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BLOGGING
'Excessive Response'
Brian Braiker 8/28/2008 12:00:00 AM
The 2008 Olympic Games, which wrapped last weekend, have been heralded as a success and China's coming out party as a superpower. But the face Beijing presented to the world—organized, efficient, well-governed—masked a few troubling truths. The Chinese government set aside zones where people would be allowed to demonstrate during the Olympics, but then refused to approve any protest applications. (Two Chinese women in their late 70s were even sentenced to a year of "reeducation through labor" for applying too many times.) Also detained last month were 37 Americans involved in protests organized by Students for a Free Tibet. One of them, Brian Conley, was arrested on Aug. 13. Conley—a popular video blogger and co-founder of Small World News, which produces two Web sites devoted to independent journalism—says he was on hand to film the protests and that he was arrested simply for recording the event. (Calls to the Chinese embassy in Washington, D.C., were not immediately returned.)
China's Winning Ways
Daniel Gross 8/25/2008 12:00:00 AM
Before the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics, I wrote about economic models that aimed to pre-empt thousands of hours of television coverage, sappy features, and tape-delayed tension. John Hawksworth of PriceWaterhouseCoopers and Andrew Bernard of Dartmouth's Tuck School of Business both aimed to predict national medal hauls based on factors like home-field advantage, the size and growth of national economies, and past political affiliations. (You can check out the PriceWaterhouseCoopers projection here and the 2008 Bernard projection here.)
PLANET EARTH
Is Healthy Air Bad?
Jamie Reno 8/23/2008 12:00:00 AM
Dissidents aren't the only ones being forced off Beijing's streets during the Olympics. The Chinese government has also pushed drivers off the roads—about 3.5 million of them—and shuttered hundreds of factories, steel mills and coal plants in an effort to reduce the city's notorious smog. But while better air in Beijing may be good news for athletes, it could for worse for the earth's environment. "When you clean up very polluted air, as China is doing during these Olympics, it has a direct impact on global warming," says Veerabhadran Ramanathan, a leading climate researcher from the University of California, San Diego, who is studying Beijing's atmosphere for the Games' duration.
All That Glitters …
Melinda Liu 8/21/2008 12:00:00 AM
China's shock—some called it "mourning"—over champion hurdler Liu Xiang's withdrawal due to injury Monday from the Olympics is bigger than a single athlete, albeit a very charismatic one. His dramatic pullout has roiled discussion on a number of delicate subjects, from government transparency (or lack thereof) to flaws in the Soviet-style sports system to sponsors' pressures on athletes—and most importantly to China's obsession with a home-team Olympic "Gold Rush." Officials and citizens alike had made little attempt to conceal their goal of winning the most gold medals at these Games, supplanting the American sports superpower as No. 1, at least in golds. Liu's anticipated gold had been seen as special; it symbolized the rare example of an Asian's ability to dominate a track and field event.
LETTERS
More Than Just Games for China
8/9/2008 12:00:00 AM
"What Drives China": Readers for the most part didn't subscribe to Orville Schell's thesis that because China suffers from a history of humiliation the Olympics should not be marred by political protests. One said, "The Chinese government's serious human-rights violations, against its own people and Tibetans, need to be addressed vigorously without moral cowardice." Another considered China's driven athletes and posited, "No nation suffering from an 'inferiority complex' can succeed in firing up its athletes with that kind of self-confidence."
The Athens Files
8/10/2004 12:00:00 AM