China's Gold-Medal Moment
The country's leaders saw the Olympic spectacle as an opportunity to demonstrate that China has regained its national stature and power
China, with a deep culture that goes back 5,000 years, is not an expansionist country. The people admire the United States, even as they resent us. So we must be patient while China develops a growing educated middle class that someday will have the same political consequences for China that it has had in many other countries. Unlike Russia, China does not have the virulent, violent autocratic and military tradition that is on display in Russia's alarming aggression in Georgia.
The Olympics provided a unique window into China that should help us support our moderate policies toward this remarkable country and its people.
Reader Comments
1911: boy emperor PUYI 1949: RED EMPEROR MAO. RISE SINCE. 1978
China has been been decline for 300-years until. 1978.
China, chinese shoud look to themselves for some failings.
Much of its own failings is backward, inward looking culture that never developed sailing, airplanes, or spaceflight.
NO scientific revolution.
NO indutrial revolution.
NO free elections. NO democratic revolution.
NO written alphabet.
NO discovery of the earth, solar system, cosmos. Hence, center of the world. Zhong Guo.
Does anyone think they live in the center of the world.
What china needs is the truth, free search for free truth by free citizens in a free world. Free elections, free markets, free-vote. free trade.
Libery for all her people.
Opium War and Eight Nations Invasion Of China
Quote M. Zuckerman,"They saw the Olympic spectacle as an opportunity to demonstrate that China has regained its national stature and power after the legacy of what it experienced as 'a hundred years of national humiliation' at the hands of foreigners. Humiliated. Chinese schoolchildren have long been indoctrinated to believe that until the Communist victory in 1949 their country was the "sick man of Asia." They learned never to forget the 1919 Treaty of Versailles, which gave to Japan Germany's special concessions and extraterritorial status in China. Incidents such as the clash of Chinese and American military aircraft, the Tibetan uprising, the Olympic torch relay, and even the Sichuan earthquake have all featured in a national narrative of a resurgent China defending itself against a hostile world. The humiliation of a hundred years has given way to an ideology of nationalism that nurtures popular resentment of Japan and America. For us the past may be past as we focus on China's awesome capacity to achieve. Not so for the Chinese. For them, the Olympics have been the crowning moment when they could see themselves at last as victor, not as victims. As the former mayor of Beijing put it last year, "We have to have a good Olympics; otherwise, not only will our generation lose face but also our ancestors."
M. Zuckerman may have forgotten the Opium War and the Eight Nations Invention of China ("Boxer Rebellion"). Those wars also humiliation of the Chinese people by foreign counties such as Britain and the United States. The Opium War was nothing more than the Britain government as illegal drug dealers invading China when the Chinese government trying to stop their people from taking Opium. The Eight Nation Invasion of China was led by the American to steal and rob the Chinese Imperial Palace of all its treasure. Both invasions were unforgivable crimes committed by the United States and British as robbers, murderers and drug dealers. Both U. S. and Britain must now be punished harshly and come to their final end.
Quote M. Zuckerman,"They saw the Olympic spectacle as an opportunity to demonstrate that China has regained its national stature and power after the legacy of what it experienced as 'a hundred years of national humiliation' at the hands of foreigners. Humiliated. Chinese schoolchildren have long been indoctrinated to believe that until the Communist victory in 1949 their country was the "sick man of Asia." They learned never to forget the 1919 Treaty of Versailles, which gave to Japan Germany's special concessions and extraterritorial status in China. Incidents such as the clash of Chinese and American military aircraft, the Tibetan uprising, the Olympic torch relay, and even the Sichuan earthquake have all featured in a national narrative of a resurgent China defending itself against a hostile world. The humiliation of a hundred years has given way to an ideology of nationalism that nurtures popular resentment of Japan and America. For us the past may be past as we focus on China's awesome capacity to achieve. Not so for the Chinese. For them, the Olympics have been the crowning moment when they could see themselves at last as victor, not as victims. As the former mayor of Beijing put it last year, "We have to have a good Olympics; otherwise, not only will our generation lose face but also our ancestors."
M. Zuckerman may have forgotten the Opium War and the Eight Nations Invention of China ("Boxer Rebellion"). Those wars also humiliation of the Chinese people by foreign counties such as Britain and the United States. The Opium War was nothing more than the Britain government as illegal drug dealers invading China when the Chinese government trying to stop their people from taking Opium. The Eight Nation Invasion of China was led by the American to steal and rob the Chinese Imperial Palace of all its treasure. Both invasions were unforgivable crimes committed by the United States and British as robbers, murderers and drug dealers. Both U. S. and Britain must now be punished harshly and come to their final end.
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