CHINA opened the Beijing Olympics with a stunning spectacle leaving even the oldest Olympic hands breathless. It is surely unlikely that any other host country will ever be able to devote such investment and resources to an opening ceremony. Certainly in four years’ time when the London Games open, it is hard to see how the British will come within a whisker of any such extraordinary display. China put on an utterly breathtaking show that kept the audience in the Bird’s Nest stadium and as many as four billion television viewers around the world spellbound for almost four hours. Less fascinating but in its own way hardly less notable was the way in which the Western media have reported this extraordinary opening to the 2008 Olympics. Hidden not very far below the laudatory reports of the magnificence was a perhaps unintentionally patronizing note that nevertheless ought to grate on all those who take a wider and wiser historic view. Time and again, commentators reported that with its unsurpassed inaugural ceremony, China was signaling to the world that “it had arrived.” Reporters also noted that in the historical context of the program, there was not a single reference to the late Chairman Mao, whose face still dominates Tiananmen Square and which appears on all Chinese bank notes.
Both of these comments are ill informed. For a start, China “arrived” long before Western Europe had emerged from the chaos that followed the collapse of the Roman Empire. More to the point, when the emperors still ruled in Rome, Chinese culture was arguably well in advance of anything the Romans produced and was to remain so for almost another two millennia. Moreover, in China’s long and complex history, Mao’s brutal rule was merely the blink of an eye. Indeed Mao’s cold-blooded elimination of intellectual opposition — having first encouraged thinkers to speak their minds — was strongly reminiscent of the emperor who egged on the scholars in his court to have their say and then buried them alive for their pains.
China has, in truth, been on the threshold of its current world position for hundreds of years. In the 17th century a great Chinese mercantile fleet set sail and explored and traded with the Hadhramut and the east coast of Africa. But the then emperor decided there was nothing that the outside world offered that China really needed. This combined with the rising power of Japanese pirates meant that the Chinese turned their backs on the world except for its immediate neighbors. And the Chinese were not far wrong. Through often-violent dynastic changes until the long rule of the Manchus, China prospered and expanded. The one thing it failed to produce until the early 21st century founding of the republic was a middle class whose enterprise could build upon the country’s cultural and scientific foundations. For centuries, Chinese merchants were despised and even supposed to wear special costumes. Now, however, China has its fast-emerging middle class and its merchants are no longer despised. That is one major new factor in centuries of extraordinary commercial and cultural achievement.
