Anniversaries: The Olympics and the Cultural Revolution
Today is the tenth anniversary of the Beijing Olympic Games, which officially began at 8:08 p.m. on the eighth day of the eighth month of 2008 — a surfeit of eights to delight superstitious feudalist and communist cadre alike. Some reading:
- A ChinaFile conversation series on the legacy of the Beijing Olympics and how China has changed since then.
- The People’s Daily website’s top story today (in Chinese) is titled “Ten years after the Beijing Olympics: Passing down the Olympic heritage, creating a ‘double Olympic city.’” The article praises the 2008 Games and looks forward to the 2022 Winter Games.
- A trip down memory lane — for me, at least — these are articles from August 2008 from my old website, Danwei, and from the blogs Imagethief, ESWN, and Granite Studio:
- The Olympic torch tour as public relations disaster
- Live blogging: 2008 Beijing Olympic Games opening ceremony
- Chinese internet reacts to Olympics opening ceremony
- Stop drugs, bombs and journalists
- No protesters for protest zones
- Lip-synching? Let’s pretend it didn’t happen
- Bang! China shoots its own Olympic PR in the foot
- Did the “Genocide Olympics” influence China?
If the Cultural Revolution has an official start date, it was 52 years ago today, when the People’s Daily’s front page headline was: “Decision of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China on the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.”
- You can read about the People’s Daily article on Baike (in Chinese) or read a translation on Marxists.org.
- “Beijing’s bloody August” is the title of two interviews with former Red Guards, translated by Geremie Barmé, that were published on a previous Cultural Revolution anniversary. See also the website Morning Sun or the film of the same name.
