Regardless of how one feels about them politically, I just marveled at their creativity, especially during their opening & closing ceremony. One wonders if they ever achieved a free-enterpise, democratic society: a "sleeping Giant" to be reckoned with....

The Chinese spent 40 billion dollars on the "Olympics" that will buy you a lot of Creativity.

Sleeping? Not hardly. China is working as hard as it can to modernize and become the leading world economic power.

China is also building its military equally fast so it can maintain its absolute dictatorship and dominate the western Pacific.

China still found it necessary to cheat in the Olympics, lie about the ages of their competitors, and violate the agreements on freedom at the Olumpics. Even when trying to impress the world, they can't resist lying and cheating; it's ingrained.

Notice the areas at the Olympics set aside for protestors to place signs and demonstrate? Not one sign allowed, not one protestor allow to stand in the designated area or anywhere else.

Yeah, its amazing what tons of money and unlimited slave labor can do!

Next visit, you really need to tour the Gymnastics Orphanage...it's kind of like Pelican Bay except that instead of 23 hours in your cell and one outside, it's 23 on the bars and 1 hour rest.

40 billion should have updated a lot of those cardboard and driftwood shacks I would think!

They did a superb job hosting the Olympics. Everything they allowed the world to see was very impressive and I hope our nations stay on good terms for a long time. A couple times during the fireworks displays, I said to my wife “They just blew up everyone in the Birds Nest”!

I give them credit where it is due. The opening ceremonies must be the greatest theatrical production in the history of man. I care not one bit about the computer generated fireworks or the prettier girl lip sync for the better singer. We have done that for decades in our movies.

This was also one of the greatest public relations attempts in history. I will still avoid their products.

The cheating by underage gymnasts must be the tip of the iceberg in showing how far they will go to win. Not the Olympic spirit.

quote:

China still found it necessary to cheat in the Olympics, lie about the ages of their competitors, and violate the agreements on freedom at the Olumpics. Even when trying to impress the world, they can't resist lying and cheating; it's ingrained.

You know what, I really got tired of the "alibing & whining" from the the American side. Poor gymnastic performance translated into "gee, we can't compete with kids", and dropped batons in both relays: "gee, we didn't have our team long enough to practice". Like, gee, handoffs are HS track 101...Anyway, give the Chinese their due for putting on a good show..Speaking of shacks, when is the last time you visited the Southside of Chicago and any other major city...Take away Phelps individual performance, we would have finished 4th...
When we lost in Water Polo to the magnificent Hungarians, "gee, we just had college kids and they had a Nat'l team", but yet when we won the Basketball game, we had the cream of the NBA and not a word is said...

Who's on our side?

Six hundred million screaming chinamen.

I thought there were six billion chinamen.

There were [whoosh of flame on campfire].

Ah, yes, just one big love-fest -- corrupt, overblown and largely meaningless, but if you like the thought of $40 billion love-fests...

Bill

I think they overspent. Holding hands and singing Kumbaya while visualizing world peace doesn't cost anywhere near $40 billion.

As to the underage gymnasts, the Chinese papers before the Olympics referred to them being 13 years old. All of a sudden, POOF!, they have passports issued by the government that show they're 16. Riiiiight. The Olympics is about as corrupt as the UN...now that I think about it, they should just share the same office space.

Wow! is right. Wow, what a crock! Now that company is leaving, they can re-fire the factories in the North and bring the smog back.

They put on a show in the most literal sense of the word.

During that whole time they were also being creative attacking our military's computer systems tens of thousands of times a day - i.e business as usual.

I am sixteeeeeen, in two years!