DUCKPOND

The Olympic Games are boring, right. And they are due to begin on 8 August. Who care who wins a race and wins a gold medal? That is not to say that sometimes, if not almost always the individual athletes are outstanding. The whole jamboree is ruined by nationalism. What is that in human beings that suggests to them that they were born on some point on the planet, or members of a certain group of human beings that in some way they are special, and therefore immune from the frailties and suffering that befall us as a planetary species? Still the political symbolism from the Tibetan liberation campaign to the pollution of Beijing are far more interesting.

Kerry Brown in Open Democracy sees not just the crisis but the opportunity:

John Keay, in his narrative China: A History, writes of the attempt in the late Song period (11th century) to create political associations that reformed and opened up the Chinese political elite from one-man absolutism. A scholar of the period, Quyen Xiu, attempted to convince the reigning emperor of the need for tolerance of political factions and organised interest groups. This idea was rejected. A contemporary scholar of Chinese imperial history bitterly noted: “China still struggles with the heritage of this 11th-century political failure.”

This suggests that even in 2008, the deep roots of many unsettling phenomena in China can be detected; and that being aware of this at least helps both to put events in perspective, and to interpret them with a degree of balance.

In this light, for example, the disappointment Quyen Xiu must have felt after his learned recommendation was turned down can be seen as just one distant – and not so distant – antecedent of the anger of many Chinese bloggers today at the corruption, complacency and greed of the government and its agents.

But in this too, discontented Chinese citizens (bloggers or otherwise) may have much more in common with their counterparts in other parts of the world than many may think. Publics around the world – in the United States and Europe, in the middle east and India, in China itself – are all, it seems, fed up and disillusioned by our politicians. We are – especially in these times of economic stress – impatient with them, frustrated their inability to deliver the simplest things, irritated by their boasts. If the Chinese past and the Chinese present are connected in multiple ways, so in this sense is the Chinese present with that of its national equivalents across the world.

This “globalisation of sentiment” as it might be called is, too, part of the reality of things on the eve of the Olympic games. If people on all sides can begin to understand how much this experience connects rather than divides them, then the celebratory Olympic slogan “one world, one dream” reality may begin to acquire a reality of its own. The sight of George W Bush and Hu Jintao standing next to each other on the podium may even reinforce the sense that these elite figures exist almost in another universe, without real accountability to their peoples. In any case, we are about to find out. China’s year is about to become even more interesting, more globalising – and more surprising.