Don't you just feel that everything seems very Chinese nowadays as the opening of the Beijing Olympics draws nearer? I mean, I watched yesterday the third installment of The Mummy (Brendan Fraser got more irritating, by the way) and The Dark Knight about two week ago, and it's amazing for me still how these two films unshamedly resorted to their stereotypes of China just to get the point across. And it's even sadder that for all the efforts China has done, most news that come out in the Western media are about how inefficient and disorganized the Chinese are. And we're still not counting here how media lambasts China for Tibet and how it ridicules the country for buildings that fall even at the weakest of earthquakes.
While it is certain that China has never been the quintessential paragon of virtue for the longest time, the country can boast of a lot of things it has achieved that most people from the outside could only dream of. And for a civilization that has gone through a lot and has spanned centuries of strife and challenges, the eventual opening up of China to world is the next big thing. Besides, if China has its Tibet, America has its Cuba, Iraq, Afghanistan, etc... and no one seems to mind. More than anything else, the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing is an occasion for the entire planet to get to know China and see it under a different light.
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