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Thread: August 8, 2008, China, Russia put the world on notice

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[quote=LEONARDO,312670]China is something else again. If ever there was a display of affable collectivism, it was filmmaker Zhang Yimou's opening ceremonies, which in their reduction of humans to a mass precision abstraction seemed to derive in equal measure from Busby Berkeley and Leni Riefenstahl. (Much of Berlin's 1936 Olympics, we should recall, was choreographed by Riefenstahl to fit the fascist aesthetics of her film "Olympiad.") The subject of Zhang's ceremonies was a celebration of Chinese achievement and power, at all times stressing China's harmonious relations with the rest of the world. Its masterstroke, however, wasn't its brilliant design but the decision, during the parade of the athletes, to have Chinese flag-bearer Yao Ming accompanied by an adorable 9-year-old boy who survived the recent catastrophic earthquake that killed many of his classmates, and who returned, after he had extricated himself from the rubble, to save two of his classmates. When asked why he went back, the NBC broadcaster told us, the boy said that he was a hall monitor and that it was his job to take care of his schoolmates.

That answer may tell us more than we want to know. He could have gone back because his friends were still inside. Instead, he went back because he was a responsible little part of a well-ordered hierarchy. For all we know, he might well have gone back even if he weren't a hall monitor, but his answer -- whether spontaneously his own or one that some responsible grown-up concocted for him -- works brilliantly as an advertisement for an authoritarian power bent on convincing the world that its social and political model is as benign as any democracy's.

What Russia did last Friday was appalling, but it ultimately poses no systematic challenge to the world's democracies. What China did last Friday was entrancing, but its cuddly capitalist-Leninism, already much beloved by our major banks and corporations for its low-wage efficiency, poses a genuine economic challenge to the messier, unsynchronized workings of democracies. A nation that can assemble 2,000 perfectly synchronized drummers has clearly staked its claim as the world's assembly line. 
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