Purported Olympic torch relay

JUNE 10, 2007: The Olympic torch came to Songyuan the other day...here it comes again...or so we were told. Photos

We ran in a parade for it, though we saw no sign of it. I looked up the torch relay afterwards and it doesn't even begin until next March. This was a practice run, it turned out, nearly a full year before the real thing.

There certainly weren’t many visible Olympic signs. The ‘Beijing 2008’ logo had to share the back of everyone’s T-shirts with China Mobile. There were rows and rows of adverts for government-owned corporations, masses of flags bearing government corporations’ insignias - both in people's hands and lining the the streets - and thousands of corporate balloons.

It looks like part of a full-scale programme to train the masses of China to consume – every spare wall in the rural areas that is visible from the road is painted with crude “China Telecom” adverts, while above the busier city streets stretch these metal arches every 30 metres or so, the only purpose of which is to coax the folks here from their simple lives into the arms of life’s luxuries...and remind them how much good the oil company is doing.

In other words, the classic Communist Chinese propaganda is being replaced by Western-style corporate Chinese propaganda. I doubt, however, that all those walls in the countryside would have been painted with Communist propaganda. I don’t think they achieved, let alone openly aimed for that kind of saturation.

Our school just about led the parade - only the Red Army was in front of us. Whether this is the case in the real thing next year, i venture depends on Bill's bribing and his representatives' imbibing (he doesn't do dinners himself). But it did give me a perfect excuse to take a lot of photos of the Red Army. Resplendent they were, too, in their little white cotton gloves...





While the army stood to attention in silence just a couple of feet away, we had a run-in with a local Education Bureau honcho. As i have previously mentioned, Boxxy has faced some nasty discrimination from the Asians here on account of her Asian appearance. Bill brought this Education Bureau woman over to meet his teachers. She proceeded straight past the Chinese teachers and stopped at Dora, the Uzbek teacher. After some hesitation she shook Dora’s hand. Then she continued down the line, shaking hands with the foreign teachers.

She ignored Cynth.

After she’d finished I demanded Bill drag her back for a handshake and photo opportunity with her Asian ‘sista’. In the meantime I took about 20 photos of her, the Sunday Times instinct kicking in to seek a particularly ugly one to use under the caption: THIS IS THE FACE OF RACISM IN CHINA

So here is ‘The Face of Racism in China’.


Later, I asked Sam, the other school boss, how this woman in charge of an Education Bureau could display such an imbecilic level of education.

"I think she is like queen in there. Used to lot of flattery. I think maybe no-one criticise her," he said.

"I think these kinds of people maybe have the low-education background."

She’d had her education cut short by the Cultural Revolution, and having gotten to her position some way or another (in the absence of someone qualified), she’d then been given the qualifications - after the fact.

"But these people are being removed from their position," he said.

"I think 5 years ago, a lot of these people."

A Chinese teacher who has spent time overseas was somewhat more direct: "I think these people must be eliminated. But i am used to it."

The joke is that growing up in the Cultural Revolution times and before - times when foreigners were feared and hated and certainly not welcome - has led to this woman today discriminating against those she judges to not be foreigners.