China’s Chery crumbles like a cookie

WASHINGTON — The Chinese are big believers in omens, so it was not a good sign that on the eve of its big pre-Olympic celebration that, in a Russian crash test, the Chinese-made Chery, its big hope for auto exports, folded up like a cheap suitcase.

“Crumpled like newspaper” were the words of one observer. It was so bad the crash dummy had to be extricated in pieces. Not, as they say, an auspicious omen.

The big shindig Wednesday night in Beijing was to mark the one-year countdown to the start of the 2008 Summer Olympics, which China sees as its coming-out party as a full and accepted member of the family of major nations.

Many Olympic officials and dignitaries were present, as were a band of foreign demonstrators and a band of foreign reporters there to cover both. The Chinese foreign ministry had decreed that foreign reporters were to be allowed to do their work unmolested, but as has a way of happening, the memo didn’t get down to the guys with the riot batons.

The prowess displayed by the Beijing police suggests that they should go for Olympic gold in rounding up reporters and protesters. (Recent revelations about the handling of demonstrators at the 2006 Republican convention also suggest that the New York City police should send a team. They’re looking at certain silver.)

Activists

These particular demonstrators were demanding the release of political prisoners, but the authorities are bracing for all kinds of activists — Tibet and Xinjiang separatist movements, pressure to ease up on the Falun Gong, those trying to get Sudan to end the slaughter in Darfur.

However, the appearance of Beijing’s periodic blanket of suffocating fog outweighed the human-rights considerations in the minds of Olympic officials. The Chinese stressed that pollution-abating efforts had advanced to the point where the air was breathable two days out of three instead of less than one day out of five as heretofore.

Still, some officials speculated that, faced with air they could see, their athletes might want either to stay home or arrive early in Beijing to acclimate to the local pollutants.

With the Olympic officials came Dick Pound, chairman of the delightfully named World Anti-Doping Agency, to delicately convey to the Chinese that the other nations didn’t totally trust them to field a drug-free team.

Pound warned that the WADA would be watching and that the Chinese Olympic team shouldn’t try to hide athletes from the drug testers. He said if the Chinese “were to appear with 1,000 or so athletes nobody had ever heard of, and all of them win gold medals, that would be a problem for them, and the Games would not be a success.”

The United States was not in a position to be its usual moralizing self on this issue, since the night before, Barry Bonds had become the all-time home-run leader thanks, it is alleged, to some illicit chemical assistance.

The Olympics are to begin on 8/8/08, said to be a very auspicious number. The Olympic goal is Faster, Higher, Stronger — and, the Chinese might add, Luckier.

Scripps Howard News Service