Showing off the real China at the Olympics

I agree...show everyone who you are.
Who really gives a sh*t about he foreigner's perception?
We certainly don't care here in the USA.
If a foreigner doesn't like how I am in America---well then they can go the f*ck home.
The dirt is what makes Beijing BEIJING.
This mask that Beijing wants to wear will fail.
The spitting, the cursing, the beer bellies, the public urination is EXACTLY what foriegners SHOULD see.
This is what makes China part of the world. This is what will connect foreigners with Chinese and let outsiders know that the natives too are human...YES Chinese are just like us dirty foriegners.

I used to use Ding Gang's argument with my mom when she asked me to clean up my room before guests came over: "reality rather than perfection."

It never worked.

Well said Fritz the cat.

Beijing is being built on the backs of the migrant workers. They are treating them like freakin animals. Making sure they stay inside their construction sites? Can we say slave labor...

Damn Beijingers always hating on the migrant workers, now the government is going to do it on a systematic level? WTF.

I rather have no Olympics if they are going to do that. It's B.S
The more I think about I think if you really care about human rights and the environment you should skip this Olympics in protest.

I will still go, just to "mess" it up for them in my own little ways.

Don't see what's all the fuss is about - the construction is bound to end at the end of '07, so all the workers will have work cut out for them. What does one do when there is no work in an expensive city? Surprising Answer: goes back to the village/home where everything is cheap!

Ah...the precious pride, the Chinese pride, which is a very triky thing. Before anyone easily dismissed it as "Party tricks", let it be known that it has become part of the national mentality that goes a long way back into the history. "China/Zhong Guo", in its original characters, means "the central empire". Staring probablly from the Tang dynasty, partly due to ignorance and arrogance, partly because it was true in a sense. we held this belief that "Only we are the best, the smartest and the most civilized", others were just barbarians, so you could imagine how we truely believed the Britains to be "ghosts" or "goblins" in the "Opium War" in 1840 because of their yellow hair and red eyes.

That kind of ignorance and arrogance foreshadowed the nightmares that yet to come in the next 150 years, in which the Chinese people were bullied, slaughtered, and violated by so many countries in such atrocious ways, that Chinese mentality as a country or a nation was literaly at the brink of collapse after the Japan invasion in WWII (imagine 300,000 civilians slaughtered in Nanjing in one month). So when CCP came to power in 1949, it was of untter importance and necessity to call on nationalism to unite people under the same national identity to get the country back on its feet. It invoked the long-held pride in the people, and it worked like a miracle.

But when necessity became indulgence, when national interest gave way to political bigotry, when good people with good intentions stretched good things too far, faith was put before facts, mentality of pride became ideology of lies, and hell broke lose. That's when Chinese lost their innocence and decency, became pawns of ignorance and arrogance, and take lies as their brain food. When denying truth became a habit, people were locked up (forced and willingly) inside the comfy bubble of rhetorics, and lost their capability of judgement and seeing reality as it is.

If in 1949 it was an inevitable choice, in 1966 it became a well-designed tool, and in the 80s and the years after, when the money started to talk, it got out of control, every thing goes. Fake food, fake money, pirated products, fake certificates, fake news, you name it, as some so put it "except your mother, anything can be faked", and I'm not so sure about the mother part. In short, the most powerful weapon of Capitalism came but without the check and ballance of morality and decency, or put it another way, credibility.

So much pride, and so little truth, and I take no pleasure in admitting that. We often see some Chinese with not-so-perfect English trying to defend China to a foreigner in every each way, no matter what truth is. I myself being a native Chinese, sometimes got over-defensive too, I just couldn't help it. But what makes me sadder is that when some people can be so misguided and deprived of the basic value of decency that they could believe that "in the name of pride", in the name of national interest, or Party interest, that some people could be denied their welfare and rights justifiably. It never is.

It is the Chinese Communist Party that does not have the confidence to allow Chinese to be Chinese. Their "face" is so important that they are ashamed of the "workers" who built up Beijing.

What the Party doesn't understand is that the world already knows what the real China is like and it is not workers without shirts.

I have to agree with most of the commenters. What impresses everyone I know when they come to China is that there are so many people who, despite intense poverty and backbreaking labor conditions and soul-crushing separation from comforts such as family or home, don't turn to crime or hate or even fear. They're just hanging around between work sessions like yahoos from any country in the world, drinking beer and eating BBQ. This is what makes China awesome -- its down-to-earth normalcy -- as well as the knowledge that once half these people can get even a substandard education, their work ethic should make China the most powerful nation on the planet. What's really exciting about all of this is that (aside from a bit of saber rattling in the government) by and large, the Chinese are a peaceful, inquisitive people. Let the world see these people. The assumption that's out there isn't that BJ is some sort of golden metropolis brimming with rich women and rainbows -- the assumption is that Chinese government is so worthless, if you wander into the wrong neighborhood at night you'll eat diseased street food, get AIDS from a hooker, and then get robbed in the night by fearful peasants. The fact that all of this is NOT true is the miracle of China's modern evolution. Don't do away with these things -- street food may mke things slightly dritier, but Beijing without street food is just dirty! Same goes for the migrant workers.

Sergey: Construction may finish on Olympic venues next year, but I seriously doubt that Beijing will be a "finished city" by then.

I've got two problems with this piece. One, I think the writer overemphasizes the urban/rural gap. In particular, shirtlessness is not something that outsiders introduced to Beijing. Walk through the hutongs during the summer heat and you'll be hard pressed to find men above a certain age wearing shirts.

Two, the only reason that this is even an issue at all is because of the mentality that "going shirtless is not really in very good taste." Who decides that? It's only when that's something to be ashamed of that the question of how to (a) hide it, or (b) excuse it as part of being a "developing country" comes into play. If it's not shameful, then who cares whether twitchy foreign guests think?

This is a pathetic question,driving them away is a insult to humanity. If we care just a bit more about the human's rights, then everything will just be clear and easy to do.

My neighbors who real Beijingers are also topless (only men unfortunately), they spit and don't behave particularly better than migrant workers. So I don't quite get the point of shooting at migrant workers while the normal Beijing population behaves the same.

This is definitely once again a self-humiliation! What about all the foreigners coming to China witness a clean and so called a civilized Beijing during the Olympics! Will this change their stereotype towards Chinese people! Come on! Why is it becoming such a big deal today to do the face-saving things! Just show every one the true color of the current Chinese society! That is the way it is now in Beijing and even the whole country-in the process of developing phase just as any other nowadays developed countries has passed before. There is no need to hide just some little imperfections! Just be confident,OK? Just to see it from another angle, only if the migrant workers can share the Olympics,we can call the Olympic Games a tolerant or harmonious pageant! Enjoy losing face and show everyone a real China!

I hope these people don't visit only Beijing. So many interesting places to visit China they should try visiting a couple.

I am a white guy from Chicago. i would have to say if you went to Oak Street or North Street beaches you would see plenty of guys without shirts. Heck you see them in the Rush Street area of town when the sun goes down. It's not a China thing.

I would like to see women doing the same. That would be good indeed.

CJ

"Don't see what's all the fuss is about - the construction is bound to end at the end of '07, so all the workers will have work cut out for them. What does one do when there is no work in an expensive city? Surprising Answer: goes back to the village/home where everything is cheap!"---SERGEY

Dude, you are assuming that this "bad behavior" is only that of migrants...that's such an arse thing to do...the city dwellers and us foreigners are guilty of being dirty, smelly, and human too...what you say is exactly what those snob city folk think.

We are all dirty slobs...live it...love it. Stop blaming it all on migrants.

"Walk through the hutongs during the summer heat and you'll be hard pressed to find men above a certain age wearing shirts."---JOEL

Hell, go to a Steelers game in Pittsburgh in the middle of the F-ing winter and you see dudes with painted manboobs supporting the Stillas!!!!!!

And none of these men are anyway you put it "in shape". This is precisely why the USA rules and why American Football is a real man's sport.

Go migrants!!!!! Go Steelers!!!!!!!!!

There will be no shirtless migrant workers in the street during the Olympics, after that, they'll all reappear--this is the ugliest side of China, and as an international city, so many foreigners are living and working there, these foreigners are always able to convey the truth of China to the rest of the world.

Here's my practical solution: Give the topless migrant workers free "Huan Huan" T-shirts off-site and make the deceitful Beijing scam lasses who harass foreigners go shirtless.

That's right; any young woman caught participating in the notorious Beijing art or tea scams should be made to parade her bare chest in front of the poor boobs that get lured to their booby trap teahouses and art galleries.

"There will be no shirtless migrant workers in the street during the Olympics, after that, they'll all reappear"--ANON

So perhaps in their absence we should start a fund to bring me and my STEELER'S faithful to Beijing to advertise our bare chests and teach the world that now only do we love the 'Burgh but one man's shame of his man-boobs is another man's pride.

Go STEELER'S...F the Ravens, F New England, F the Colts.

What's wrong with going shirtless? Foreigners aren't concerned with those kind of things. I believe what makes a society (or a metropolis, for that matter) is the people themselves. FRITZ said it right, "dirt is what makes Beijing BEIJING". The crowded streets, the noisy vendors and the ethnic mish-mash defines the marketplace. Shoving people back to their home provinces is just not the way. Two words: Human rights.

As one who has travelled fairly widely including in different parts of the developing world, and having learned Chinese, I can't help but expect that Beijing 2008 will be about as insufferable a venue as any for the Olympics. Rampant commercialism, profit-driven herding of people, and a rip-off-the-outsider mentality. It's a pity the old values of Chinese civilisation have been so turned upside down by those who rule and prosper there today.

I too have a large connection with china as a foreigner who speaks chinese, having travelled there countless times and studying chinese history. It is a real shame that the natural beauties of traditional china will be in some way concealed by the olympic drive for China's Modernity. The government has become so over indulged and obsessed with showing the "western world" what it thinks they want to see, that perhaps they will miss the point that maybe the west wants to see a pleasantly contrasting society, not one mirrored to our own..compared to the world we know. I will be holding my breath for china when I arrive in Beijing in august next year!

nick, I take your general point but migrant workers described as 'the natural beauties of traditional china"? well that's a first ;)

if china is so worried about the olympics, then maybe its not worth it. although problems like shirtless men should be taken care of either way, olympics or not.

Hi Folks, Before we all get bent too far out of shape by the images of shirtless workers relaxing after a day of honest labor in the building of a New China.....let's rethink a bit. One of the objectives,as I understand them,is the rendering of dignity to the Laobaixing!They always had an inherent dignity,but it wasn't always acknowledged....until new perspectives emerged! There is nothing undignified about a worker relaxing...comfortably...after a day of strenuous effort. There is nothing,either in the mode of dress,or in the degree of energy expended,that Beijing hasn't seen since time immemorial.As one who has circled the globe several times,I am in no way turned off by what viewing those workeres,and sharing their joy at a job well done.What I would change is the destruction of fewer hutongs...and the establishement of more Lao She tearooms and the expansion of more hutong tourism and the continuing preservationh of minority cultures and languages,especially Beijing Tuhua! Cordially, Ken Grey

The whole discussion is a red herring -- you can solve the problem of shirtlessness at the Olympics in the most sensitive manner humanly possible, with applause all round, and still not begin to address the larger, overarching problem of what happens the day after the Olympics.

There is a difference between fixing broken floor boards and mending windows because company is coming over, and shoving everything -- including your dirty, shirtless children -- into the closet.

Actually I think that you should cut China some slack. It is, after all, the country that's powering the global economy.

Think that Beijing 2008 will be a success. Then it will be one.