Lavish Ceremony Opens Olympic Games Beijing '08

The Games have drawn a record number of participants and more world leaders than any previous Olympics. The ceremonies proceeded almost flawlessly, defying speculation that everything from rain to protests to terrorism might disrupt China's moment of glory. A steady stream of cheers and applause accompanied the performance, from the estimated 91,000 spectators, athletes, executives and world leaders at the stadium, a mass of latticed steel known as the "Bird's Nest" that has come to symbolize the dizzying transformation of China's capital for the XXIX Olympiad.

The Games have been both a magnet for international debate and a wellspring of pride for many of China's 1.3 billion people. Critics charge that the event is a distraction from the Chinese government's human-rights abuses and its support for governments in places like Sudan and Myanmar. But most Chinese see the country's first Olympics as a celebration of its rise from poverty and political chaos to global pre-eminence.

Elaborate Ceremony Opens Olympic Games

BEIJING An ecstatic China finally got its Olympic moment on Friday night. And if the astonishing opening ceremonies of the 2008 Olympic Games lavished grand tribute on Chinese civilization and sought to stir an ancient nations pride, there was also a message for an uncertain outside world: Do not worry. We mean no harm.

Usually, that message is delivered by the dour-faced leaders of the ruling Communist Party, who dutifully, if sometimes unconvincingly, regurgitate the phrase harmonious society coined by President Hu Jintao. But in the nimble cinematic hands of Zhang Yimou, the filmmaker who directed the opening ceremonies, the politics of harmony were conveyed in a visual extravaganza.

The opening ceremonies gave the Communist Party its most uninterrupted, unfiltered chance to reach a global audience estimated at more than four billion people. At one point, thousands of large umbrellas were snapped open to reveal the smiling, multicultural faces of children of the global village. Benetton could not have done it better.

Any Olympic opening is a propaganda exercise, but Friday nights blockbuster show demonstrated the broader public relations challenge facing the Communist Party as China becomes richer and more powerful. The party wants to inspire national pride within China, and bolster its own legitimacy in the process, even as leaders want to reassure the world that a rising China poses no danger.

That has not been an easy sales pitch during the tumultuous Olympics prelude, in which violent Tibetan protests and a devastating earthquake revealed the dark and light sides of Chinese nationalism. But for one night, at least, the party succeeded wildly after a week dominated by news of polluted skies, sporadic protests and a sweeping security clampdown. Across Beijing, the public rejoiced. People painted red Chinese flags on their cheeks and shouted Go China! long after the four-hour opening concluded.

"Old movies that make us look poor and pathetic"

For a lot of foreigners, the only image of China comes from old movies that make us look poor and pathetic, said Ci Lei, 29, who watched the pageantry on a large-screen television at a glitzy, downtown bar. Now look at us. We showed the world we can build new subways and beautiful modern buildings. The Olympics will redefine the way people see us.

China has grown so rapidly that even people who live here often do not realize that the country that, seven years ago, won the right to stage the Games is no longer the same place. In 2001, Chinas gross domestic product was $1.3 trillion; this year, it is estimated to reach $3.6 trillion.

The scale and speed of that growth often leaves the outside world awed, but also worried. China has the worlds largest authoritarian political system. Chinese society is prospering, even as it is cleaved by inequality and burdened with corruption and severe pollution.

China is asserting its diplomatic muscle in Asia and Africa and pumping money into a military that by the Pentagons estimates now has greater resources than any except that of the United States. Yet foreign investment and open export markets have been crucial to Chinas success, and it still seeks, even depends on, the support and respect of the United States and Europe.

These contradictions are one reason Mr. Hu has promoted the amorphous concept of a harmonious society as a rhetorical tent encompassing polices intended to soothe, if not necessarily resolve, a range of tensions.

Earlier on Friday, Mr. Hu hosted world leaders at a luncheon inside the Great Hall of the People. His table guests illustrated Chinas evolving, sometimes conflicted role in world affairs.

At one seat was Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, with whom China sided in July to veto a United Nations resolution, backed strongly by the United States, that would have imposed sanctions on Zimbabwe, after most observers had concluded that Robert Mugabe stole the presidential election there.

President Bush shared the same table. So did the Japanese prime minister, Yasuo Fukuda, with whom China has been conducting a careful reconciliation designed to repair relations that were badly strained by nationalist fervor in both countries just a few years ago.

Perhaps no guest better illustrated Chinas uncertain diplomatic balancing than President Nicolas Sarkozy of France.

Earlier this year, Mr. Sarkozy threatened to boycott the opening ceremonies to protest Chinas crackdown of the Tibetan protests in March. Chinese nationalists, cheered by the state-run media, promoted a boycott of the French retailer Carrefour and filled the Internet with anti-French postings. France and China then scrambled to contain the damage and reopen the door to Mr. Sarkozys visit.

The historic moment we have long awaited"

The historic moment we have long awaited is arriving, Mr. Hu said in a speech at the luncheon on Friday. The world has never needed mutual understanding, mutual toleration and mutual cooperation as much as it does today.

Times journalists and special contributors explore the Olympics in Beijing and on the Web from every angle the politics, the culture and the competition.

China first bid for the Games 15 years ago, when party leaders were struggling to recover their legitimacy at home and abroad after they violently suppressed pro-democracy protesters in Beijing in 1989. They were rejected then, though by a narrow margin, and when China won the right to host the 2008 Games, the Olympics had become something of a national obsession.

Leaders spent an estimated $43 billion in building roads, stadiums, parks and subway lines in trying to transform Beijing into an Olympic city.

Beijing Welcomes You!

Plans to welcome the world Beijing Welcomes You! is one Olympic slogan have suffered from polluted skies and the presence of a security force of more than 100,000 people, summoned to guard against terror attacks.

Yet even amid such a huge police presence, the crowds that gathered near the Olympic Village on Friday afternoon were giddy and proud that China could show itself to the world. Yang Bin, a D.J., had traveled more than 500 miles to Beijing from the city of Chongqing.

I came to Beijing last night to celebrate the Olympics, even though I dont have a ticket, Mr. Yang said. China is never more glorious than today. The whole world is watching us.

The opening ceremonies reportedly cost tens of millions of dollars and involved 15,000 performers inside the latticed shell of the citys new National Stadium, known as the Birds Nest. No Olympic opening ceremonies are thought to have approached it in cost and scale.

The production was filled with signature Chinese touches: the elaborate choreography of dancers on a giant calligraphy scroll; the undulating rows of Chinese characters, with the character for harmony illuminated; and the use of masses of people, working in unison into a grand spectacle centered on traditional Chinese history, music, dance and art.

Topping the Oscars?

This is a huge gathering for sports lovers, and I am one of them, said the famed composer, Tan Dun, whose score will be played during gold medal ceremonies. This is a lot more than about China. If we think this is only Chinas moment, its a big mistake. Its the moment of the world.

Mr. Zhang, the filmmaker, has said he wanted the opening ceremonies to be his gift to China. The climactic moment of the evening came during the dramatic ceremonies to light the Olympic flame. Li Ning, a Chinese gold-medal winner in gymnastics, was hoisted by thin cables to the stadiums roof with the torch in his hand.

Then, as the cables slowly guided him around the inner rim of the roof, as if he were running, a digital scroll unfurled behind him with images of some of the thousands of other torch bearers who had carried the flame during its journey around the world this spring. The mesmerizing sight culminated with Mr. Li igniting a giant torch affixed to the roof.

The scroll did not appear to show images of the angry protests that erupted during the torchs stops in London, Paris and San Francisco. Filmmakers, of course, work from a script.

Just as men really cannot fly, art is not reality. As Friday night proved, art and artifice can inspire. One burden of staging one spectacular show is that people will want and expect an even more spectacular one in the future. And as Chinas leaders celebrate, that is the challenge facing them.

The Beijing Olympics are now under way. They will end on Aug. 24. Then the world will exhale and look away from China and its search for harmony. But the Chinese people will want more. And then the real Games of China will begin again.

Huge Display Aims To Illustrate Change To a Global Power

China Leaders Try to Impress and Reassure World - Opening Ceremonies Aim To Illustrate Rise to Global Power The Opening Ceremonies were believed to be the most-watched event in television history. Experts estimated that more than two billion people around the globe watched it live.

The Games have also drawn a record number of participants and more world leaders than any previous Olympics. As uniformed athletes marched into the Bird's Nest Friday night, leaders from President George W. Bush to France's Nicolas Sarkozy stood and were applauded by the crowd. Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin waved vigorously and smiled, even as the Russian military was engaged in a conflict with its neighbor Georgia.

The show required 13 months of rehearsal by some 14,000 performers, including 9,000 from the People's Liberation Army. As the seconds ticked down ahead of the start, hundreds of young men clad in silver and red banged on computerized drums, forming human pixels in a giant countdown clock.

A National TV Draw

Later, fireworks erupted around Beijing in a display that organizers said symbolized China's invention of gunpowder. Then women in rainbow body-suits, suspended from cables, danced floating above the crowd.

They were followed by costumed children striding to a podium, where soldiers raised the Chinese flag as the national anthem was played by a military band.

Across the country, Chinese watched the ceremonies on state broadcaster China Central Television. In Beijing, security was extraordinarily tight, and threats of attacks on the Games were reported in Tokyo and Hong Kong.

Not everyone was impressed. Pei Yuekai and his wife, Zhang Xueliang, watched the Opening Ceremonies on TV in front of their convenience store on Beichizi, a small street lined with scholar trees near the emperor's palace. "The Opening Ceremonies are only for people with position [in society]," Mr. Pei said. "But for sporting events, we might try to get tickets."

Critics and supporters have battled intensely in the months leading up to these Games to define them in the minds of the global public. For the ruling Communist Party -- whose chief, President Hu Jintao, presided over the evening -- the arrival of the Olympics is a triumph.

Yet officials have taken pains to infuse the day's events with messages of peace and harmony. At a luncheon earlier in the day with more than 80 world leaders, Mr. Hu toasted the "strong growth of the Olympic movement," and said the Games represent "an opportunity not only for China but also for the whole world."

Welcome to the 21st century, China! I hope you will develop not only your economy ...

Harmony and the Dream

By DAVID BROOKS Published: August 11, 2008 Chengdu, China

The world can be divided in many ways rich and poor, democratic and authoritarian but one of the most striking is the divide between the societies with an individualist mentality and the ones with a collectivist mentality.

This is a divide that goes deeper than economics into the way people perceive the world. If you show an American an image of a fish tank, the American will usually describe the biggest fish in the tank and what it is doing. If you ask a Chinese person to describe a fish tank, the Chinese will usually describe the context in which the fish swim.

These sorts of experiments have been done over and over again, and the results reveal the same underlying pattern. Americans usually see individuals; Chinese and other Asians see contexts.

When the psychologist Richard Nisbett showed Americans individual pictures of a chicken, a cow and hay and asked the subjects to pick out the two that go together, the Americans would usually pick out the chicken and the cow. Theyre both animals. Most Asian people, on the other hand, would pick out the cow and the hay, since cows depend on hay. Americans are more likely to see categories. Asians are more likely to see relationships.

You can create a global continuum with the most individualistic societies like the United States or Britain on one end, and the most collectivist societies like China or Japan on the other.

The individualistic countries tend to put rights and privacy first. People in these societies tend to overvalue their own skills and overestimate their own importance to any group effort. People in collective societies tend to value harmony and duty. They tend to underestimate their own skills and are more self-effacing when describing their contributions to group efforts.

Researchers argue about why certain cultures have become more individualistic than others. Some say that Western cultures draw their values from ancient Greece, with its emphasis on individual heroism, while other cultures draw on more on tribal philosophies. Recently, some scientists have theorized that it all goes back to microbes. Collectivist societies tend to pop up in parts of the world, especially around the equator, with plenty of disease-causing microbes. In such an environment, youd want to shun outsiders, who might bring strange diseases, and enforce a certain conformity over eating rituals and social behavior.

Either way, individualistic societies have tended to do better economically. We in the West have a narrative that involves the development of individual reason and conscience during the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, and then the subsequent flourishing of capitalism. According to this narrative, societies get more individualistic as they develop.

But what happens if collectivist societies snap out of their economic stagnation? What happens if collectivist societies, especially those in Asia, rise economically and come to rival the West? A new sort of global conversation develops.

The opening ceremony in Beijing was a statement in that conversation. It was part of Chinas assertion that development doesnt come only through Western, liberal means, but also through Eastern and collective ones.

The ceremony drew from Chinas long history, but surely the most striking features were the images of thousands of Chinese moving as one drumming as one, dancing as one, sprinting on precise formations without ever stumbling or colliding. Weve seen displays of mass conformity before, but this was collectivism of the present a high-tech vision of the harmonious society performed in the context of Chinas miraculous growth.

If Asias success reopens the debate between individualism and collectivism (which seemed closed after the cold war), then its unlikely that the forces of individualism will sweep the field or even gain an edge.

For one thing, there are relatively few individualistic societies on earth. For another, the essence of a lot of the latest scientific research is that the Western idea of individual choice is an illusion and the Chinese are right to put first emphasis on social contexts.

Scientists have delighted to show that so-called rational choice is shaped by a whole range of subconscious influences, like emotional contagions and priming effects (people who think of a professor before taking a test do better than people who think of a criminal). Meanwhile, human brains turn out to be extremely permeable (they naturally mimic the neural firings of people around them). Relationships are the key to happiness. People who live in the densest social networks tend to flourish, while people who live with few social bonds are much more prone to depression and suicide.

The rise of China isnt only an economic event. Its a cultural one. The ideal of a harmonious collective may turn out to be as attractive as the ideal of the American Dream.

Its certainly a useful ideology for aspiring autocrats.

NBC's Beijing Olympics Closing Statements

Well, just as the marathon was one of the concluding events of the Olympic Games, we are now bringing our broadcast marathon to a close. Beyond the competitive drama, every Olympics provides a snapshot of a city and a country at a point in time. This one was more compelling than most, since Chinas rise and its ongoing transformation is the global story, not only of the moment, but likely of the foreseeable future. These Olympics were a milestone in that still unfolding story. And while history will tell us whether or not the Olympics provided China with the confidence to not only build on its considerable strengths, but also to address its considerable problems. This much we know.

This is a country so vast, a people with lives so varied and a history so rich and complex that no visitor can fully grasp it. Still, of these Games, no advanced degree in international relations was required to appreciate the genuine warmth of the Chinese people, the honest pride in their country and how seriously Chinese citizens, famous Olympians, to everyday men and women, took this chance to show themselves to the world.

All Olympics are important to the host city. These Games were monumentally important to the host nation, which happens to be home to 1/5 of humanity. All that said, just as these Olympics were significant politically, they were also very significant competitively. Beijing turned out to be among the most memorable Olympics ever.

One headline was anticipated before the Games began, and then verified here. For the first time since the fall of the Berlin Wall, an ongoing Olympic rivalry shapes up. In Beijing, the U.S. won 110 medals-the most its ever won at a non-American Olympics. But China, second in the overall count, easily won the most golds here, and the most by any country since the old Soviet Union in 1988. Many of Chinas triumphs went beyond excellence. Their perfection and precision, simply beautiful to behold. China is now a sports power with a sophisticated state-supported sports system. They will be at or near the top of the medal list at London and beyond.

Meanwhile, the Americans had plenty to cheer about. Beach volleyball pairs both prevailing, Nastia Liukin and Shawn Johnson winning gold and winning hearts, the mens basketball team doing exactly what they set out to do-winning, yes-but also redeem and redefine the image and purpose of the U.S. program.

These Games reached multiple crescendos. From the beginning, there was Michael Phelps, who now ranks among the very greatest Olympians ever and who is also now in the top tier of the best and most popular contemporary athletes in any sport-unheard of for a swimmer, until Phelps.

Just about the time Phelps left the pool, a Jamaican jet zoomed over the track. The sprints are supposed to be decided by blinks of an eye, not by bolts of speed so astonishing that, like the spectators, the competitors can only marvel at the worldsC and historysC fastest man. More nations, 204, participated here than in any Games before. And more won medals, 87, than ever before as well.

But beyond the medal podium, the Olympics remain a human panorama, with many alsoC ran finishes and first-round eliminations, nonetheless representing epic personal stories, only appreciated by the participants themselves and their families, friends and countrymen. Theses Games began with Zhang Yimous stunning Opening Ceremony, so boldly conceived and brilliantly executed, that it set a standard for such occasions unlikely to be equaled. And tonight, with more theatrical touches, the curtain came down. So the people of the world came to Beijing, and the people of China extended their hands. You dont have to speak a word of Mandarin to understand that.

Ive been fortunate to be involved with many memorable Olympics, and in many ways, this has been the most memorable. In no small part, due to the efforts of the small army of people who worked tirelessly to bring these Games home to you. For these colleagues, I will always have enormous professional regard and personal gratitude.

The names of these talented men and women accompany this final montage of the images of China and Olympic moments-moments we hope resonate with you as they have with us. Good night, this one last time, from China.