Last month, The New Republic had a fascinating piece by Columbia University China expert Andy Nathan that explained the sticky political situation and human rights violations that went on behind-the-scenes at the dawn of the Olympics.
The efflorescence of creativity that foreign visitors will see in Beijing in August is not a challenge to Party control. It enables that control….the energetic new Chinese art that has caught the imagination of Western buyers, with its pictorial irony and cynicism, repudiation of history, detachment from the world, and love of stunts, is not the challenge to those in power it is sometimes construed to be. Rather, it is a secret joke that the regime shares with the artists and their audience–part of a new social contract that allows the children to have their sly fun so long as the grown-ups run the house.
I interviewed Nathan for my last MangoBot feature about China's future.
Medals and Rights (The New Republic)
