All Cynicism Aside, A New China Dawns

The Sunday Age

Sunday August 10, 2008

John Harms

It was a time for suspending cynicism and embracing spectacle, but to truly understand the symbolism of the Olympics opening ceremony, the mix of old and new, Westerners need to consider the recent history of China in broad and less biased terms.

THEY say half the world's population watched the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games from Beijing. Which suggests that people, no matter where they might be, need to dream. Because the opening ceremony was like a dream.

It took us to another place. Far from thoughts of earthquake and fire, famine and disease, violence and conflict, poverty and desolation. We were taken to a place of innocence and hope and joy; a place of expectation and possibility. And even though it required us to suspend the sense of reality that has made us cynical about the world, we were willing to let the guard down for a moment. And that doesn't happen very often.

Who could not be moved by Lin Hao, the nine-year-old boy marching with Yao Ming, the flag-bearer for the Chinese team? He had helped some of his classmates survive during the Sichuan earthquake.

Or by the synchronised human movement of the drummers, the beat on a vast scale, and the roaring voice of 2008 chanting young men? Or the pure light that brought the Olympic rings to life. The delicate peach blossom. The Confucian scholars. The tai chi masters.

This other place wasn't just any-old-where. It was China. Exotic China. Distant and mysterious China. Comparatively unfamiliar. Different.

Australians have a limited knowledge of China, although that is changing. Our understandings have tended to be simplistic, based on deep-seated notions of Western superiority.

We've been bombarded by Western prejudice for years. So much of the Australian media's analysis of China over the past century has been on Western terms, serving Western ideological and political ends.

Suspicion (if not racism and xenophobia) has prevailed, fuelling widely held views that China has been secretive and closed, untrustworthy, expansionist. When China "fell" to the communists in 1949, Cold War politics made Australians even more fearful. And despite the reforms of the past 25 years, such fears have remained and been exploited, particularly by the right in Australian politics.

Such understandings are not uniquely Australian. The Chinese have had to deal with the implications of Western views for many years.

The beauty of the Beijing Games is that the rest of the world is seeing a different China.

Dr Gao Jia is a sociologist who teaches at Melbourne University. He hopes the Olympic Games will encourage the West to overcome its prejudice. "The Olympic Games and the opening ceremony are about showing that China is China," he argues. "They are about creating real understanding. Not understanding of China on the terms of Western journalists."

To him, the opening ceremony mixed the traditional and the new China. Sophisticated technology represented the new; the scroll of paper and simple image of hills and sun symbolised the old. The whole event conveyed a sense of the Chinese as a creative and skilful people with a deep respect for their past.

For much of this history the Chinese believed they were the mainstay of mankind: the Middle Kingdom. They were ahead of the West. Four significant advances - paper, gun powder, movable printing type and the compass - were highlighted on Friday night. But when they reached out to the West, they were rejected. The Chinese became Sinocentric, keeping their door closed to the West, enriching their culture from within. Until imperial Europe forced its way in.

Gao Jia cautions that to understand this Olympic moment, analysts must consider the recent history of China in broad terms. When he speaks of recent history, he is speaking of the past 150 years. That is how the Chinese think of their history. "This (Olympic moment) is complicated. China has a number of things to tell the world," he says. "The key is that China is trying to restore its glorious past after the disruption of a century of upset. From the Opium Wars. The trauma of the Japanese invasion. The new China is trying to regain its own confidence in the world."

Since the reforms of Deng Xiaoping, China has become more open. Business has helped that. The capitalist West has eyed Chinese markets for a long time, lured China, pressured China, and the Chinese have made a decision to build these commercial relationships. The Chinese are a little bewildered. The West encourages them to modernise, and then criticises when there is an environmental impact.

The main question for the Chinese has been how to feed, clothe and house their people. They have done this in their own way, which is where the dream ends and we wake to the political and social realities.

© 2008 The Sunday Age

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