Letters from China No 8

14th August 2008

The “Games” are well and truly underway now and no complaints about pollution levels. Mind you the Marathon is traditionally the final event, so perhaps we’ll just have to wait until then to get the full picture. The complaints I’ve seen so far could very easily be relegated to the “usual” things about ticket touts, scalpers or whatever you might call them, police dragging away protestors – well that happens just as much in London, New York or any major city where there’s some international goings-on going on. Apart from the fact that they are shouting about Tibet, the Falung Gong etc, there’s no real difference from the millions who marched in the UK against the Iraq invasion and had a very cool “blind eye” turned to them by Mr. Blair, who, by the way, happened to be here just before the games started and presumably stayed for the opening ceremony.. He’s not exactly shunning China when it comes to his $500,000 fee for a three-hour trip last November. I’m not really a political person at all; I just can’t stand the hypocrisy. So why was he here? More money presumably, he does have his staff in his London office to pay after all.

We did notice at the opening ceremony that all the world leaders and the heads of state etc, including a few royals, were herded into a block whereas the Chinese official party had very nice seating with serving wenches pouring them tea as they kept cool by wafting their gold souvenir fans. The world leaders had to be content with waving their programmes.

We were talking with a Chinese friend this morning and she was delighted at the whole thing, but declared the walk-on of the teams to be “velly boring” and took too long. The Chinese can have a very short attention span when it comes to things non-Chinese.

Today, at last, we received our digital TV box and had it fitted. It just took about 8 months or more of haggling our landlord and eventually a ten-day rent strike before we finally got what has been a legal requirement for the last 6 months. Our landlord seems to roam the world and is currently in the USA meaning that the TV Company would not give the box to his representative until a little “commission” had been paid. This is the curse of China. So now I’ll go and watch the swimming from the Water Cube in Beijing, quite a remarkable building. By the way, one of the main designers of the Bird’s Nest stadium, Mr. Ai Weiwei, didn’t attend the opening ceremony. He is a very strong critic of the government.

Apart from all that, it’s sunny and getting very hot again…..