The Sad News of Beijing Olympics
Unfortunately, it isn't the case this time. Time has past for 3000 years, now the world has for the first time, witness, a rather unique "Chinese idiosyncratic"(中国特色)style of the summer Olympic hosted in the heart of PRC -- Beijing. On top of being scrutinized for all your political disposition by the CCP based on prejudice and favoritism, you are constantly subject to surveillance and random harassment by the authority. It really isn't much of a pleasurable event for most people anymore other than a handful of CCP bureaucrats, chauvinist Chinese statists, and some lionhearted athletes.
Society is being clutched ever tightly for maintaining a good image of a "harmonious society" (和谐社会), therefore any cacophony is being nip out of the bud, any dissidents, any petitioners, any incongruent elements, any "obstreperous" foreigners, are being persecuted, incarcerated, interned, and blocked out as the persona non grata of the PRC. You can now imagine what censorship on the free flow of information will be like, namely, an utter suffocation on the freedom of the press and expression. On top of that, factories are being temporarily shut down just to eke out a precarious standard for air quality during the game, and automobiles are now subject to the decree of traveling every other day by odd and even numbers based on their license plates. As to hundreds of millions of suburb and rural Chinese, they are being graciously escorted out of the cities and are being condescendingly advised not to leave their compound.
What we have witnessed as the 2008 summer Olympics of Beijing is a deplorable reincarnation of the 1936 summer Olympics of Berlin. Both are bent on putting up an impeccable image of a fascist state of hypocrisies at the expense of freedom and liberty that the game originally symbolizes. Both are utterly state manipulated propaganda at showing the world their mighty facade over an evil institution. And both, the sad news is, have been tolerated and conceded by the world thinking that it just might be possible to coexist with that perfidious wolf.
The good news is that the regime which sponsored the 1936 summer Olympics of Berlin has now been buried in the heap ashes of history, but the sad news is that the regime which sponsored the 2008 summer Olympics of Beijing is still standing. Let us hope that its demise isn't that far away as the Nazis' once were in 1936.