SHANGHAI—It’s sometime past nine, and I’m sprawled across the lawn in People’s Square with a few friends and hundreds of strangers (including a middle-aged couple lost in a makeout session, a boy in a T-shirt that reads I LOVE CHINA, and a legless beggar), watching the opening ceremony on a screen embedded in a skyscraper. We’re about a third of the way through the Parade of Nations, that part of the ceremony where countries display questionable fashionable decisions, en masse. People are starting to get bored. As if on cue, a pair of uniformed guys appear to sell us milk tea for only three times the normal price. But then the crowd erupts into cheers. There, onscreen, is the Canadian team.
So why the uproar? (more…)
BEIJING—A good day to kick-off the Olympic Games it ain’t. The view from the CBC studio in Ling Long Pagoda, a tower overlooking the Bird’s Nest and Water Cube where I’ll be working for the next two weeks, is of one of those post-apocalyptic Beijing days you need to see to believe. The apartment blocks across from the man-made river snaking through the Olympic Green are barely visible. Through the clouds, the sun appears a “lurid red,” as an early Reuters report put it. For critics, Beijing hasn’t disappointed.
The weather may not be cooperating, but it won’t take away from today’s significance: the seven-year wait is over. “Welcome, World,” splashed today’s front page headline on the state-owned China Daily. China’s moment is here and it’s hard not to get caught up in the excitement.
Forgive the melodrama, but Beijing is electric. (more…)
SHANGHAI—China’s state television Olympics coverage got off to a tumultuous start. At a ceremony held last fall to celebrate the renaming of CCTV-5 to Olympics Channel (to distinguish it, presumably, from CCTV-1, -2, -3, -4, -6, -7, -8, -9, -10, -11- and -12), jilted media darling Hu Ziwei stormed the stage and announced that her husband, sports news announcer Zhang Bin, was having an affair.
The confrontation that ensued—Hu, clad in a pea coat and Burberry scarf, calmly explaining that her husband was tainting the image of the Olympics; a crew worker, palm splayed, rushing the camera lens; a pan to the blurry rings fading into the background—was the stuff of great soap opera. The clip was excised from the broadcast version of the ceremony, but fortunately some brave soul caught it all on a cell phone camera. It now lives on Youtube. (more…)
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