An email to a friend - about Topping the Gold Medal List

M.C.,

Your mail has just arrived in the right time when I am going to write something for my stupid blog.

I thought you had been flown into the Bird's Nest to enjoy two full weeks of Olympic spiritual intoxication.
Just watching on TV the technically flawless and spectacular performances in the opening ceremony could have thrown you into ecstasies, couldn't it?

It looks like you are still very much intoxicated, much more than those teen gymnastic angels who won all those gold medals for adding to the glory of the glorious ancient nation.
I hope that you would turn sober and less sentimental when you wake up a couple of days later.

And you should work out a bit to keep fitter in order to glorify the ancient nation yourself, and not leave the heavy burden to the Party, the government, and also the athletes which include all those very young gymnastic angels, who have been trained like hell since they were tiny little girls, and also the drop-out hurdler Liu Xiang who let many of his irrational worshippers extremely down.

Our nation's being able to top the list of gold medals is of course good, so good that it should have been achieved decades earlier, but certainly not good enough to convince some of the Westerners that China is worth their respect and recognition that the Party is so eager to earn.
And some Westerners still have an impregnable sense of superiority that can hardly be updated, certainly not by counting of gold medals or something like that.
You show them purposely you can achieve something, you do it in vain. What you get in return could be deeper hatred and contempt instead of recognition. This could be racism, and not confined to racism.

The Olympic achievements are great. They are worth more than 300 billion yuan. Beijing is now a modern metropolis. Yet in many remote provincial rural areas there are still utterly poor young children and teenagers deprived of decent education. And there are still towns and villages that could easily be liquefied by an earthquake.

Of course we want the rest of the world to learn more about us, even though we haven't sufficiently learnt about the rest of the world yet, despite that we have sent students by the million to the Western world to study and copy.
But what exactly are we? Do we really know ourselves well in the first place? Have we learnt about our ancient civilization, our culture and history adequately for telling the rest of the world what made us as we are?
I am afraid not, simply because education and academic studies are still subject to strict ideology control in the Mainland.
Just how we should talk about the Great Helmsman Chairman Mao and the Cultural Revolution is rather tricky.
How we should talk about the KMT-CCP civil war and the Mainland-Taiwan status-quo is even trickier. The mainlanders can only be free to talk about the issues in the Party's viewpoint.
To talk about the 1989 Tian'anmen Square Incident could be the trickiest, even in this tiny little free region of China.
These are some of the topics that may interest the ordinary Westerners, who really care about China, more than the 4 ancient inventions do.

By the way, I would like to talk about the invitation of the governor of Tokyo 東京都知事 to the Beijing Olympics opening ceremony.
Beijing broad-mindedly invited Ishihara Shintaro 石原慎太郎 to the opening ceremony.
Ishihara is a writer turned right-wing politician who would spare no efforts to intentionally agitate the Chinese government and people. He hates the Chinese and the Koreans with his whole heart. He denies that the Japanese committed the Nanjing massacre. He says the Chinese fabricated the story. And he says if the U.S. goes to war with China, the U.S. will lose because the Americans value human lives and the Chinese do not.
This is definitely not a friend of China and the Chinese people. Yet China did the right thing inviting this man to the ceremony.
Having seen in the massive group dance the purposely chosen Han character 和, which may mean harmony or peace, and is also the name of the Japanese domninant ethnic people (大和民族 Yamato minzoku), to which he belongs, Ishihara so far has not say things really bad of the Chinese, at least not openly. He even praised the student volunteers he encountered.
Now Tokyo is bidding to host the 2016 Olympics, so Ishihara must have known it all too well that he should better conceal his deep-rooted hatred and contempt in order to sound friendly.
I can't speculate where Ishihara's hatred comes from. But his contempt is rather comprehensible. We demand an official apology for what the Japanese committed in Nanjing, we have a rough number of the victims slaughtered. But as of the Cultural Revolution and the Tian'anmen Incident, our government seems to have kept no account at all. This is more than enough for the Japanese contempt to be based on.

Of course it's good that China has won so many Olympic gold medals this time.
But when you are at the top, challengers converge to engage you, and you simply have to train harder still to face new challenges. A more hellish training life will be awaiting the gifted athletes if they are determined to stay at the top of the list. Even a nation with such a huge population base of 1.3 billion strong could not have much of the upper hand.

Excelling in international athletic games and sports competitions is only one of the many aspects in terms of indicating the quality and well-being of a nation's citizens, just like excelling personally in an athletic or sports performance is only one of the many aspects in terms of indicating the quality of the person's life. Those who run really fast might not even necessarily be really healthy, or happy.

Our beloved nation has occupied the top place of the golden Olympics now. Yet the nation is yet to claim its people are among the strongest and healthiest.

It takes only a few years to train an Olympic gold medalist, but it takes decades to educate an ordinary person.