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E-book Staging China : The Politics of Mass Spectacle
It is 2009, a year after the Beijing Olympics, and I have made my way across northern Beijing, past one of the massive ring-roads, to a large block of office buildings that sits not too far from the Olympic axis — a long stretch of asphalt, greenery, and event buildings that cuts across the city in an extension of the old north-south connection that the Forbidden City forms with its gates. New construction sites are again blossoming around the area, only a year after much of the city was remodelled to host the mega event. Three new metro lines were constructed in the run-up to the games. More will follow. I am looking down from an office window at the traffic jam below, people milling across overpasses in the blazing heat. The passers-by are not yet wearing particle masks. The full scale of Beijing’s pollution has not made it into the public conscience in 2009. While I am sipping a cold soft drink, one of the organisers of the Beijing Olympics opening ceremony shows me images from the event’s press book. She flips to a picture of actors representing Confucian scholars, accompanied by an explanation of the quotation they recite: ‘all those within the four seas can be considered his brother’. Another picture shows the huge painting scroll that displayed examples of pre-modern Chinese ingenuity like paper, pottery, and bronze casting. ‘Our goal was to brand the Chinese nation’, says my host. ‘We had two keywords that we were going to showcase: harmony and civilisation’. I turn to the page that shows serene martial artists in white attire performing the elegant movements of Taijiquan below the large digital canvas that circled around the top of the stadium, where animations cascade downwards like a waterfall, in reference to a famous poem by Li Bai. Another page shows the stadium at a distance as fireworks form smiley faces in the sky above. ‘Many people abroad felt the Beijing Olympics were controversial’, I point out. The torch relay had been accompanied by protests, by calls to boycott the Games. Then Chinese students abroad responded with their own protests, meant to defend the event. The confrontations between the two protest groups quickly turned the public relations campaign into a security exercise. How did people perceive those conflicts here, I ask. She explains that these negative reactions came as a shock to many. Thousands of people had volunteered. They were hoping to show visitors their home and what China had become. ‘Of course they were disappointed about the criticism. In their view, all they had wanted to do was throw the world a giant party.
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