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Let's Do the Olympics ... But as a Sort of Ambivalent Non-event

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Let's Do the Olympics ... But as a Sort of Ambivalent Non-event

That's unfair because ChinaDiction is sure some Golds are being duly noted on the inside pages of syndicated newspapers, but it's not going to be an Olympics to remember, unless you're Eileen Gu.

Chris Taylor
Feb 13, 2022
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Let's Do the Olympics ... But as a Sort of Ambivalent Non-event

www.chinadiction.com

So, this is really Bill Bishop’s turf – and he’s the doyen of Chinese newsletters (you should head over and subscribe if you haven’t already because he’s genuinely engagé, unlike ChinaDiction, where we irreverently just make it all up). Bill’s nodded at the mysterious case of China’s missing Standing Committee members.

Twitter avatar for @niubi
Bill Bishop @niubi
None of the Standing Committee members have appeared in official media for several days as far as I can tell. Wonder why. Doubt they are all just watching the Olympics
8:15 PM ∙ Feb 10, 2022
34Likes8Retweets

The speculation is that they’re ‘quarantining’ from possibly infected global leaders, or that Putin let it drop that he’s going to make some kind of move on Ukraine before the Olympics are over and that’s stuff that needs to be discussed by Standing Committee people. Of course, they might all just be taking the break they didn’t get for Chinese New Year – or Lunar New Year as we now refer to it neutrally in politically correct, LGBTQ-tolerant – and boisterously democratic – Taiwan.

But, tea-leaf conjecture aside, it’s basically just a downright weird Olympics. As The Economists notes:

The “closed-loop”, a secure quarantine zone created for Olympic athletes, coaches and dignitaries newly arrived from an outside world that, in contrast with China, has resigned itself to living with covid-19. Most of the stadium’s seats were kept empty, as a pandemic precaution. Olympic tickets are not on sale to the public, and China’s borders are closed to foreign fans.

[But it’s all still supposed to be fun and games, as The Economist further notes] Any hint of bad news about the games is blamed by Chinese officials on “paranoid Western media”. A meme flying around Chinese social media shows Bing Dwen Dwen [China’s lovable Olympics mascot – see Other News below] in a bobsleigh, warning those who block his way: “I’ll run you over.” Though not an official slogan, it captures China’s mood well.

Twitter avatar for @Beijing2022
Beijing 2022 @Beijing2022
The dance battle between #bingdwendwen and our lovely volunteer❤. Who is the winner?👏 🎥: Xu Tianran
2:35 AM ∙ Feb 12, 2022
3,079Likes615Retweets

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Could a Putin damper on the Olympics hold a silver lining for Beijing?

Let’s get this straight, if Putin does anything in Ukraine – it doesn’t have to be a full-scale invasion, although terrifyingly it could be – we have a humanitarian disaster on our hands and potentially the biggest conflict in Europe since Hitler stopped buying canvases and brushes.

But Bloomberg is taking it a step farther and suggesting that the Biden administration thinks Beijing sees the Western reaction as a proxy for Chinese action on Taiwan.

American officials said they believe Xi’s government is studying the cohesion of the NATO alliance as it seeks to push back on Russian President Vladimir Putin’s massing of forces near Ukraine’s border. Although Putin has said he has no intention of invading Ukraine, the standoff has emerged as the biggest crisis to face the North Atlantic Treaty Organization since the Balkans conflict in the 1990s.

Of note, Taiwan president, Tsai Ing-wen, has ordered the government to monitor the situation and its potential impact on Taiwan’s security.  

So, is Beijing watching this unfold and thinking about it? Sure. Will Ukraine’s fate determine Taiwan’s? Put on your thinking cap and you’d have to say, Improbable. There are no parallels, really, other than the ability of China foes to agree on whether appeasement has a bottom line.

Russia’s GDP is approximately equivalent to that of China’s southern Guangdong Province – a rich province, but just one of 31 Chinese provinces. How NATO and the US respond to whatever Putin has planned will be of great interest to China, but it will not be a decider as to whether unification is possible only by force – and whether that is actionable.

Other news

ChinaDiction knows that this story’s been done to death, but all the same, it has to be said, Beware pirated pandas. Reports the New York Times:

Most popular of all [Olympics paraphernalia] is an eight-inch-tall plush stuffed animal version of the Beijing Olympics mascot — Bing Dwen Dwen, a rotund panda in a suit of ice. The main version of the stuffed animal weighs seven ounces and sells for US$30 at 162 official Olympics memorabilia stores nationwide. Long lines form every morning to buy limited stocks.

Online scalping of the toys has also been rife, despite efforts by the authorities to stop it, with prices said to run into the hundreds of dollars. The Beijing police said [last week] that they were imposing unspecified administrative penalties on three people who they said had ‘violated normal market operations’ by trading Bing Dwen Dwen stuffed animals.

Fortunately, there is a fail-safe test to ensure your Bing Dwen Dwen is the real deal. Can it squeeze through the average modern doorway?

Twitter avatar for @SecondRingSZN
来都来了 @SecondRingSZN
This is the only real #BingDwenDwen mascot. The other ones are fake 😒
6:54 PM ∙ Feb 9, 2022

Unlike a lot of the other Other news, we report at ChinaDiction, this is is important shit. It’s thought that Chinese adventurers may have reached what may be the world’s most inaccessible Lenin sculpture:

Twitter avatar for @pycpim
CPI(M) Puducherry ☭ @pycpim
The Chinese expedition has reached the southernmost Lenin statue in the world. Its been 10 years since the statue was last visited. It was installed at the Pole of Inaccessibility in Antarctica by the Third Soviet Antarctic Expedition in 1958. #LeninLives #lenin #Soviet
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4:37 AM ∙ Feb 10, 2022
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In Asia’s World City, Hong Kong, you can queue cheek-by-jowl by the thousands to be tested – and people are doing so, because that’s what they’ve been told to do:

Twitter avatar for @EricWishart
Eric Wishart @EricWishart
The queues for mandatory testing at Discovery Bay, #HongKong today. Meanwhile ⁦@SCMPNews⁩ reports police under orders to step up action against those gathering in groups of more than two. #china #covid
3:00 AM ∙ Feb 11, 2022
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But if you stop for a chat with three other people on the way home afterwards (ChinaDiction hears it may be one other person now – see tweet below), you’re going to get fined thousands of HK dollars.

Twitter avatar for @tripperhead
🇭🇰 5th 👋 Aaron @tripperhead
A family of four in Discovery Bay saw two friends and started chatting. No less than 6 police officers attended. All were fined $5000 for breaching the group gathering ban. Just a reminder that as of tomorrow, the "group" gathering rule goes from 4 to 2.
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Twitter avatar for @hurtingbombz
Justin Lim | hurtingbombz.eth @hurtingbombz
Watch out the Coffee Stasi is everywhere! #hongkong https://t.co/OjyrIyqJso
10:23 AM ∙ Feb 9, 2022
370Likes207Retweets

Just take a look at this poor homeless man who took off his mask to eat some food and had to beg on his knees not to be fined:

Twitter avatar for @JoyceLauNews
Joyce Lau 😷 💉💉💉 @JoyceLauNews
1/2 Fact check: Yes, the #Hongkong police harassed a homeless man for taking his mask off to eat. He was scared enough to beg for mercy. No, they didn't fine him $10,000. #Covid enforcement is indeed ridiculous now, but I want to get my facts straight so deleted an earlier post
Image
3:50 AM ∙ Feb 11, 2022
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This isn’t news that needs to be here: it’s no secret, but more people need to know that it’s happened – and what it really means. Peng Shuai has retired … She’s out of tennis … and as far as the CCP is concerned she will soon be out of the international public eye and will be just another Chinese citizen with no rights.

Twitter avatar for @Stand_with_HK
Fight For Freedom. Stand With Hong Kong. 重光團隊 @Stand_with_HK
What’s most concerning about #PengShuai’s “retirement” from professional tennis is that it provides #CCPChina🇨🇳 with an excuse to sweep her under the rug, keep her out of the headlines as @WTA season starts, and prevent her from playing tour events abroad. deadspin.com/peng-shuai-ret…
deadspin.comPeng Shuai ‘retires,’ most of the world barely noticesThe Chinese tennis star has been largely left in the hands of a state hell bent on silencing her
4:50 PM ∙ Feb 10, 2022
536Likes292Retweets

Of note: Lauded Australian scholar, Jeremy Barmé, has translated Fang Zhou’s Requiem for an Autocrat: Xi Jinping’s End of Days. Barmé has done a lot of this ivory tower translation work over the years (he cannot visit China, obviously), introducing defiant anti-Xi intellectuals and their thoughts to a small minority of dedicated China watchers. To be sure, outspoken intellectuals like Zhou are rare but they speak to an educated elite in China who are concerned that China has careened off the tracks under Xi and, by the time the country realizes it has overdosed on its own hype, it will be too late.

Book Review: The Subplot: What China Is Reading and Why It Matters

Very newly released (February 8), Subplot is one of those rare China books that make you think, if only more people wrote China books – which obviously is a terrible idea. But where else do you get to read stuff like this?

In the early days of the COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan, Yan Lianke [highly respected Chinese novelist who is banned in China but still allowed to teach] urged some of his creative writing students to be ‘the people who have graves in their hearts, with memories etched in them; the people who remember and can someday pass on these memories to our future generations.’ Literature is a place in which topics and ideas can be suppressed but not buried. It can explain why things feel too good to be true, why contemporary society feels disconcerting and uncanny. Yan believes that the same line of magical thinking that produced the Great Leap Forward’s smelting campaigns in the 1950s also created the artificially low number of official COVID casualties in 2020. ‘While memories may not give us the power to change reality,’ he told his students in the aftermath of the outbreak, ‘it can at least raise a question in our hearts when a lie comes our way.’

What China is Reading is a reminder that China is 1.4 billion stories – success, failure, tragedy, despair, hope, dreams and the will to find meaning when meaning itself is dangerous. The migrant poet Xu Lizhi, threw himself off the 17th floor at the age of 24 after working at a Foxconn factory in Shenzhen, making Apple products. He wrote:

I swallowed an iron moon
they called it a screw

I swallowed industrial wastewater
and
unemployment forms
bent over machines our youth died young

I swallowed labor, I swallowed poverty
swallowed pedestrian bridges, swallowed this
rusted-out life

I can't swallow any more
Everything I've swallowed roils up in my throat

I spread across my country
a poem of shame

Walsh writes, “We turn specifically to fiction for explanation, solace, and guidance when things feel out of step, or when our realities no longer measure up to the stories we are being told.” She remarks on how formerly banned To Live (in which almost everyone dies), suddenly hit the charts with a bullet three decades later due to a celebrity endorsement. Yu Hua, the author, thanked the celebrity and said to the entertainer’s young fans: “You are a unique generation … You are in a period where the future has come and the past has not yet passed.”

It’s as profound a statement on the current China condition as any other ChinaDiction has heard.

Coda

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Let's Do the Olympics ... But as a Sort of Ambivalent Non-event

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