displays of opposition, the groups are ramping up a powerful online presence that includes the use of the big three social networking sites - MySpace, Facebook and YouTube - plus an array of widgets, podcasts, blogs and other web-based weapons of persuasion and subversion.
The agitators include long-time China critics such as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the Free Tibet Campaign plus a host of smaller activist groups covering the entire gamut of anti-Beijing causes including Darfur, Burma, workers' rights, animal rights, pro-democracy and the death penalty.
Their common aim is to drown out China's attempts to use the Olympics as a celebration of its coming of age as a modern economic powerhouse and refocus international attention on the many skeletons that rattle around in the regime's closets.
With the Olympic torch setting out on a four-month, 19-nation tour of the globe, before returning to the Chinese capital for the start of the opening ceremony on August 8, expect to see the symbols of the Games - in particular - come under sustained attack.
Today's launch by Amnesty International's Australian branch of its Olympics campaign, for instance, features a monkey character called Nuwu.
China campaign director, Sophie Peer, says this is the first time that the Australian branch of the international human rights organisation has used a cartoon character in one of its campaigns.
Nuwu - meaning angry young boy in Mandarin - is a play on "Fuwa", the collective name given to the five Teletubby-esque mascots of the Beijing Olympics.
The Fuwa five "seek to unite the world in peace and friendship through the Olympic spirit," the official Beijing Games website says.
Amnesty's mascot wears a red bandanna - just like the ones worn by many of the Tiananmen Square protesters in 1989 - and "wants to set the record straight by speaking about the human rights abuses suffered by people in China", Amnesty's new Uncensored website says.
The monkey - the brainchild of an Australian creative team - is also used as the logo on Amnesty Australia's new Facebook presence, one of thousands of "Causes" that members of the social networking site can join.
For activists, the five official critters have become sitting ducks and fair game.
They have already been appropriated by PlayFair 2008, a campaign launched by a group of labour organisations promoting workers' rights in the global sporting goods industry.
PlayFair's website features posters of Beibei, the blue fish-themed official mascot that is supposed to symbolise the "blessing of prosperity", working in a sweatshop sewing garments.
Ben Cohen, the co-founder of the famous Ben & Jerry's ice-cream company in the US, says that he also has the cutesy mascots in his crosshairs.
Cohen is helping the Mia Farrow-backed Dream for Darfur organisation, which seeks to end the genocide in the Darfur region of Sudan by putting pressure on China, the Sudanese regime's principal international backer.
"I'm interested in running some sort of campaign that introduces these little guys [the mascots] to the world as 'Looks cute - supports genocide'," Cohen told The New York Times last month.
Farrow's organisation is also behind the push to rebrand the Games as the "Genocide Olympics", a phrase she first used in a commentary published in The Wall Street Journal last year.
But the award for the most brutal act of Photoshop subversion goes to activists who transformed the official Games emblem from a statement of "trust and an expression of self confidence" into a blood-stained symbol of repression.
The official emblem of the Games is called "Chinese Seal, Dancing Beijing". It's a red and white stylisation of the Chinese character "jing", which is both the second character in "Beijing" and the word for capital.
The official Games website states that the emblem - which looks a bit like a running stick figure - is supposed to be "filled with Beijing's hospitality and hopes, and carries the city's commitment to the world".
But over at The SubRealism Manifesto website, a group of freelance anarchists has published a wicked video parody in which "Chinese Seal, Dancing Beijing" becomes the bloodied, crime scene chalk outline of a dissident who has been chased and mowed down by a tank.
Once viewed, the Beijing Games stick man will never look the same again.
The video is the work of the French cartoonist Guillaume Podrovnik and an American who uses the pseudonym Keiko Ketsugo.
Podrovnik, who describes the site as a "radical, anti-consumerist project", worked for many years as a political cartoonist on the anti-Beijing Hong Kong newspaper Apple Daily.
Ketsugo says the video, which was created using the animation tools in the Second Life virtual world, drew its inspiration from a four-panel cartoon found on the web in which the blood-rimmed silhouette is formed after a man is executed by a firing squad.
A similarly edgy animation is being promoted by Students for a Free Tibet on its parody of the official Torch Relay site.
The animation, a hack of the official Torch Relay logo, can be downloaded and used as a "badge" on blogs and websites, ensuring that it will spread virally across the internet.
The official logo is static and depicts two characters running, holding aloft a flame in the stylised shape of a phoenix, the mythical creature that in Chinese culture symbolises high virtue and grace and is supposed to appear only during periods of peace and prosperity.
However, in the Students for a Free Tibet version, one of the characters pulls on a policeman's cap, the torch becomes a truncheon and the other character is beaten senseless until it collapses and blood spills down over the Olympic rings.
The online flash video mocks China's torch relay logo and slogan "Light the Passion, Share the Dream" in an attempt to expose China's cynical Olympics propaganda, the SFT website says.
The IOC's most sacred symbol, the five interlocking rings, have also been targeted.
In one image used by the French organisation Committee for Supporters of Tibet, the Olympic rings are shown as tank tracks.
In a poster, originally published by Amnesty's branch in Slovakia and later withdrawn, the rings are depicted as barbed wire loops. The image shows a man pointing a gun at the head of prisoner.
The poster uses the slogan "China is getting ready", the same one being used by the Beijing Olympic Organising Committee in the lead-up to the Games.
A similar theme is being used by press freedom group, Reporters San Frontiers, which is promoting its Olympic campaign with a graphic using interlocking handcuffs instead of rings.
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