August 24, 2008

Cue the fireworks

So the closing ceremony has just finished, and it fit what I hear is the long tradition of Olympic closing ceremonies.

Sort of a tired attempt to get the magic going once more before we all go home.

There was Placido Domingo, Jimmy Page, David Beckham and some Chinese pop stars I didn't recognize. But the star power didn't generate much heat.

All the athletes walked into the Bird's Nest stadium in a sort of jumble, with 7-foot, 6-inch-tall Chinese basketball player Yao Ming the only person sticking out of the crowd.

The ceremony went on and on, and the big dramatic moment - the extinguishing of the torch - was remarkably non-eventful.

After the spectacular way the Chinese lit the torch, with gymnast Li Ning flying around the inside rim of the stadium before igniting the giant torch attached to the roof, this time, the ceremony's organizers just sort of turned off the flame.

One moment it was there, then it was gone. Pretty much at random. Like you were turning down a burner on your gas barbecue grill. No giant dragon flying over the stadium to blow out the flame or jets of water gushing flamewards out of Yao Ming's eyes. Oh well.

The nicest moment was actually outside the stadium as I was walking back to the press center ahead of the crowd. With the ceremony petering to a close, fireworks started going off in the distance, about a mile or so from the Bird's Nest.

It wasn't your most jaw-dropping fireworks display, not too different from what you'd see at your average mid-sized American city's Fourth of July show. But something about it was sublime as it went off humbly in the distance. They did shoot off some cool expanding rings with red hearts in the middle.

So much about these Olympics has had an attention-starved "look at me! don't you approve?!" quality that these fireworks sort of doing their own thing and not caring if anyone noticed was refreshing. It made me want to just go off to a cafe somewhere and read a book or catch an art movie in an afternoon matinee.

It wasn't about one nation's glory or another's decline or history or world record or Olympic spirit.

We all get to go back to the real world now, which is a relief for me. I've been working three weeks straight in Beijing, with most days starting at 8 a.m. and ending at 2 a.m. We'll all go to our homes and like those distant fireworks, quietly do our thing without anyone in particular to notice.

See you there.

-Jack Chang

August 22, 2008

Circle the wagons time for Chinese gymnasts?

Chinese gymnast He Kexin, at center, who's been the target of accusations that at least some of China's women gymnasts are underaged girls. Photo/AP

It's midnight Friday, and questions are mounting about whether China used underaged girl gymnasts to win two gold medals this Olympics.

The International Olympic Committee had said this morning it initiated an inquiry into the true ages of the Chinese gymnasts and would have a response by the end of Friday.

The Chinese say He Kexin and other gymnasts are 16 or older. The minimum age to compete in Olympics gymnastic events is 16.

Various press investigations, however, suggest that at least He is 14 and perhaps two other gymnasts are underaged. The IOC said it launched the inquiry to "put the matter to rest."

Well, Friday just ended, and there's still no info. The matter is wide awake.

My last phone call with an IOC spokeswoman was at around 6 p.m., and none of the IOC reps have been answering their cell phones since about 8:30 p.m.

There's no news on the IOC Web site nor on the International Gymnastics Federation site, as the spokeswoman told me there'd be as soon as the results come out.

Although IOC's chief spokeswoman Giselle Davies made it sound like the case was closed and that the gymnasts were old enough, you'd think they'd just get it over with. So why haven't they?

-Jack Chang

August 21, 2008

A superstar mea culpa

For those of you following the dramatic, mysterious case of superstar Chinese hurdler Liu Xiang, who backed out of his first Olympic race Monday, this letter from Liu released earlier this week and excerpted by the state-run newspaper China Daily adds to the mystery.

Note the paragraph about how "pressure has also piled on me." As my story from Monday noted, speculation has run rampant in China that Liu cracked under pressure, faked his heel injury and backed out of the race. I wonder if this puts such suspicions to rest.

FENG SHUYONG, head coach of China's track and field team, published this letter from Liu Xiang on his blog.

To my supporters,

Thanks for the understanding and support you have shown me at this time. I am still feeling sad about my withdrawal and the disappointment I brought to you all.

July 13, 2001, the day when Beijing won the bid for the 2008 Olympic Games, happened to be my 18th birthday, which tied my birthday celebration with the joy of the successful bid, although I was not well-known at that time.

Attending the Beijing Olympic Games is a dream for every athlete, and I put in 100 percent effort.

At the 2004 Athens Olympic Games, I realized my championship dream, and from then on, winning the gold in my country was my unshakeable goal.

I always like facing challenges and never give up. It is my character. In fact, I was very confident in Greece.

Since I won a gold medal in the 110m hurdles race at Athens four years ago and titles in other tournaments, I have received lots of attention and support.

At the same time, pressure has also piled on me. I couldn't attend parties freely with friends like my peers. I could also feel the rising expectations from my fellow countrymen.

I knew everyone was watching me at the Bird's Nest and on television. I wanted to rush to the finishing line like I did before. But my right foot really knocked me down. I think I am no less upset and disappointed than you, my supporters. And please trust me I am who I am.

A number of friends sent me messages and called me to express their concern. I sincerely thank them for all their understanding, support and encouragement. And I also want to thank all my countrymen for your great support during the last four years.

I believe I still have power, and you will see a faster Liu Xiang.

-Jack Chang

August 20, 2008

Tough Olympic choices

You're either with Romania or Hungary in women's handball.

I was eating lunch yesterday at a downtown Beijing restaurant while the closest TV was showing the Sweden-Norway women's handball quarterfinals match.

Being a captive viewer, I ended up watching about 30 minutes of handball, a sport I've never seen before, played by two countries I think about maybe once every six months.

Slowly, however, as I ate my beef stew, I found myself rooting for the Swedes with their pretty yellow and blue uniforms.

Why the Swedes?

First off, I'm the world's most impartial person when it comes to what I imagine is a heated rivalry between the Scandinavian giants.

Yet still, my heart went out to those blue-and-yellow jerseyed players getting beaten by those wicked Norwegians. How quickly such loyalties form. Why?

The main reason, I thought, were all those Ingmar Bergman movies I've seen over the years. I know the Swedes. I know they wrestle a lot with their wavering faith in God and that death really freaks them out. Those Swedes deserve at least a women's handball victory.

I've had to make several hard choices like that.

How about Cuba vs. Venezuela in women's indoor volleyball? Which Latin American Socialist country should win that one? I imagine Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro would be OK with either team winning.

Or Japan vs. South Korea in women's singles table tennis?

A hard one. Japan, after all, has provided me with so much video gaming and listening pleasure over the years, not to mention driven me all over the United States.

Yet those South Koreans really did get screwed over by the Japanese during World War II and probably want this one more. I guess I was going for the South Koreans.

As a journalist, I don't pick favorites. But as a spectator, the strange loyalties form.  Bahrain versus Kenya in the men's 10,000-meter run? Australia versus Japan in women's softball?

-Jack Chang

August 18, 2008

Outside the Beijing bubble

A neighborhood of Zibo, China, that has boomed over the past 30 years. Residents left an old brick house standing to remind them of what times used to be like while building the columned village headquarters and other new houses.

I left behind manicured Olympicland, better known as Beijing, Thursday afternoon to take a look at what "the real China" looked like.

To my relief, the One World, One Dream billboards and ubiquitous Olympic volunteers disappeared within 10 minutes of leaving South Beijing station by train.

What I found was a more honest picture of the country than the giant flashing TV screens and cutting-edge architecture custom made for Olympic Beijing.

The train sped me into a heavily industrialized China filled with housing cranes and sooty, brick-smokestacked factories, now paralyzed as part of the government's effort to clean up Beijing's smoggy air for Olympic visitors.

Out here, people experience the Olympics like they do anywhere else in the world. It's something to be seen on television when one feels like it. Still, as I wrote here, many people were still obsessively following the medal count, usually by Internet.

But what most people were focused on was making money. This was the new go-go capitalist Communist China, and a good example of it was a neighborhood I stumbled across in the industrial city of Zibo in coastal Shandong province.

Just three decades ago, this was a village of wheat and corn growers eking out a living. After China's Communist Party opened the country's doors to capitalism in 1978, however, village leaders decided to go into business.

And they did so with a vengeance. The village pooled its money together and opened a brick factory right beside their houses, which sent pollution all over the region.

The village switched to making roofing tiles in 1987 and later expanded into the production of everything from paper to plastic. In 2004, the villagers closed the tile factory and began producing less-polluting fibrous building panels.

By the late-1990s, the villagers had torn down their old brick houses and built pastel-colored townhouses and apartment buildings. The village president built even himself an immense office fit for Donald Trump filled with fish, a huge jade sculptor and a statue of Mao Zedong.

Yet I got the feeling Mao wouldn't have approved.

The old class divisions also came back, with the village president lording over the place while I was there and the rest of the neighborhood wordlessly serving and scraping. While the village president drove around in a gleaming black Audi, the workers made do with old bicycles on the dirt roads outside of the neighborhood.

It reminded me of my last visit to China in 1984, when our government handlers took us to a statue garden filled with top-grade Communist propaganda. One depicted the hard-hearted landlord kicking out the peasants. Another was of proud workers striding into some glorious Communist future.

This village president with his Audi zooming around the bicycle-riding workers would have fit right in. And I'm not sure this was the future those workers were supposed to be striding into.

But it was clear the whole place was better off than before, even as it struggled with pollution and other problems. The center of Zibo on Friday night was full of folks playing some kind of shuttlecock game and others burning fake money for their ancestors in little makeshift sidewalk altars as part of a kind of Chinese Day of the Dead observance.

While the Chinese government has spent billions of dollars sprucing up Beijing for visitors, I would have rather spent my August in a place such as Zibo. You got your shuttlecock, your factory and your Olympics on TV.

The Chinese dream.

-Jack Chang

August 15, 2008

What would a real Chinese Olympics look like?

Chinese kick shuttlecock-like things Friday night.

As Team China racks up the medals, I've encountered puzzlement from several Chinese here over what exactly their athletes are up to.

Fencing? Beach volleyball? Do Chinese play these sports?

The answer is no, but the Chinese government has shelled out mega-bucks to win medals in those sports.

The effort's included hiring foreign coaches and training athletes with no history in what they're competing in.

So you get something like fencing, which the Chinese won an individual gold medal in this past week.

Sword fighting is something Chinese know about, but I challenge you to find anyone practicing European-style epee fencing anywhere in China other than at the Olympic training centers that crank out Chinese athletes.

Or take rowing. There is dragon boat rowing here but one-or-two person rowing teams competing in the middle of a lake, again it's not something you see.

Now, if you were going to organize an Olympics with sports millions of Chinese could identify with, it'd look something like this:

Some Olympic sports would stay - basketball, soccer, table tennis, baseball, gymnastics, diving, indoor volleyball, shooting, track and field, badminton.

Then, you'd add some sports I've seen on the streets here. Such as:

A kind of hacky sack kicking game you do with a variation on a badminton shuttlecock. I imagine this would be judged on artistic merits like gymnastics is. Tonight, I encountered a mass shuttlecock session pictured above while walking back to my hotel.

The martial art tai chu chuan, which is more of a meditative exercise and which armies of people perform in parks here.

Kite flying, which isn't the kind of high-impact acrobatic kite flying people do in parks in the San Francisco East Bay where I lived. No, this would be judged more on the cuteness of the kite, preferably if the kite resembled a cartoon frog or fish. Otherwise, the kite just sort of stays put in the sky.

Then, some other activities I've seen around town which aren't sports but should be:

Urban driving, where the athlete would speed down the wrong side of the road while all manner of pedestrians lunge at him or her with zombie-like fury.

Urban bicycling, where the athlete would weave between moving cars at a glacial pace with a spouse sitting sideways on the back holding a television set.

Tourist-wrangling, where you'd rustle stray tourists into buses headed for Olympic venues and then unsuccessfully urge them to cheer during boring events.

Now, this, the Chinese could get into. A gold medal in shuttlecock would turn you into a national hero for sure.

-Jack Chang

August 14, 2008

Authenticity first to go in Beijing

Controversy has erupted this week over the fakery used during last Friday's Olympics opening ceremony in Beijing. My response is a big "ho hum."

Chinese Olympic officials have fessed up that the little girl singing a solo at the start of the ceremony was in fact lip synching and that footage of fireworks shown on TV was enhanced with computer-generated explosions.

While the revelations set off chatter in the Chinese blog world and among some U.S. media, they were no surprise to me.

I was at the ceremony and if what television viewers saw what was shown on the giant screens in the Bird's Nest stadium, I would guess that every single second of fireworks footage was fake.

In fact, I suspect that every aerial shot of the Bird's Nest and the city that I saw inside the stadium was prerecorded and digitally prettied up.

The night of the ceremony was a heavily smoggy one, with visibility all of about a mile and the stadium covered in a gray pall.

Yet the supposedly live aerial footage of the stadium they showed on the video screens revealed crystal clear night skies, with the city lights shining like a chandelier. In fact, I did a double-take when I saw that footage but quickly figured out it was phony.

At the very least, the ceremony wizards must have run the video through some heavy filtering although I don't know if there are any filters that can remove smog and haze and general gunk.

Ditto for the opening aerial footage traveling from the Forbidden City and following firework "footprints" across town. Was that on TV? It was shown in the stadium and it was so artificial looking, I didn't think it was even pretending to be live footage.

It would have been pretty difficult to fly a helicopter or plane that quickly and precisely over Beijing and shoot the "footprints" just as they were sent up in front of the camera.

But all the fakery fits the logic of Beijing at the moment, which has been turned into a huge stage for China's strangely subdued "coming-out" party.

With freshly planted flowers and trees in every corner and rainbow-hued lights flashing into the fuzzy night sky, authenticity has clearly been the first thing to go.

Hence, big "One World One Dream" billboards all over the city covering construction sites, weedy parking lots, decrepit apartment buildings, basically anything resembling real city life.

Likewise for the army of volunteers stalking the venues encouraging fans to chant and cheer during listless games (like the U.S.-Angola men's basketball game I saw on Tuesday. (One volunteer even had a canned USA cheer complete with arm motions that he was unsuccessfully trying to persuade some bored American fans to perform.))

If you leave Beijing, though, all the Olympic clutter falls away, and normal, industrial China reappears.

A China where the girl who sings the best may not be the cutest and where you might not be able to see the fireworks for all the smog. This is the China you TV viewers won't find. It's not perfect and "Olympic" enough, I suppose.

In fact, all the flash and glitz of modern Beijing is a big front. China, despite all the economic gains of the past three decades, is not Beijing skyscrapers and Louis Vuitton stores. It is fundamentally a largely poor country.

The most recent U.N. Human Development Index, which measure countries on education, income, health and other factors, ranked China 81st out of 177 countries, between Belize and Grenada.

This is the country Chinese will return to after the Olympics. And no amount of lip-synching and fake fireworks can change that.

-Jack Chang

August 13, 2008

Kobe Bryant gets the love in China

I was at the U.S.-Angola basketball game Tuesday night, setting my things down before play started when, suddenly, a wave of cheering erupted.

Los Angeles Lakers basketball star Kobe Bryant had stepped on court.

The shooting guard has been enjoying a lovefest in China, eliciting almost as much enthusiasm as the home country's giant star Yao Ming.

Why Kobe? Well, he was last season's NBA most valuable player, and the Chinese do keep track of things like that. He's also a friendly enough guy, which is half of why Yao Ming is a star here.

But I think it's also cos the Chinese can say Kobe much more easily than LeBron James or Dwayne Wade, some other stars on the U.S. team. In fact, the word "LeBron" patently defies Chinese attempts to pronounce it phonetically.

Bryant was having an off-night Tuesday but was still getting the love. He scored 8 points and missed several 3-point shots, while Wade scored 19 and James scored 12.

But Wade received only a smattering of applause, mainly from the Americans in the crowd, when he stepped off the court, while Bryant got rock-star thunder. Lebron was the dominant force of the night, blocking shots, zooming around the Angolans, but still, no love from the Chinese.

The Chinese will really erupt when Bryant actually plays at the top of his game one of these nights.

-Jack Chang

August 11, 2008

Paranoia in the PRC or I always feel like somebody's watching me

Who's been snooping in my room?

I just came back tonight to my Beijing hotel room after a long day of work. I sat down, set up my computer and tried to log onto my work e-mail.

An error message appeared, saying the connection had been interrupted.

My first thought: The Chinese censors are at it again.

We all know there are thousands of Chinese worker bees busily trying to block us foreigners in town from seeing all those nasty online nuggets that touch on those "sensitive topics."

We're talking about Tibet, Falun Gong, all the other stuff that will get you an error message if you even Google them.

As a newcomer to this Orwellian world, many of us thousands of visiting journalists don't know how this works. So every thing that looks out of place or every problem that turns up with the Internet or phone sparks paranoia. Is it those Chinese censors at it again? we think. Is this how this game works?

For example, I was trying to reach the advocacy group Human Rights in China on Friday in their Hong Kong office using my Skype, and the line kept dropping or the human rights guys couldn't hear me clearly. I had never experienced that with any of the other many calls I've made on Skype in China.

The group finally reached me by cell phone, but while we were talking, a beep would interrupt every 15 seconds or so. Again, I've never heard that before. The line was also pretty bad.

Now, was this those government leprechauns at it again? Or just an innocent problem with my Internet and phone line?

In this case, knowing how much the Chinese government worry about what Human Rights in China is up to, I would guess this was the real McCoy, some censors at work.

But that's a guess. It's all about odds. Never heard beeping before, never had problems with Skype in China, the only time I experience this is when I'm talking to a group Chinese authorities demonize. I vote for Big Brother's at work.

But then another visitor here told me he was talking to his wife back in the States a few nights ago and started hearing clicking on his line. His wife noticed and asked what was going on. He said it was probably the Chinese listening in.

Were they? What would they hope to learn from this guy's conversation with his wife? Who knows?

We've been told to expect surveillance at every turn, but I find it hard to believe the government is listening in on all tens of thousands of journalists in town for the Olympics.

Then again, this is a country of 1.3 billion people, so they've probably got some tens of thousands of leprechauns at work. Tens of thousands are nothing here.

In my case, I did, after all, write an article last week headlined "China fails to keep promises it made to win Olympic Games." I'm sure that didn't make the government happy.

But what would they hope to learn from listening in? They know who Human Rights in China is after all. Maybe they think I'm talking to some dissident they've spent months looking for. Or maybe they couldn't give a damn what I'm doing and no one's listening, looking, combing...

But the paranoia returns.

Another example: I usually lock my luggage when I leave my hotel room just in case someone untrustworthy is on duty that day.

Last week, however, the same day the story I mentioned came out, I returned and saw that my lock only ran through the hoop of one zipper on my suitcase and not through the hoops of both zippers, which meant my suitcase could be opened.

The questions again: Did I mistakenly only run the lock through one zipper or did the leprechauns come in and do a scan of my room and carelessly leave the lock in one zipper?

Or even more diabolically, did they intentionally put the lock in one zipper so that I would know they'd been here and know that they had their sights on me? Oh, what wicked logic these leprechauns wield.

What were you looking for then? Did you sift through my dirty underwear? Was it you who organized the newspapers I left lying around on the floor? Are you watching me write this now? Are you outside my door listening in?

Or how about this: What are you so afraid of? What could I or any other journalist here possibly write or see online that would threaten your nearly 60-year hold on power? Isn't it about time you opened the doors completely and let the world in?

-Jack Chang

August 10, 2008

We're playing well, although we're losing by 30 points

I'm watching the U.S. basketball team play China's, and the Americans are kicking butt 83-50. It's like the Harlem Globetrotters playing that other team, whose only purpose was to look like idiots as the Globetrotters danced around them.

This is probably the most anticipated game in the Olympics for millions of Chinese. Riding the taxi back to the hotel as the game got under way, I could see countless TV screens in homes and shops tuned to the match. The radio program the driver was listening to announced score updates every 10 seconds, it seemed.

Yet what with their state-of-the-art sports venues and nationalistic pomp this Olympics, it seems the Chinese have forgotten their team isn't what'd you call a world basketball power.

Houston Rockets player and Chinese national Yao Ming is a hero to many here, but he's been unable to ward off this public flaying. The Chinese are getting a harsh reminder at the moment.

Yet if you listened to just the Chinese announcers' play-by-play, you'd think the Chinese team was winning.

"It's not like the American team is playing that well," one announcer says in Chinese. "It's just the Chinese aren't shooting well."

That came after LeBron James soared through the air and slammed one home over two Chinese players.

"The trick to the Americans is they're aggressive," another one says. "They're actually shooting very poorly."

The Americans were ahead by 26 points at this moment. Hmm...maybe aggression was a good strategy.

So it's 89-54 now. The Americans are looking bored. They're leaving Chinese players wide open to take 3-point shots, which the Chinese have made quite a few of but not enough. Jason Kidd just now didn't even try to block an attempted 3-point shot. It failed to go in anyway

Those lazy, aggressive Americans. They're not actually more talented. They're just better at putting the basketball through the hoop.

"The Chinese are playing actually pretty well," the announcer just said. "They proved that they're not afraid of the Americans."

It's 98-66, with 30 seconds to go. By the way, the Americans have the 98 points. Just in case you were only listening in.

-Jack Chang