What are China’s Olympic preparations *really* telling us?
Every day when I scour the internet for stuff to blog here at Yellow-Menace I come across yet another preparatory measure Beijing is taking to welcome the world to their fair city for the upcoming Olympic games. While most of them, like the innumerable security precautions being set in place, are pretty sound – I wonder if some of them are actually having the opposite effect. More to the point, do some of these measures actually draw attention to Beijing’s flaws, rather than obfuscate them?
For instance: when it was noted that Beijing restaurants and hotels were being instructed to take dog off the menu, my first reaction was ‘Mmmm-kay…gotta post this…’. My second reaction was, ‘Wait, I didn’t even know they ate dogs in Beijing.’ No doubt they didn’t want any wide-eyed gwailo tourists gawking at the canine cuisine on display, but in announcing that no dog would be available to eat, they spelled it out in neon letters across the internet.
Some of these preparations are so silly as to make me doubt their veracity: I’ve heard stories of artillery pieces and surface-to-air-missiles being set up around Beijing to disrupt weather patterns in case rain threatens the festivities, bald taxi drivers being banned from servicing commuters, and more.
In the end, I think all this maddening perfectionism does is highlight the very issues they’re trying to sweep under the rug.
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