China pulling out all stops for the opening ceremony

MCCLATCHY NEWSPAPERS

BEIJING — China is expected to set a new standard for spectacle tonight when it kicks off the 2008 Summer Games with an opening ceremony meant to wow the world and proclaim the arrival of a new global power to be reckoned with.

In a no-expense-spared sensory explosion meant for a television audience of billions, some 15,000 performers will turn the already landmark National Stadium into a multicolored Chinese scroll telling this country’s millennial history.

The Chinese government has guarded the spectacle’s contents like a state secret, but leaked footage of a rehearsal shot by a South Korean camera crew and eyewitness accounts of a Tuesday night dress rehearsal have revealed what the monumental show will look like.

Casts of thousands will hurry on and off the field in tightly choreographed segments featuring acrobatic dancers and an epic play of lights. Performers dressed as everything from fireflies to astronauts will fly through the night air. An army of musicians beating traditional Chinese drums will count off the spectacle, which will last a total of 31/2 hours.

And as to be expected from a country that’s synonymous with fireworks, a gargantuan 29,000-shell pyrotechnic display will cap the event. More than 80 state leaders and royals, including President Bush, will take in the show.

The Chinese government, which has spent some $40 billion preparing for the Olympic Games, is aiming for nothing less than mounting the most spectacular opening ceremony in Olympic history, said Xu Guoqui, the U.S.-based author of the book “Olympic Dreams: China and Sports, 1895-2008.”

“What China has tried to do through this mega-event is to inform the world that it’s a new China, with a new economy,” Xu said. “China’s interest in the Olympic movement has always been closely tied to its desire to join the world. That political content will be there in this ceremony.”

To be sure, the world will see a heavily doctored version of Chinese history approved by this 1.3 billion-person country’s Communist Party-dominated government.

Gone will be references to party founder Mao Zedong, whose nearly four-decade rule here left behind an impoverished country traumatized by famine and political purges. The inclusion of a popular Chinese-language singer who grew up in Tibet will counter international criticism of the government’s repression in the mountainous province.

And with about a third of the show’s performers hailing from the country’s People’s Liberation Army, which includes the world’s largest standing army, the ceremony will send an unmistakable message of military strength.

“This is likely to be a North Korean-style opening ceremony,” said Russell Leigh Moses, a U.S. political scientist based in Beijing. “l think it will be a spectacle about state power ... It’ll be less an artistic statement than an ideological and nationalistic one.”

In an interview published this month with the People’s Liberation Army Daily, Zhang Jigang, who’s deputy director of the opening ceremony, said “several thousand meetings” ranging from three to 10 hours went into the ceremony’s preparation, with countless rehearsals lasting all night.

“I really hope the people of the world can get to know Chinese culture through [the opening ceremony], to get to know China, to understand China, to love China, to long for China,” Zhang said.

So far, the world’s offered more tough love than hugs and kisses.

In February, U.S. film director Steven Spielberg resigned from his role as an artistic adviser to the ceremony to protest Chinese support for the government of Sudan, which arms and supports militias that have killed hundreds of thousands of people in the country’s Darfur region.

Chinese film director Zhang Yimou, whose politically pointed works drew the Chinese government’s ire in the 1990s, is the ceremony’s main artistic director.

Also haunting the ceremony will be possible acts of protest by some of the nearly 11,000 athletes from 205 countries scheduled to march through the stadium tonight.

Already this week, scattered protesters have eluded Chinese controls and won media attention with guerrilla protests in Beijing denouncing Chinese policies in Tibet and the government’s crackdown on practitioners of the outlawed Falun Gong meditation practice.

Adding to the controversy, the U.S. Olympic team announced Thursday that its athletes had chosen Sudanese-born runner Lopez Lomong, who was a refugee from Darfur, to carry the U.S. flag while leading the 596 person-strong delegation into the opening ceremony.

Chinese officials have denounced attempts to “politicize” the games and discouraged athletes from protesting.

“The Olympic Games have transcended the boundaries of different races and cultures,” said Zhang Heping, director of the Beijing Olympics committee’s opening and closing ceremonies department. “We believe all athletes involved in the games know they should not link the games with politics.”

Despite such statements, the Chinese see the ceremony as a grand political statement, Xu said.

Yet China won’t be the first country to turn the ceremony into a patriotic spectacle. Olympic historians consider the 1984 Summer Games in Los Angeles to be the first to launch the games with an all-out show.

That was also the first Summer Games Chinese athletes participated in after a 26-year boycott to protest the inclusion of Taiwan, then known as the Republic of China, in the Games. China considers Taiwan a rebel province.

Speaking to reporters in Beijing this week, Peter Uberroth, who organized the Los Angeles Olympics, said he expected today’s ceremony to be bigger than anything ever seen in the games.

“The bar has been raised by China and by Beijing,” Uberroth said. “It’s not just in terms of venues but in terms of science and trade, the Chinese are winning in a lot of things.”