China Business Blog and Podcast

I have decided that for this Olympics, I am going to be “of the people.” If I watch any Olympic coverage on TV, I am going to go to where Chinese people gather and do it there, eschewing private viewing at home. Kinda regular-guy of me, isn’t it? Actually, it is more of a necessity than a moral position – my satellite reception at home is broken and I can’t seem to get my repair guy out to fix it. You know that “we’ll be there between 8 a.m. and 6 p.m. sometime in August” you get in the States? We have that here, too! Cable guys, I guess, are the great cultural equalizer.

But I like this public viewing thing. I watched the opening ceremonies from two different locations, first at a local bar near my home here in Shanghai and then moving on to Malone’s, more of an expat hang-out (which, actually, was loaded with more locals than expats that night). I won’t comment on the opening ceremonies – needless to say they were very cool and had more how-the-heck-did-they-do-that moments than a David Copperfield special.

I spent as much time watching the crowd watch TV as I spent watching TV, and I was enthralled! The faces looking up at the big screen TVs, imagines reflecting off eyeglasses, was amazing. For every amazing moment, local Chinese were not only thinking “isn’t that incredible” … they were also thinking “aren’t we incredible?” When the Chinese national anthem came on, everyone in the bar stood up and sang at the top of their lungs.

As an American, I am conditioned to be wary of mass demonstrations of loyalty and unquestioned fealty for a government – I would say that, on the whole, Americans are proud of our system of government, but we are not necessarily proud of the people or parties that make up that system. We reserve the right to throw the bums out (even if we cannot get a quorum of citizens who care enough to get off their chip-eating, X-Box-playing tushies long enough to actually go into the voting booths).

During the singing of the Chinese national anthem at the opening ceremonies, many people had tears in their eyes, as if they had just won a gold medal after many long years of training. Well, in a sense, they have. Even if much of post-Liberation history has been erased from the books here, the shame of the Opium wars and Japanese colonial occupation is learned by wrote. So, to see 80 world leaders gathered with 91,000 others in a stadium to be watched by – probably – nearly a billion more on television, all to recount 5,000 years of Chinese history and contribution to world culture and commerce … well, that should be emotional.

So I say, let China have its moment. Are there still problems? Of course there are. But I believe that the way out of these problems is through the pride and (yes) abject nationalism of the Chinese people themselves. Pride in building a nation into the fourth largest economy in the world over the past 20 years is child’s play compared to the challenges of building one that represents justice for every one of its citizens. Given that, over the past 200 years, we Americans have not been able to do this ourselves – and, in fact, have slipped drastically backwards in recent years – should give us all pause.

But give it time and the Chinese people will stop comparing themselves to where they have come from and will start measuring themselves against where they could be. Then – and only then – will change happen in China.

Twenty years ago when I was teaching in a Teacher’s Institute in rural China, where the average wage was barely $40 a year, I never thought I would see this day. So I am going to gather with my friends and neighbors at the local pub and will lend my voice to the shouts of “Zhong Guo Jia You!!” (”Go China!!”). I, too, get misty when I see a Chinese gold medal winner on the stands and hear their national anthem. I am not Chinese and I will never claim to know what it is like to be Chinese, but I am honored to be here among them as they are discovering just what that is.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 13th, 2008 at 2:46 pm and is filed under China, culture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.