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Chez Andrew
Andrew Lam is a NAM editor and author of "Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora" (Heyday Books, 2005), which recently won a PEN/Beyond Margins Award.
The motto of the Olympic Games in Beijing is xin Beijing, xin Aoyun, which translates to “New Beijing, New Olympics.” Nearly 100 years ago, there was a similar rallying cry to get China into the Games. According to Susan Brownell, a professor of anthropology at the University of Missouri, St. Louis, and the author of Beijing’s Games, “As early as 1907, patriots in the Chinese Young Men’s Christian Association promoted a campaign that linked physical education to national strength, posing three questions: When will China be able to send a winning athlete to the Olympic contests? When will China be able to send a winning team to the Olympic contests? When will China be able to invite all the world to come to Peking for an International Olympic contest?” Western sports were, at the time, fairly new to the country, having been introduced after the Opium War (1840) when China was a semi-colonial nation. The Chinese quickly took to contemporary athletics, partly due to the Qing government’s insistence on “foreign drills” including gymnastics, fencing, boxing, athletics, and intensive training in many military academies. Contemporary athletics found another route into China: through missionary schools and the YMCA. The schools promoted athletics as extracurricular activities. Soon an appetite to compete with the west emerged. This national drive for fitness, according to Andrew D. Morris in his book Marrow of the Nation: A History of Sport and Physical Culture in Republican China, was consistent with the progressive political move toward nation building. The new emphasis on training, which required discipline and regimentation, was consistent with the aims of political reformers, says Morris, a history professor at California Polytechnic State University. Sports, in this case, became “a physically experienced link” to national unity and modern China. As for the answers to those questions posed above: The first two happened at the 1984 Olympics where marksman Xu Haifeng won the nation’s first individual gold and the women’s vollyball team got the gold. The answer to number three is August 2008. —Andrew Lam For more on China and Olympics comments |
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Yes, but what about those classless and undignified Chinese spying on foreign nationals attending the Olympics? The Chinese have become so obsessed with spying on the free world, they now spy on people even in their sleep or in the privacy of hotel rooms. The Chinese have reduced themselves to disgraceful and disgusting animals the way they spy on people, businesses, sporting teams and other countries.
Every keystroke, every password, every email, every word spoken or whispered, and every telephone call made, even cell phones are monitored. The Chinese are so obsessed with spying on everyone and everything on earth, they have stripped themselves of any class, dignity or honor. They are behaving like sex-crazed teenaged boys trying to catch a feel of a sleeping coed, only the coed is all people, free or not. Disgraceful and disgusting Chinese. Utterly classless and filthy animals. So be very careful in China, or around any Chinese. You will have zero privacy. They have become the most disgraceful and disrespecful people on Earth.
By Daniel · Posted on Jul 30, 02:26 AM