Ted's Take

Unless you have been to China, this one is hard to understand.

China is a place that tries to be “collectively meticulous.” I remember that in the summer of 2007 - to show effectiveness and cost efficiency - the government mandated that all thermostats were to be placed at 78 degrees while it was in the high 90’s outside. And this is in a city where shirts and ties are mandatory for business attire. Talk about uncomfortable business settings! All hotels and all city and government buildings were sweltering and not a single person I met complained about the heat.

Or even in the best hotels, when you turned your browser to NYtimes.com, a “that page doesn’t load” message would appear. Or when you would be watching CNN and suddenly the screen would just go dark for 45 seconds as a censor decided that something on the news wasn’t appropriate for folks to see. Or go to Google and type in “Tiananmen Square” and all you get is nice travel information of the city center. No info on the student uprising that the entire world experienced on CNN.

The medium and the message are still controlled pretty tightly throughout China.

China partially built this Olympics around its own athletic prowess and former gold medal winner Liu Xiang was the poster boy. The collective pressure on this man to achieve greatness was unfathomable. If he had raced and lost, I can’t imagine the pressure and ridicule he would have faced. By not racing, he was actually better off. He will be a martyr in the country. He didn’t lose. His gifts are free to be debated by all. He will forever be ”could have, should have, would have” and in China that kind of debate is a good thing.