Awe (but no laughter) in Beijing
By Kent Ewing

HONG KONG - The stunning opening ceremony on Friday to the Summer Olympic Games in Beijing - with its panoply of color, painstaking choreography and sweeping portrait of Chinese culture and history - was everything it was supposed to be.

The four-hour extravaganza, brainchild of China's most renowned filmmaker, Zhang Yimou, depicted an immensely proud nation that has made monumental contributions to humanity and seeks unity and harmony with nature and other nations as it continues its rise on the world stage. Indeed, it was a perfect presentation of the image China seeks to promote in international affairs.

That said, Zhang, director of such critically acclaimed films asRaise the Red Lantern and House of Flying Daggers, was tellingly selective in his characterization of 5,000 years of Chinese civilization. The ceremony focused heavily on the glories of China's ancient past but had very little to say about modern China - no doubt because so much of the country's modern history is marked by shame and humiliation.

Marveling at Zhang's brilliant spectacle, a global audience could easily forget that the communist revolution had ever happened and or that Mao Zedong, the Great Helmsman who ruled with an iron fist for 27 years, had ever existed - even though Mao's portrait still dominates Tiananmen Square in the capital.

Most distressingly, this lavish show of national pride and virtue reminded us that, 32 years after Mao's death and 30 years after Deng Xiaoping opened up China to the rest of the world, the country still lacks a sense of humor. No matter how rich and powerful China becomes, the world can never fully trust and accept a country that has not learned how to laugh.

There was laughter in Sydney in 2000 and in Athens in 2004. But there was not so much as a chuckle Friday night from any of the army of 15,000 performers or the 91,000 spectators (including more than 80 heads of state) packed into Beijing National Stadium, more popularly known as the Bird's Nest. A television audience estimated as the largest in Olympic history may have been awed and perhaps even daunted by the sheer power of it all - but mirth and irony play no part in the Olympic experience this time around. This has been no fun. [1]

From the day in 2001 that the International Olympic Committee made its bold choice to award the Summer Games to China, Beijing has proved an anxious - at times even paranoid - host, building and prepping relentlessly for the Games while reacting angrily to any criticism of its human rights record or authoritarian rule. Most recently, the leadership caused international alarm with its crackdown in Tibet and with the intense nationalism that was ignited by protests dogging the ill-fated Olympic torch relay.

The obviously profound anxieties of the host of this grand party have left the guests, too, on tenterhooks. God forbid if something does go terribly wrong over the next two weeks. Would China ever recover its lost pride, which it has only so recently begun to recover? Now, however - despite the smog and the bizarre, apparently random murder of an American tourist in Beijing, as well as bombings in the troubled northwestern autonomous region of Xinjiang - the world’s best athletes have taken center stage at the Games, as they should, and by all accounts it is a great show.

No one who recognizes China's increasingly important place in the world wants to see the country fall short in its bid to use the Games to prove that it belongs in the first tier of nations. But it has been discomfiting to watch the Chinese leadership time and again betray their insecurity as they struggle to adapt to this new international role. Strangely, despite its power and pageantry, the opening ceremony was a reminder of that. A confident, modern nation taking its rightful place in the world knows how to laugh at itself. This one does not.

In addition, a rising nation at ease with itself knows how to deal with its detractors - and these Games have revealed that China has also yet to learn this lesson.

It is odd that a master of his craft like Zhang, through the sin of omission, would betray China's continuing shortcomings and insecurities at the same time that he underscored the country's great strengths. After all, in his films Zhang has not been shy about upsetting the communist leadership with his honest depictions of some of the darker chapters in modern Chinese history. And the director also has a wonderfully ironic sense of humor.

Witness the 1994 film To Live, Zhang's adaptation of Yu Hua's novel of the same name chronicling the tragic history of one family as it lives through the upheavals of the Chinese civil war, the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. The film is full of despair, death and pathos, but it is also marked throughout by an ironic sense of humor that is a natural and welcome companion to the shattered lives and calamitous history it depicts. When a country gets things this wrong, it must, of course, cry over its loss. But it should also laugh at the absurdity of it all. Despite its horror and sadness, To Live emerges, thanks to its sense of hope and humor, as an optimistic film - about both the stricken family and the stricken country it portrays.

Acclaimed abroad, the film was banned in China, which serves as a reminder of how far the country has come. That a once-banned Chinese filmmaker wound up chief architect of the opening and closing ceremonies of the Olympics (originally with Steven Spielberg signed up as a consultant before the US filmmaker pulled out in February in protest over China's policies in Sudan's Darfur region) is an important symbol of the country's progress. That his ironic sense of humor (not to mention his knowledge of modern Chinese history) failed him in the opening four-hour production is, however, a less salubrious signal.

On the giant scroll that served as the stage for the opening ceremony, a meticulously choreographed army of performers took the audience through the glories of China's past - the invention of paper, printing, the compass and gunpowder, the building of the Great Wall, the beauty and creativity of Chinese opera, the linking of East and West on the ancient trading route called the Silk Road, and more. At one point, 3,000 performers dressed as Confucian scholars chanted sayings of the great sage. This was China at its best.

Later in the performance, however, there was a jarring transition to the modern age symbolized by the appearance of pianist Lang Lang, called the "Chinese Liberace" because of his sartorial flamboyance and his talent for popularizing classical music. Children chanting about the dangers of pollution were another modern feature, as was the Olympic theme song, You and Me, sung by pop idol Liu Huan and the British star of The Phantom of the Opera, Sarah Brightman, while Chinese acrobats performed around them. With the show unfolding under the watchful eyes of President Hu Jintao - who also had a brief, if unremarkable, speaking part in it - no one was expecting the incisive honesty of a Zhang film. But to call this a shallow representation of modern Chinese life would be an understatement.

Finally, Zhang's visual tour de force culminated with former Olympic gymnast Li Ning, who won three gold medals in Los Angeles in 1984 and is now the owner of a sports apparel company, bounding along the roof of the stadium on cables before lighting the Olympic cauldron in a show-stopping aerial stunt that organizers of the next Summer Games in London would be wise not to even try topping. In the end, Zhang's epic production was punctuated by the explosion of no less than 33,866 fireworks - something that also probably will not be duplicated in London.

If the global audience harbored any doubts about China’s claim to have arrived as a major player on the world stage, the unprecedented pyrotechnic display and the 44-year-old Li's gravity-defying feat surely put them to rest. Zhang's closing ceremony on August 24 - which, together with the opener, is reported to cost US$100 million - should further seal the deal.

Meanwhile, let's hope the skies clear, the terrorists are held in check and Chinese athletes rack up a record number of gold medals as the Games go off without another hitch. Then, maybe China's 1.3 billion people can sit back, relax and laugh about it all.

Note:
1. China Central Television estimated 4 billion people (of the world's estimated 6.6 billion population) watched through various channels, ie television and the Internet.

Kent Ewing is a teacher and writer at Hong Kong International School. He can be reached at kewing@hkis.edu.hk.

Interesting history lesson and nice read here.

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