Upon entering the arena I was surprised at how modern it was and how it reminded of a 1980’s NBA stadium all at the same time. This place had the look and feel of the old Oakland Coliseum if there were thousands of middle aged fat guys in dress pants, white socks and playboy belts lighting up cigarettes all over the place like cancer didn’t exist. At the same time, it was a 15,000 seat stadium that walked all over the 5,000 seat Carrefour parking lot stadium in Suzhou to which I have grown accustomed.

“This is a pretty solid place,” said Chico. “Obviously the best part is that it doesn’t have smoke alarms.”

After fighting through a cloud of smoke and sea of fat guys in the lobby, Chico and I faced our next test: the overwhelming presence of thousands of security guards.

I would estimate that the Nanjing Olympic Stadium beat was being patrolled by 2,000 – 2,500 security guards (“security” shirts), police officers (blue shirts), army dudes (green shirts) and real bad asses (tight fitting black shirts with earpiece). Every row of every section had at least one of the aforementioned enforcers, and a few sections were taken up entirely of the hired guns. Luckily, only the guys in the black shirts meant business while the rest of the crew slept, smoked or asked Chico and I if we knew how to use chopsticks.

We finally made our way to our seats just as the Iranian team was being introduced. Chico brought up a good point.

“Wait a second. They play basketball in Iran?”

Apparently not too well as the home team jumped out to an early lead with Yao Ming (Houston Rockets), Wang ZhiZhi (former LA Clippers), and Yi Jianlian (New Jersey Nets) all in the starting lineup.
Yao’s play early was pretty sluggish and they used him sparingly throughout the game. This wasn’t too big of a shock as he never plays heavy minutes in the NBA, and this was his second game back from a five month layoff.

Yi could be called the Chinese Tim Thomas. Physically he is tall, strong and quick. In warm-ups he can shoot from anywhere, drive on anyone and seems to jump really well. The problem arises when the whistle blows and he actually has to start playing a real game. Against one of the worst teams in the tournament without much talent to speak of, Yi was content to sit at the three point line and hoist up a jumper if the ball happened to come to him. He rarely put the ball on the floor to make a move towards the basket and defensively never made a key stop or rebounded outside of his immediate area. Overall he seemed like he would much rather be someplace else and was content to sit back and let the rest of the team do the heavy lifting.

The standout player of the afternoon was everyone’s favorite former defector Wang Zhi Zhi. Wang has retired from his job as an NBA benchwarmer, made amends with the Chinese government after his refusal to return for the Asian Games in 2002, and seems ready to lead the team. Above everyone, Wang seems to be playing with the most to prove as he is the elder statesmen on the team at age 31 and also the only one out of the aforementioned three to try his hand at the NBA and fail.

Wang emerged as the clear leader early in the game while hustling for rebounds, asserting himself offensively through a combination of outside shooting and penetration, and vocally shouting out orders on the court. Overall, China cruised to a 75-46 win over the hopelessly overmatched Iranian team in a game that was never in question.

Keep reading for part II: No Shrimp, No Barbie, No Victory for the Australians

A coming out party for a nation that boasts 5000 years of history and more skeletons in its closet than there are teeth-marked discarded wooden skewers outside the barbecue place at 3 AM？Who’s coming out, the minority groups, the political prisoners, the AIDS activists, the handicapped, the mentally disabled?

A dazzling display of modern China’s industrial, technological and financial prowess, built atop smashed homes and disrupted lives, with peasant sweat and blood mixed into the concrete for that extra grip.

A host nation assuming its place at the international banquet table, where the big players throw themselves parties for being so damn rich and powerful. Look at my wealth and my power, look at my massive airport and my unrecognisable capital city, totally pimped out, plastic surgerised to perfection, gone the centuries old lanes like wrinkles on an aging face, gone the history, the proles and the disgrace.

A nation has been racing towards this summit of glory, this peak on a mountain of magnificence, this apogee, this zenith, orchestral chords swirling like schools of silvery fish towards the surface, the spin on this things so tight by now that it has its own gravity, pulling matter and lives into it, three days to go until the great collective holding of the breath when all that has been struggled for, all the columns erected, people trained, particulates swept away, the endless stockpiles of vapid speeches exhausted at last, such focus, dedication and hope as to sustain the nightly dreams of countless souls for years on end, comes to pass.

What does it all mean? That the best is yet to come, and come it will, totally inevitable and thoroughly unpredictable.

Of course, to protest, you’ll have to apply five days in advance and hope your cause isn’t considered, the rather ubiquitous, “against national interests” (anyone wishing to raise a sign against the domestic policies of Azerbaijan are welcome).

The decision to allow the Disney-flavoured protests comes from the on going pressure the global community has put on China because the Games aren’t as open as they were promised to be.

Liu Shaowu, security chief for the BOC, explained, “Assembling to march and protest is a citizen’s right. But it must be stressed that when exercising this right, citizens must respect and not harm others’ freedoms and rights and must not harm national, social and collective interests.”

It raises the question: what is there to protest that doesn’t, in some way, conflict with national, social or collective interests? I guess I could protest my ingrown toe-nail, or maybe the gas that eating Sichuan food gives me? Hey, Hey ho, Hui Guo Rou has got to go, hey, hey ho!

Even more present in the mind of would-be protesters has to be the consequences of raising a sign of protest in a country that has historically be very open to rounding up voices of dissent after allowing or even encouraging them to do so.

Foreigners are also allowed to apply to protest, and can do so at their local Entry and Exit Bureau - you know, the same place you apply for your visa. You do the math.

According to writer Naomi Klein in the conclusion of her book The Shock Doctrine: the rise of disaster capitalism, this turn is happening because China and its people are recovering from the “economic shock therapy” that the government put the people through since certain event in June 1989.

Klein says that the government used this event to push through some of the most anti-citizen-styled economic policies which were just recently corrected by the country’s new labour law that took effect on January 1st 2008. The inspiration for these policies was the economist Milton Friedman of the University of Chicago.

Friedman who advocated a pure form capitalism which was free of government intervention — and low taxes and little in the way of social services. Klein says that the only way citizens would accept a situation like this is in the wake of a major physical shock such a coup or natural disaster. The citizens would then be hit with a second economic shock in the form of Friedman’s economic policies and finally, violent physical repression would be used to ensure that those who tried to oppose the economic policies were effectively removed from society.

Klein details the history of this policy and how it was first tried in Chile with Pinochet and then through out other Latin American countries and then Indonesia with Suharto. In the late 1980s, the economic policy was pushed on Eastern European countries when they emerged from Communism. There wasn’t the same violence in Eastern Europe as in Latin America or Indonesia, but Klein seems to think that the drop in the standard of living of most of the population was just as bad. 

The final third of the book is devoted to the disaster capitalism complex, which Klein says developed mostly in the US and was able to reach its peak after 9/11 when companies such as Haliburton emerged fully prepared to help the newly established Homeland Security Department with protecting the US and the Pentagon with planning the war in Iraq.

The really reason the Bush government went to Iraq, Klein said wasn’t because of WMD or Islamofascism but instead because it wanted to use Iraq as a Middle East experiment. The Bush government wanted to open the markets of the Middle East and the easiest way they thought to do that was to destroy Iraq and remake it as a pure capitalist paradise.

The thing is you can’t completely clean the slate, people will always resist the attempts to erasing the old form and replacing it with something new. And as we know people in Iraq resisted. It didn’t help that the foreign contractors that came in such as Haliburton and Blackwater didn’t attempt to hire any Iraqis but instead brought in all their workers from abroad (something these same companies would repeat with the assistance they would give in Hurricane Katrina).

Klein concludes the book by saying that some countries are now recovering from the shock doctrine and replacing its economic theory with a component that is more beneficial to its citizens — such as the story with China I mentioned at the beginning of this piece.

In fact the opening paragraph really sums up all of the 10 or so pages that Klein writes about China in the book. China might of gotten a lot of mentions in book reviews and media interviews but it is really just a small portion of the book, but that doesn’t mean the book is not worth reading.

One of the things that has always bothered me about China is the way that “officials” treat the public like children. Now certainly, anyone that has been in China for more than 30 seconds realizes that the public doesn’t go a long way to dispel a need for this sort of overseeing, but I rather strongly believe that when you treat someone like a child then you simply encourage them to act like a child.

I also understand that the upper-class and growing middle-class of Beijing (and China at large) lay awake nights worrying that their foreign counterparts are going to come to their country and believe that ALL of China, and all Chinese, have the civility and manners of the sweet potato hawker (in all ways) on the corner.

But for a country so sensitive about its pride and its face, what does it do to the psyche of a nation knowing that the rest of the world is reading it had the need to create an Office of Capital Spiritual Civilization Construction Commission because the citizens aren’t “civilized” enough to dress themselves?

BEIJING - Polishing up Beijing for the Olympics has extended to telling residents what not wear, with the city government advising against too many colors, white socks with black shoes, and parading in pajamas.

The advice, on top of campaigns to cut out public spitting and promote orderly lining up, was handed out in booklets to 4 million households ahead of the Olympics, an official said Thursday.

The etiquette book giving advice on everything from shaking hands to how to stand is part of a slew of admonitions on manners, said Zheng Mojie, deputy director of the Office of Capital Spiritual Civilization Construction Commission.

“The level of civility of the whole city has improved and a sound cultural and social environment has been assured for the success of the Beijing Olympic Games,” she said.

Tips Include

• There should be no more than three color groups in your clothing.
• Wearing pajamas and slippers to visit neighbors is out.
• Dark-colored socks are recommended, and white socks should never be worn with black leather shoes.
• No public displays of affection
• Feet should be slightly apart or in the shape of a V or Y when standing
• Handshake should not last more than three seconds
• Don’t ask foreigners their age, marital status, income, past experience, address, personal life, religious belief or political belief

These tips have been added to the ban on spitting (in Beijing at least) and Patience In Line Day (the 11th of each month).

Campaigns involving nearly a million volunteers have been launched to give etiquette tips at schools, universities and government offices. In some districts university students have been encouraged to go to villages to educate rural people, she said.

“Such campaigns and educational activities are now gradually improving the lives of Beijingers, for example now you’ll find more smiling faces and people are more properly and elegantly dressed,” she said.

People have formed a habit of queuing for buses, she said. At more than 1,000 bus stops in the city people are queuing up, she said. “This has already become a habit for the Beijing citizens,” Zheng said.

And now today, more astonishingly, the BBC’s Chinese language news site has also been unblocked, quite possibly for the first time in the history of the Interwebs.

Here are the two front pages, as I wrote this now on the evening of July 31st. Somewhat amusingly, the front page of the English section blares that the BBC’s Chinese site is now unblocked within China, although that same ’shock’ news is not featured in the BBC Chinese part:

This is clearly related to the upcoming Olympics - just 8 more days, folks - and the promised “openness to media” that is being touted by Liu Binjie, minister of the General Administration of Press and Publication.

Journalists who have newly arrived in Beijing to cover the Games, however, are not finding the internet in China to be entirely open, however, as some have noted that sites such as Amnesty International are not available via the domestic intertubes.

Indeed, earlier today the International Olympic Committee (IOC) acknowledged rather sheepishly that “there will be limitations on website access during Games time,” according to the IOC press chief.

So, despite the insistance of Minister Liu that the “open door to the foreign media will not close after the Games,” (in his own words), it seems somewhat unlikely that it will actually come to pass, just as I doubt that the BBC’s Chinese news site will still be accessible here in - oooh - about 3 or 4 weeks time.

Spread the word among your friends in China. Screw proxies. This is friggin’ wonderful.

Watch the Video of the VPN install:

NOTE: I had to censor the part with The Daily Show in it.  Apparently youtube is quite sensitive about showing Jon Stewart’s face anywhere!  They took this video down the first time I posted it.  How about that? Youtube censored a video about censorship!

I was well aware that in the past ten years the prevalence of 普通话 has spread in Hong Kong, yet people tell me that the average native still feels more comfortable conversing in English. Feeling lazy, I used English exclusively during the first two days and communicated without undue difficulty.

I found the Hong Kongers to be neither polite nor rude, rather on par with people from any major metropolis. On the third day, however, I found myself in northern Kowloon looking around for a dim sum restaurant. I approached two people standing outside of a shop and asked in English if they could recommend someplace that was authentic and nice but reasonably inexpensive. They stood inert, neither ignoring nor adressing me, and feeling frustrated (and hungry) I repeated my question in Mandarin. Suddenly, their expressions changed and they smiled broadly, not only recommending a place nearby but even escorting me there.

From that point forward, I used Mandarin as my default language in the city. At once, I noticed that people were far more friendly and polite than before, and my opinion of the infamously proud Cantonese changed for the better.  Even at immigration at the airport, a location not known for its effervescent employees, I was praised for my Mandarin and for scrawling my Kunming address in barely legible 简体字.

Now, those of you with extensive travel experience are surely nodding and saying, “Of course. It’s always better to try the local tongue overseas.” This is true, and even irascible Parisian waiters will smile if you order your breakfast in French. Being somewhat ignorant about Hong Kong in general, I wasn’t sure what the linguistic dynamic was there. Perhaps Hong Kongers preferred English both to show off their competency in the tongue (in comparison to their mainland cousins) or as a gentle rebuke against Beijing rule.

Yet as I discovered, knowing a bit of Mandarin actually smoothed things over, and those of you heading there in the future would be wise to wield your language skills even if you don’t necessarily have to.

© James Justin

Hey all you fellow laowai in China, Harvard student Wendy Lee is researching how we go about travelling in this big country, and due to the lack of stats about our expat habits available online she’s put together a little survey and asked I tell you about it.

Now, personally, I’m always eager to help Harvard when it comes a callin’, but I think Wendy realized early on many of you would need some additional incentive. As such, all expats that take the time to fill out the survey will be entered into a random drawing for a free trip for two to Sanya, including round trip plane tickets (from any Chinese city) and a 3-night hotel stay.

The 18 questions all center around general demographics and travel behavior. So, why not help a student out and maybe win yourself a trip to the closest thing China’s got to paradise.

Fill out the survey here