BBC Chinese journalist Meng Ke tells it like it is in the above article. He roasts some of the sacred cows of Olympics propaganda, like the “100 years dream of the Chinese people” (he says: did Chinese people really care about having the Olympics way back in 1908?）as well as the whole thing about “fire and water can mix, why can’t people be equally harmonious” (he says: sounds like a good metaphor, until you realize that it doesn’t make much sense).
Meng is critical of opening ceremony director Zhang Yimou’s attempts to cram in all the best parts of China’s long history and vast cultural depths into a few hours: he wonders whether or not cultural elites are not just like political and business elites in desiring a “harmoniousness” that is derived from and sustained by the power to control.
In the last section, Meng says that “harmoniousness requires decoration”—though “decoration” is the literal translation of what he says, what it means is a certain “dressing up,” which the more critical among us believe lies on the slippery slope towards outright falsification. He talks about Beijing’s rebuilt and cleaned up streets with the faux-ancient buildings (a la Shanghai’s Xintiandi) as a “Disneyification” of Beijing.
Finally, Meng mentions that one of the more well-known BBS in China, the Qiang Guo BBS (强国论坛), has been under tight supervision and monitoring: some netizens are complaining about how fast their posts are getting deleted, making it hard for them to reply to others and engage in any kind of conversation.
