Beijing 2022

China gets it started by making it so obvious: 2022 is not 2008 anymore

China gets it started by making it so obvious: 2022 is not 2008 anymore

BEIJING — How to top what happened here on a steamy summer night 13, going on 14, years ago?

Remember: precisely at the stroke of 8:08 p.m. on the evening of August 8, 2008, 2,008 drums sounded out the powerful beat of China rising. The drums carried an unmistakable message. We, more than 1 billion people with a great and glorious history, have arrived, to stake our claim among the great powers of the world, now, at the dawn of the 21st century. Take notice, those drums made crystal clear.

On Friday night, back at the Bird’s Nest, the iconic stadium where in 2008 Usain Bolt would go on to light up the track, across Olympic Park from the cube where Michael Phelps would go 8-for-8, Beijing formally became the first city in Olympic history to become host of both the Summer and Winter Games, athletes Zhao Jiawen and Dinigeer Yilamujiang lighting the cauldron — a torch placed in a latticed snowflake-style sculpture (cue: environmental sensibilities).

Xi, Bach and history in the making in Beijing

Xi, Bach and history in the making in Beijing

BEIJING — Its many critics, particularly in the West, presumably do not want to hear or are not willing to listen to anything that might suggest these Beijing 2022 Games might carry salvation of any sort. Indeed, the numbers show a mighty few people from literally around the world tuned in to the 139th International Olympic Committee’s session, its general assembly.

They missed history in the making.

The president of the People’s Republic of China, Xi Jinping. In a brief video message, outlined the importance of the Olympic movement to the People’s Republic, and vice-versa. Beijing is the first city in Olympic history to stage the Games in both Summer and Winter. Because of Beijing 2022, some 300 million Chinese have taken up winter sports — nearly the population of the entire United States, a number that figures to change the economies of winter sports in our 21st century. The Chinese, Xi said, pursue the “Olympic ideal with concrete actions.” This begs the question: around the world, who else?

After Xi came Thomas Bach, the IOC president. Bach is into his ninth year as president; Beijing will be his fifth Games leading the organization. He is a gold medalist from Montreal in 1976 and was himself denied the opportunity to compete in Moscow because of the U.S.-led boycott in 1980. On Thursday, he spelled out, eloquently, the mission of the Games, what they can and cannot do — to “get all humanity together in all our diversity,” but only if they “stand beyond all differences and political disputes.”

Less violence all around -- starting with our words

Less violence all around -- starting with our words

BEIJING — Absent a dramatic and unforeseeable event, the 2022 Winter Olympics, like the 2008 Summer Games, will be a huge success. They will happen. Two years into our global pandemic, that is no small thing. It is, in fact, a very big deal.

When these Games are done, the sanctimonious hypocrisy of the American government and the pack journalism of far too much of the U.S. media that for weeks if not months has been banging on about how bad China is — both really ought to be in for serious examination.

Does China have serious issues? Of course. But it’s incredible to witness how we go on and on about, say, human rights while simultaneously delusionally adrift with an incredible case of bizarro collective amnesia, one that apparently sparks some entitlement to superior moral standing — as if waterboarding never happened, as if Guantanamo is not still in operation. These are matters, to be clear, involving the apparatus of the American state.

The 2022 'boycott' -- d-u-m-b spells U-S-A

The 2022 'boycott' -- d-u-m-b spells U-S-A

We are so dumb here in the United States when it comes to the Olympics.

More precisely, perhaps, reactive instead of proactive.

And heavy-handed and myopic.

Or maybe, really, just dumb.

President Biden’s so-called “diplomatic boycott” of the Beijing 2022 Winter Games marks yet the latest example. In this instance, the president is focused on the approval of a domestic audience and certain Anglo allies. He has been egged on by the dual echo chambers of a political class and a pliant media, both based on the East Coast, that know next to nothing about the Olympics.

In all, he is playing it, in a word, dumb.

Not to mention: being hypocritical to the max.

Again with the pre-Games FUD? Everyone deserves better. Especially the Chinese

Again with the pre-Games FUD? Everyone deserves better. Especially the Chinese

Here we go with the déjà vû all over again, only this time it’s China.

Right on schedule, it’s time for Olympic-style FUD — fear, uncertainty and doubt.

Stories about how big, bad and awful it’s all going to be at the Beijing 2022 Winter Games — especially for the dogs and mongrels of the working press — are going to be the norm from here until the opening ceremony on February 4.

Didn’t we just go through this? In Tokyo and the Summer Olympics? Where the hue and cry was that the Games were going to infect the city (didn’t happen) and that the Japanese people were against the Games (they just re-elected, comfortably, the very same majority political party to office).

Now Beijing, and the Winter Games.

The closed loop! The bubble! A “level of control never before seen at the Games,” a New York Times headline decried in a late-September story in a deliberate attempt to set the tone for Beijing 2022 coverage.

Let’s be blunt: this narrative is absurd and more. It not only shapes perceptions but feeds malicious preconceptions. And that’s inappropriate.