Here’s something you don’t see in the streets of the Chinese People’s Republic every day. However, if the Beijing police have anything to say about it, you won’t ever be seeing this type of thing again.

What is going on? Is it perhaps a casting-call for a Chinese-studio remake of 300? No, as the accompanying RFI piece explains, this was a marketing stunt, by a Beijing restaurant called “Sweetie Salad” – a marketing stunt gone bad for those taking part, as the local police swiftly moved in and conveyed at least some of the make-believe Spartans to the slammer.

On the other hand, it was a marketing stunt gone good for Sweetie Salad – if you take into account that old maxim that no publicity is bad publicity – which according to this RFI report generated enormous on-line buzz about itself within China and was punished only to the extent of feeling obliged to post this message:

We have humbly recognized that, as a start-up, we lack a certain experience in the organization of large-scale events.

Where did all those buff foreign males think that they were – Amsterdam? In fact, the timing couldn’t be better: all they need to do is get out of jail (those to whom that applies), scrape up the funds for a half-round-the-world flight and find a hotel (admittedly a challenging proposition at this late point), and they then can all enjoy themselves royally this upcoming weekend at the yearly Amsterdam Gay Pride celebrations. They’ll feel right at home there, walking around Amsterdam’s streets in their Spartan suits (I assure you, that sort of get-up often verges comparatively on the tame side); yet they might very well impress the locals enough to be invited to join a boat for the infamous Canal Parade that kicks off this upcoming Saturday (August 1) at 1.30 PM CET. (more…)

Followers of this weblog over at least the past few months will recall my very doubtful stance towards the issue of possible doping by athletes at this years Beijing Olympic Games. I presented commentary from an ex-Olympic star doubting that doping could be avoided; and I pointed out how technological advances in sporting accessories were probably producing athletic performances many would call “unnatural” anyway. In fact, in my last sentence of that latter post I opined that, because of these accessories, we “have something else to be concerned about in addition to the pharmacological/blood-swapping tricks that we have to hope the Olympic authorities are sufficiently on-guard against.”

Sorry to say, but up comes an article in the respected German commentary weekly Die Zeit, by Friedhard Teuffel (Doping Policy of the IOC [= International Olympic Committee] is not credible), which indicates that those authorities were rather unlikely to have been sufficiently on-guard.
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With his commentary piece in the Financial Times Deutschland (Sterile Games in Peking) Claus Hecking wraps up all the repeated instances of fakery that have been brought to light already at this year’s Beijing Olympics – and they are only about half over! – into a thought-provoking synthesis: together, he maintains, they add up to a profound and very revealing cultural misunderstanding.

If you’ve been paying attention at all, you know what “fakery” I’m talking about here – (more…)

It was something to make you wonder aloud: “Are they serious?” As part of the good face towards the outside world that China was trying to build in the run-up to the Beijing Games – an attempt to live up to supposed “Olympic ideals,” since similar measures had apparently been introduced at the Athens and Sydney Olympics – back last month the Chinese authorities announced that protests and demonstrations would be legally allowed, but only within zones that would be designated within three of Beijing’s parks, namely the Zizhuyuan, Ritan, and World Parks, respectively in the city’s NW, E, and SW parts. All that was necessary was to apply for permission five days in advance, specifying in your application, in detail, the planned nature of the protest, the topic, and the number of participants.

(If you’d like a bit of English-language amusement, you can check out the on-line article about this from Xinhua, one of China’s two official news agencies. The respective park managers are diligently boning up on the national “law on assemblies, procession and demonstrations” to get prepared; meanwhile, park visitors express alarm that their lives could be disturbed.)

No, of course they were not serious. (more…)

Back now to the upcoming Beijing Olympic Games. I mentioned before their rampant commercialism. That is certainly not a recent phenomenon by any means, but nonetheless an ever-growing annoyance, clearly at variance with the original “Olympic spirit” and quite possibly a major reason behind the awarding of the Games to Beijing in the first place (that huge Chinese market!), despite the country’s deficiencies in the area of human rights and free information that we have already seen, as well as Beijing’s own deficiencies in sheer clean air which we may be about to witness.

The guardian of the Games and their “Olympic spirit” is supposed to be the 110 members of the International Olympic Committee, lead by its president, the Belgian Jacques Rogge. For anyone who might have any confidence in that body as a defender of the Olympics against the seductions of money, the recent article by Evi Simeoni in the leading German daily the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (or FAZ) should provide a bracing corrective (The Rivalry of the Applicants). (more…)

As everyone is well aware, the Beijing Olympic Games are coming up this weekend, and so while everyone has to wait a few more days for the athletic spectaculars to begin, the focus of media attention is falling mainly on the host city that is setting the stage. Will the air be clean enough? (The jury is still out; we might not know until the actual dates when the particularly atmosphere-sensitive events – e.g. running, bicycling – are scheduled.) Will the authorities allow free access to information, mainly via the Internet, to enable visiting journalists to do their work? (That one is still touch-and-go as well.)

On-the-scene reports are now popping up in the media to give the outside world a sense of how the Chinese capital city has been improved and “cleaned up” in preparation for the Games, with the accent on the often extreme measures that the authorities have taken to do that. Jen Lin-Liu has a piece in today’s NYT (Beijing Under Wraps) touching on many of these below-the-surface measures, invisible to foreigners just now flying in to take part in some way in the Games’ staging. (Few foreigners, it turns out, will be flying in just to serve as spectators, if Lin-Liu’s description of the newly-stringent visa regulations is any indication.) (more…)

After the unblinking look at the quality of American education (and the supposed American intellectual-level generally) on this site of a few days ago, it’s refreshing to see an article in which a German newspaper turns its focus back on the qualities of the Germans themselves, if in a tongue-in-cheek manner.

That’s what we see on-line today at the Süddeutsche Zeitung with the article The Games Must Be Expanded! (more…)