Contact: Brenda Velez                     

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

at 212-445-4078                                                                           Sunday, July 27, 2008

BEIJING OLYMPIC GAMES WILL PROVIDE CHINA AN OPPORTUNITY TO SHINE

AND MOVE PAST NATIONAL INFERIORITY COMPLEX

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ORVILLE SCHELL: DESPITE AMPLE CAUSES FOR PROTESTING,

“THIS IS NOT THE TIME”

COVER: WHAT DRIVES CHINA

New York—Rarely has a more varied array of contentious issues crystallized around a single sporting event than the Beijing Games, according to guest writer Orville Schell, who opens the cover package of the current issue of Newsweek. In his essay, adapted from “China: Humiliation and the Olympics,” published in the current New York Review of Books, Schell argues that despite the ample causes for protesting the Chinese government, now is not the time.

In the August 4 Newsweek cover package, “What Drives China,” (on newsstands Monday, July 28), Schell writes that “China is bedeviled by internal problems—human-rights violations, media censorship, corruption, pollution, labor abuses and lack of due process, to name a few…At the same time, a host of relatively new, purely international problems have accrued to China as the country has aggressively sought access to natural resources around the world. By dealing with pariah states like Burma, Sudan, Zimbabwe and Iran in order to feed the country’s voracious appetite for oil, timber and metals, Chinese leaders have been accused of playing an irresponsible global role. Their critics would like nothing more than to flay Beijing before a worldwide television audience of hundreds of millions.”

Although Schell says he is the first to admit that the Chinese government gives ample cause for protest, he also argues, “that this is not the time—and not just because any unauthorized protest is quite likely to fail. The Beijing Games present a fraught and sensitive moment.” He adds that China has made a Herculean effort to prepare the way for this spectacle, in which ordinary Chinese, not just their leaders, can announce themselves to the world as having regained their national greatness. “Protests would almost certainly spark the kind of nationalist and autocratic backlash that they’re meant to remedy,” he writes. “Remember what followed the 1989 Tiananmen demonstrations—a nearly 20-year period of reaction and restoration from which China has still not recovered.”

Schell argues that to have an understanding of what these Games mean to the Chinese, it is important to first understand their historical grievances. The most critical element in the formation of China’s modern identity has been the legacy of the country’s “humiliation” at the hands of foreigners, beginning with its defeat in the Opium Wars in the mid-19th century and the shameful treatment of Chinese immigrants in America. According to Schell, “the process was exacerbated by Japan’s successful industrialization. Tokyo’s invasion and occupation of the mainland during World War II was in many ways psychologically more devastating than Western interventions because Japan was an Asian power that had succeeded in modernizing, where China had failed. This inferiority complex has been institutionalized in the Chinese mind.” Despite the fact that China has gotten closer than ever to escaping from this past, it’s important to understand that its leaders and people are still susceptible to older ways of responding to the world around them. “Now is not the time to provoke them further and impede their progress toward a new, more equal and self-assured sense of nationhood.”

Also in the cover package: 

Boston Bureau Chief and National Sports Correspondent Mark Starr provides a viewer’s guide to the Beijing Olympics. The guide includes what’s behind the race for gold medals between U.S. and China; the key athletes to watch, such as Michael Phelps and Dara Torres; the rivalries in the gymnastics arena; and the new ways scientists are testing athletes for performance enhancing drugs.

Senior Editor and Science Columnist Sharon Begley writes about China’s weather modification program and how it plans on keeping the rain at bay for the opening and closing ceremonies at the Beijing National Stadium (a.k.a. the “bird’s nest”). “Too bad that no project in the 60-year history of weather modification has managed to reliably bring about or suppress rain on demand,” Begley writes. “On paper, the recipe for keeping raindrops away from the bird’s nest is basically what China has been doing since the late 1950s. With an estimated 30,000 rainmakers, a $100 million budget and more hardware than it has pointed at Taiwan, China has the largest weather-modification program in the world. Despite China’s claims that its cloud-seeding technology can make rain on demand, though, experts are dubious.” Still, Beijing has a twofold plan for a blue-sky Olympics. Both rely on the standard technique of seeding rain clouds with either the traditional silver iodide or newer hygroscopic (water-absorbing) particles such as calcium-chloride salts.

Guest writer David Maraniss, an associate editor at The Washington Post and author of eight books on politics, history and sports, writes that any semblance of the old notion that the Olympics could be free from professionalism, commercialism and politics is long gone and much of that change started in the days leading up to the Rome Olympic games. In an adaptation from his book, “Rome 1960: The Olympics That Changed the World,” Maraniss writes that “the contests in Rome shimmered with performances that remain among the most golden in athletic history,” he writes. “But more than that, the forces of change were everywhere. In sports, culture and politics—interwoven in so many ways—one could sense an old order dying and a new one being born. With all its promise and trouble, the modern world as we see it today was coming into view. Television, money and drugs were bursting onto the scene, altering everything they touched. Old-boy notions of pristine amateurism, created by and for upper-class sportsmen, were crumbling. Rome brought the first doping scandal, the first commercially broadcast Summer Games and the first runner paid for wearing a certain brand of shoes. It also, fittingly, brought the first round of controversy over China.