China won gold at more events than any other country in the Olympics, but it didn’t take home the most gold medals, as Duke University political scientist Michael Allen Gillespie points out (via Tim Johnson). The reason: Americans dominated the team events, while Chinese athletes excelled in individual sports.
If one looks over all of the Olympic sports, Americans took home 118 gold medals, 99 silver medals and 76 bronze medals, while the Chinese took home 76 gold, 35 silver and 38 bronze medals. That is 293 total medals for the USA to 149 for China.
The point here is that Americans are much more successful in team sports than the Chinese, and perhaps this is no accident. Voluntary cooperation has always been a hallmark of the American system, suffusing the lives of children and adults alike, an outstanding factor in our playrooms and in our boardrooms.
China, by contrast, has always put much less emphasis on voluntary cooperation than on hierarchical control and the obligation of those below to take directions from those above. Such discipline and obedience can produce individuals who become superb at repeating individual tasks, as in the diving competitions where the Chinese were outstanding, but it cannot produce the creativity and voluntary cooperation necessary to the successful operation of a team.
The Chinese government has begun to learn this lesson in the case of industry and the world has applauded its success, even if many have been intimidated by it. One might anticipate a similar success if the Chinese loosened the reins on other sections of their society.
The evidence from the basketball courts around China suggests this may be beginning to happen. In a cosmopolitan spirit, we therefore may hope that, in London in 2012 or in some future Olympics, Chinese teams will bring home more gold medals than the U.S. (as painful as that might be for our pride), for it would be an indication that China has in fact become a more open and creative society.
Ah, there’s that temptation, again. Suddenly sports most people pay attention to only once every four years become clear indications of cultural and political character. Gillespie (whose specialty lies on the other side of the globe) has an interesting theory, but I suspect there’s a simpler explanation:
Eight years ago, as China was vying to win its bid for the Olympics, officials like Cui [Dalin, the vice minister of the General Administration of Sport of China] began a government-financed effort called the 119 Project. Its purpose was to improve performances in the medal-heavy sports–track and field, swimming, rowing, canoe/kayak and sailing–in which the Chinese have been weak. The plan was named after the 119 gold medals awarded in those sports at that time. Other nations’ Olympic committees also attempt to win medals by allocating extra resources to certain sports. But none have been as elaborate, well financed and daunting as China’s plan.
“No secrets, no mysteries going on here,” [rowing coach Igor] Grinko said in a heavy Russian accent. “They’re just doing this like the East Germans did in the 1970s and ’80s.”
Rowing, judo, diving, track and field and gymnastics. Lots of medals for lots of athletes using the same training facilities. China won nine gold medals in gymnastics, seven in diving, eight in weightlifting, five in shooting. ESPN has a complete list.
Would being a “more open and creative society” make China better at basketball? Maybe. I’m sure the last 30 years of Reform and Opening Up have helped the country’s prospects, but I’d credit that more to Yao Ming and an economy that suddenly allows more people to own TVs and obsess over the NBA than to any underlying change in culture.
Politics lends itself to facile issues, to facile answers. The problem is you’ve got the rhetoric and you’ve got the reality. The rhetoric is, you’ve got candidates talk about bringing all those jobs back and not giving tax breaks to companies that send jobs overseas.
The problem with that is that it only tells half the story. One of the reasons America has been able to keep inflation down is precisely because WalMart imports all that stuff out of China, and Vietnam and Bangladesh and all the other places.
What I really want to hear is how these candidates are going to deal both with the issue of brinign jobs back to places like Michigan, and at the same time keeping inflation lower.
The media doesn’t cover it. Labor has not been a top story for a long time in this country. I hope it becomes that story again. It needs to be a much bigger story.
Media these days tend to cover stories that are immediate. What is most recent, not necessarily what is most important.
Getting into the whole labor issue, that’s a tough story, it’s a complicated story. It’s not easily covered just by sending a crew out for an hour or two and bringing them back for a Live at 5 o’clock.
It requires more work, and there aren’t quite as many news organizations out there that want to do that kind of story.
We knew beforehand that Joe Biden will be Barack Obama’s running mate. Obama has been the presumptive nominee (glad we can finally dump that phrase) since June (or arguably March). The only remaining questions concerned the presentation: Would Hillary Clinton give Obama the support he needed? Would Bill Clinton talk more about his presidency or Obama’s? How many people could the Democrats pack into Invesco Field, and how many would watch on TV? Would anybody screw up?
Now, we need real answers to real questions, and Koppel raises many. I have my own, and I’ll be posting them here, along with whatever answers I find.
Much of what really matters in this election, and what will continue to matter after, takes more reporting that many news organizations won’t provide. Much of it is dull, hard to find, decidely unsexy. But it’s critical.
Some of this will happen. Some of it will come from newspapers, wires, blogs. Some might even come from TV. I hope projects like Spot.us, which I’m grateful to be a part of, will help fill the void, too, especially on local issues and local impact. Because I really do want to know.
Fareed Zakaria of Newsweek seems to think so. While he’s no fan of the current president, Zakaria gives him credit for engaging the People’s Republic in last week’s cover story, What Bush Got Right:
The bilateral relationship between China and America will be the most significant one in the 21st century. Bush began his term poorly on the subject. During the campaign, when asked by Larry King for the single most important area where he would depart from Clinton foreign policy, he cited China. “The current president has called the relationship with China a strategic partnership,” Bush said. “I believe our relationship needs to be redefined as one as competitor.” The initial months of the administration suggested that Bush would adopt a confrontational approach to Beijing, just as many neoconservatives and Pentagon strategists hoped.
And while Bush talked tough, those in his administration were taking a harder line, especially on the Taiwan issue, as James Wilkenson told CQ last year:
While Bush publicly continued the one-China policy of his five White House predecessors, Wilkerson said, the Pentagon “neocons” took a different tack, quietly encouraging Taiwan’s pro-independence president, Chen Shui-bian.
“The Defense Department, with Feith, Cambone, Wolfowitz [and] Rumsfeld, was dispatching a person to Taiwan every week, essentially to tell the Taiwanese that the alliance was back on,” Wilkerson said, referring to pre-1970s military and diplomatic relations, “essentially to tell Chen Shui-bian, whose entire power in Taiwan rested on the independence movement, that independence was a good thing.”
In 2001, an American surveillance aircraft collided in midair with a Chinese fighter plane, killing the pilot and crash landing on Hainan island. Bush chose to negotiate with Beijing and to publicly express regret over the death of the Chinese airman. Bush eventually took an uncharacteristically internationalist line with China, including admonishing Chen Shui-bian against any movement away from the status quo. While he criticized the Communist Party over China’s human rights record, Bush resisted calls to boycott any part of the Olympic Games.
Further, engaging China led to engaging India and Japan, to balance the Middle Kingdom’s rising clout with others’.
All in all, it’s a far different picture of the outgoing president. As with Iraq, Iran, North Korea and elsewhere, Zakaria says these shifts in policy were driven by an administration that finally gave in to a reality that wouldn’t match the prescriptions of its most hardened ideologues.
“It doesn’t reflect a change of heart so much as an admission of failure,” Zakaria writes, “the old way simply wasn’t working.”
I’m watching the Olympics right now. I’ve been watching since early Friday morning, on TV and online, with and without the help of NBC.
The network has been the sole broadcaster of the Olympics as long as I’ve been watching television, but that monopoly is clearly ebbing. Yesterday morning, while I was sitting through an insufferable pre-taped Today show (summary: Isn’t China weird?!?), my friends back in China were watching the opening ceremonies in Beijing live and telling me all about it over Twitter. Meanwhile, others were doing whatever they could to get around NBC’s waiting game:
NBC’s decision to delay broadcasting the opening ceremonies by 12 hours sent people across the country to their computers to poke holes in NBC’s technological wall — by finding newsfeeds on foreign broadcasters’ Web sites and by watching clips of the ceremonies on YouTube and other sites.
In response, NBC sent frantic requests to Web sites, asking them to take down the illicit clips and restrict authorized video to host countries. As the four-hour ceremony progressed, a game of digital whack-a-mole took place. Network executives tried to regulate leaks on the Web and shut down unauthorized video, while viewers deftly traded new links on blogs and on the Twitter site, redirecting one another to coverage from, say, Germany, or a site with a grainy Spanish-language video stream.
As the first Summer Games of the broadband age commenced in China, old network habits have never seemed so archaic — or so irrelevant.
This may be the first distributed Olympics, or Olympics 2.0, or Long Tail Olympics. Whatever name sticks, fans and followers have never had more control over programming or the conversation.
Because we’re not just watching. This is the Beijing Olympics, and there’s plenty to talk about. Check out the Beijing Olympics room on FriendFeed, set up by Chad Catacchio, for a quick overview of everywhere the dialog is going. I’ll be posting links there and on Twitter, and maybe even a few updates here.
I have an ongoing fascination with issues that are, to most people, boring as hell. I’m fascinated with school reform, demographics, infrastructure, and in all cases, data.
The problem with such stories, from a freelance perspective, is that they’re tough (for me) to make interesting enough to sell, even if they’re really important.
Fortunately, I met up with David Cohn at CopyCamp in San Jose last month, and he encouraged me to put a pitch up on Spot.us, his new project to crowdfund local investigative reporting (more info here). Here’s what I want to write about:
California has committed to reducing greenhouse emissions to 1990 levels by 2020 (AB32). The cement industry is at the center of this effort. Making cement is one of the dirtiest industries in the state, and California’s 11 kilns produce about 10 percent of the total US cement output each year.
Making cement naturally releases CO2. It’s part of the chemical process. On top of that, most kilns burn coal or petroleum coke, which adds to the pollution. Other fuels are possible–natural gas, saw dust, biosolids–but those come with added costs and other issues.
If plants leave or shut down, they’ll likely be replaced by kilns in other states with less stringent environmental laws, or by international competitors like China, which already produces half the world’s cement and more carbon dioxide than the US.
Can cement plants in the Bay Area cut emissions and stay in business?
I wrote about cement plants a few years ago, when I worked in the Antelope Valley. What I kept wondering, long after I left the newspaper and moved to China: Why do they even bother? Why run a cement kiln in California when every regulation and every state legislator behind it seems determined to push you into the ocean, or at least into Nevada. I’m still looking for an answer to that question.
Here’s a bit more background:
If this is interesting, if it’s something that should be written about, please consider pledging a small amount (even a dollar) to help me get this story produced. I promise words, pictures, video and probably a map (or some kind of visualized data), and I promise it will be interesting.
Perhaps you’ve seen the cover of the most recent New Yorker, drawn by Barry Blitt. Perhaps you, like Barack Obama’s campaign, were offended by the image of the candidate dressed in Muslim garb, mimicking that of Osama bin Laden, who is pictured in a framed portrait over a fireplace, wherein an American flag is burning. Michelle Obama is a Black Panther in extreme, toting a Kalashnikov and giving her husband that famous fist-bump (or is it a terrorist fist-jab?). It’s possible I have no taste or decency, which is why I laughed.
Satire is tough, and good satire almost necessarily offends someone. The trick is offending the “right” person, I suppose.
David Horsey makes a better stab at the subject in the Seattle PI, benefited by pseudo-controversy and the ability to bounce off Blitt’s piece.
I got to thinking about these illustrations–both potentially offensive to some–while reading Imagethief’s reaction to the new That’s Beijing, which should be considered offensive to all. A snippet:
So, how is it? It’s Chinglish monthly, and much expense appears to have been spared on copy editing. It has amateurish layout and design, to the point of occasional unreadability. It’s lifeless and sports a gloomy, stark cover that says nothing about what is in the magazine. (The cover relates to an article on the Wenchuan earthquake. This may explain the stark design, but if so it comes a bit late and is a strange approach for an expat entertainment magazine). The back page is a grade school crossword puzzle. There may be something of value in the magazine, but you have to wade through the desert to get to it.
Some background on this: That’s Beijing was the mainstay lifestyle magazine for English-speaking Beijing denizens until this spring, when its publisher pulled the copyright from True Run Media. The magazine continues in all but name, Imagethief reports, under the new masthead, the Beijinger. (Disclosure: I wrote a bit for Urbane, an offshoot of the original That’s).
Will Moss should earn a model worker badge for typing out a passage from the magazine so readers and fellow bloggers could properly dismember it. Hell, he deserves an award just for reading it.
The shower: Conversation between American guy and Chinese girl
Q. Why don’t Western people take showers at night?
A. Some do. Especially after moving to Beijing. There’s no doubt it makes sense to shower before hitting the sheets. But many Westerners, before coming to Beijing, lived relatively comfortable lives, with an air conditioned home, car and office, and no sweat or stench at the end of the day. Another way some westerners manage their stench is through creams, powders and deodorants, which all work to limit perspiration and odor. When clothes or bed sheets get too dirty, the washing machine and drying machine makes every thing as good as new in just a couple of hours. It is easy to see why with this sort of day-to-day routine the nightly shower might drop out of the picture.
Q. But now that my boyfriend is in Beijing, shouldn’t he shower before sleeping? There’s lots of pollution here.
A. The simple answer is yes, he probably should. But old habits die hard. After doing things his own way for 20 to 30 years, he’s bound to have formed his own patterns and habits about sleeping, waking up and cleaning his body. Many Westerners sweat a lot during the night and so require a shower in the morning if they want to look presentable. Differences in hair and skin call for different patters of care. Imagine how you’d feel if you suddenly gave up your nightly shower. You might find it harder to go to sleep. Many Westerners rely on their morning shower to start their day, and a shower at night throws that immune system out of balance.
Q. Why don’t Chinese people shower in the morning?
A. Some do. Especially if they have a skin and body type that sweats during the night, or hair type that requires special care or conditioners. Otherwise, it’s not uncommon for many of the people you work with to fall out of bed and drag combs across their heads on their way to the bus. This makes even more sense when you remember that it was just eight hours or so previously that they took a shower, followed by a good night’s sleep in a clean bed. So what is there to clean?
Q. Why do Chinese people insist that I shower at night?
A. Because 1) they are concerned about your health, and 2) they think you’re totally disgusting for not doing it. If you were dating someone who never, ever brushed their teeth, would you kiss them?
When I built my online clip file last year, I used Wordpress, the same software I use on my blog. It’s easy to use, I could install it quickly and tweak it as needed. It’s good for SEO without much effort. And best of all, it’s free.
But Wordpress really is a blogging platform. It’s meant for conversational media, like this blog (in theory, anyway). With my clip file, I turned off comments on posts, because I didn’t envision that as a place to have a conversation. That’s what this blog is here for. Plus Twitter. And Facebook. Or Wired Journalists or FriendFeed or [insert social media darling of the month].
Today, though, I got to thinking: What would a conversation about my old clips look like? Maybe somebody wants to talk about the time Henry Hearns, mayor of Lancaster and bishop of a major church, hired a convicted child molester to help plan his day camp. It’s possible somebody has a critique of my multimedia projects, or an idea for improving the site itself.
So I’m thinking of opening up comments there, but first I thought I’d ask anyone passing by here. Should I?
Quick recap of Saturday. CopyCamp was awesome. No other word for it. Anytime a newspaper opens its doors and lets its readers say what could be done better, that’s a good thing, and the Mercury News reporters and editors who came can’t be thanked enough. I don’t know if I could have after ending the week the way they did.
Much as the discussion was haunted by the latest round of job cuts, there was, I think, still a feeling of optimism, if not from within the newspaper, then at least from outside, and that may be worth more in the long run.
My impression is that people need this newspaper, that readers want it to be better and believe it can be. Of the two dozen or so who came (admittedly, a limited sample in a circulation area of several million) most still felt some sense of ownership over the paper, or at least a longing for it.
“People are still passionate and do still care,” Chris O’Brien said at day’s end.
More tomorrow, when I’m more awake. (I spent the rest of the day with my grandparents, hence the late and weary posting.) Stay tuned.
I’m finishing up a long project on second-tier Chinese cities for a real estate newsletter, and clearly, I now have second-tier cities on the brain.
CN Reviews posted a list of the Middle Kingdom’s top 30 universities, according to the China Academy of Management Science (h/t China Law Blog), and I couldn’t help count how many were in smaller cities. For purposes of consistency, I’m calling Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen the first tier, and anything else is second-tier or lower. By that standard, two-thirds (20/30) of China’s top 30 campuses are in second-tier cities.
This could be as much a function of there being more (duh) cities in the second tier than the first, but its interesting to watch places once on the fringe rise to become metropolitan centers in their own right. If the universities listed below are indeed the best in the country, it wouldn’t surprise me to see those cities begin to draw more research talent and more high-value investment as their campuses gain notoriety.
Anyway, here’s the list. As all rankings of this sort go, add salt to taste.
Top 30 China Universities in 2008
Tsinghua University: Beijing
Beijing University: Beijing
Zhejiang University: Hangzhou, Zhejiang
Shanghai Jiaotong University: Shanghai
Nanjing University: Nanjing, Jiangsu
Fudan University: Shanghai
University of Science and Technology of China: Hefei, Anhui
Huazhong University of Science and Technology:Wuhan, Hubei
Wuhan University: Wuhan, Hubei
Xi’an Jiaotong University: Xi’an, Shanxi
Jilin University: Changchun, Jilin
Zhongshan University: Guangzhou, Guangdong
Sichuan University: Chengdu, Sichuan
Harbin Institute of Technology: Harbin, Heilongjiang
Shandong University: Jinan, Shandong
Nankai University: Tianjin
Tianjin University: Tianjin
Beijing Normal University: Beijing
Central South University: Changsha, Hunan
Southeast University: Nanjing, Jiangsu
Xiamen University: Xiamen, Fujian
Renmin University: Beijing
Beijing University of Aeronautics & Astronautics: Beijing
Dalian University of Technology: Dalian, Liaoning
Northwest Polytechnical University: Xi’an, Shanxi
Tongji University: Shanghai
South China University of Technology: Guangzhou, Guangdong
Chongqing University: Chongqing
East China Normal University: Shanghai
Lanzhou University: Lanzhou, Gansu
(For what it’s worth, I studied Chinese at Dalian University of Technology)
Update: I took out the Chinese names for the universities listed, because Wordpress, in its current incarnation, doesn’t seem to know what to do with them. If anyone knows how to fix this…
My Saturday gig sent me to Tennyson High School this week where alumni celebrated the school’s 50th anniversary. I was tasked with adding unspecified multimedia to an already-written print story. I went, grabbed photos, audio and nachos, and built a slide show that I’m in no way happy with.
Here’s where I think I went wrong: I tried to tell a linear story, and I fell all over myself doing it.
First, Soundslides was the wrong tool. It was wrong because, for the most part, it is a tool for telling stories that go from beginning to end, or for capturing one concise moment or idea. It’s perfect for photo essays, or profiles, or focused narratives.
This was none of those. There was a Big Story, to be sure: a sweeping narrative of five decades, a sense of history in the place and hope for the future. Not very visual, though (especially lacking historical photos).
But this wasn’t really one story, or rather just one story. It was hundreds. Threads of every student and teacher and administrator’s life at this school make up the real story, not beginning to end but overlapping in a way that’s tough to boil down to 400 words, or a dozen photos with two minutes of sound.
Were I writing for print, I could probably wax with some eloquence about the coalescing of memories, the nostalgia free of longing, the connections between oldexperienced and young.
But really, most of that would be utter bullshit.
The truth of Tennyson High is that it’s not my school. I was there on a Saturday, and I’ve never been there before. If I did my job right, I served as a conduit for others to remember and to share, and I got the hell out of the way.
Which brings me to my second error: I got in the way. By trying to force a spectrum of memory into a linear story, I made myself the arbiter of recollection. I sat over GarageBand deciding whose story deserved to be told. That’s pretty much a no-win situation for something both personal (to those involved) and trivial (in the grand scheme).
So, for next time, what’s the best way to cover something like this?
First, start early. We know this is going to happen, when and where. We know there is going to be community interest. We know generally what the Big Story will be. There’s time to build some infrastructure.
Infrastructure? Yeah, I said it. Roads and bridges, or in this case, a space for people to share memories, exchange photos, plan to meet up. Much of this is already out there, so it’s just a matter of cultivating and curating, hopefully.
Flickr is a good place to start. Make a group and invite people to scan photos of Tennyson in the old days. Or last week. Doesn’t really matter because we want them all. Make it clear that the newspaper (and it’s website) intend to use some in print and online features, but also aggregate as many as possible under the company banner. Whenever I’ve covered community events, the number one complaint I would hear back is about whose kid didn’t get their photo in the paper. Online, everyone gets their photo in the paper (so to speak).
Next, stories: It needs to be easy. Set up an email address, a simple web form, a snail mail address and a voice mail line (Cinch or Utterz might work here). Again, invite people to share memories of their (or their kids, parents, etc) time at Tennyson. Also encourage them to attach photos to these memories, but don’t require it.
All of this needs to be promoted in the print edition ferociously. People should see it at least two weeks before and every day until the event. Make it obvious, and make it easy.
Next, get all the photos, stories, voices and other extraneous bits into one place. Make them sortable and shareable. This is probably the toughest part, since it might mean going outside most newspapers’ content management systems in order to bring people in. Do what you gotta do.
When in doubt, go with what’s out there. Most of this can be done with Ning (it’s free, at least to start). Drupal, too, has modules to pull in threads from other sites, and I’m sure it’s wicked easy in Django (I will learn this, eventually).
But if any of that looks hard, run back to Ning, get something up, and get talking to people, because that’s the real juice for this. It’s not about technology or websites or brands. The point is to create a vibrant portrait of a community that already exists. People, first and last, and get out of the way.
