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August 9, 2008
I watched the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics last night that featured thousands of drummers, floating Olympic rings and a glowing globe around which ran runners who seemed to defy gravity. The design of the Opening Ceremony by Zhang Yimou and Zhang Jigang was brilliant. Around 15,000 performers were involved in the ceremony, 2008 of them in the opening minutes beating on "fou", traditional drums that flashed in time to the percussion. That set the tone for a series of tableaux evoking Chinese history, none of which involved fewer than 100 colour-coordinated dancers.
China's Olympics are as much about announcing China's place in the world as sport. China has arrived on the world stage---it is China's coming-out party as a world power. It looks a superpower and it is using the Olympics in successfully compete in the global competition to establish an image as a world power. China is celebrating civilizational progress and the way that the Confucian tradition has facilitated modernization. They are successfully carrying on their civilization in the march of progress.
They appear to be committed to a rather simple notion of evolutionary progress based on economic modernization and so accept fundamentalist Western ideas about what constitutes a prosperous, strong, and moral nation that still dominate in global politics and public opinion.
National Stadium (Bird's Nest) Beijing, designed by Herzog and de Meuron and the Chinese architect Li Xinggang.
The Bird's Nest looks to be an aesthetic triumph that should make China's reputation as a place where bold, creative gambles can take place. The stadium has a monumental presence and its matrix of crisscrossing columns and beams appear as a gargantuan work of public sculpture that continues the rupture with the purity of late Modernism that had become a kind of authoritarianism.
This rupture is reinforced by the "Water Cube" , which sets next to the Beijing National Stadium in the Olympic Green.
Beijing National Aquatics Centre, designed by PTW Architects, CSCEC International Design and Arup
The cube-shaped Aquatic Centre is a steel frame covered with a thin membrane composed of tiny ETFE (a plastic-like material) bubbles, which are more energy-efficient than traditional glass.
Both monuments express China’s muscle-flexing nationalism and cultural sophistication.
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I watched the Opening ceremony and I was impressed. I could not help but be reminded of the 1936 Games in Berlin, Germany--thedrilled utopianism of the mid-20th century.