Today, I've been taken back a few thousand years in China's history by the world's leading scholar on China and the Olympics, Professor Susan Brownell from the University of Missouri and Beijing Sports University. Her keynote address at the close of the Olympic conference I've been attending interrogated Western centrism within the Olympic Movement.
I know Susan quite well and we've met a few times in the last year. I even have a few photographs in her new book, Beijing's Games: What the Olympics Mean to China. She speaks great Mandarin and has had unrivalled access to the Olympic community in China, including being the biographer of Zheliang He, the IOC Chair of the Culture and Education Commission.
Susan has also spent a lot of her passed months interviewing for the world's press about the Games and this week she's hardly out of a studio or off the phone. When I spoke to her some months ago in Ancient Olympia just after the fires in Greece, she expressed some reticence about this prospect. However, she's placed herself wholeheartedly into the subject of her analysis -- the Western media's representation of China. Her ideas speak to critical issues that have framed Beijing's Games - disputes about media freedoms and bias. As a true anthropologist, she stressed the importance of the West learning Chinese and Asian languages generally, if it ever hopes to shed its imperial and colonial mentality about how it is defined in relation to this Other part of the world.
Next stop was an interview with the British Independent Television Network (ITN) about more gene doping issues. This was a chance to see one of the media venues, specifically the Beijing International Convention Center, which is one of the major goals of the research I do at the Games. The BICC is very different from the IBC, the MPC and the BIMC and I'm not convinced all of the journalists really know how their space differs from others. If the IBC people -- the International Broadcast Centre -- just strolled over to the BIMC -- the Beijing International Media Center -- they'd discover a whole different Olympic world that exists beyond the sport. But most of them won't. Still, the BICC was even more interesting.
The ITN -- a non-rights holder -- sits within the NBC news set-up and it's not an accredited centre at all. However, a lot of these broadcasters have accreditation to the Main Press Center (MPC), so it feels as though there are many routes through which companies are trying to access Olympic news and information. We were kindly shown around the BICC, in exchange for my interviewing for them about gene doping. The presenter expressed that they've no issues with regard to using the Internet, everything was working excellently and they've even got a great studio backdrop of the Bird's Nest. All seems well.
After trying to persuade the presenter that athletes should be allowed to use performance enhancements, we walked across to the Bird's Nest and Aquatic Center. It was much more animated than two days ago, but with a few more restrictions of movement and the promise of more to come. I still can't work out how the Olympic cauldron will be lit though. The place is full of small street acts, but very few toilets, no water vendors and no information kiosks anywhere. This takes its toll a bit.
We then take the No.1 Olympic Bus for a packed -- but air conditioned ride -- around the venues -- again, for the second time, but busier. We alight at the final stop and glance into a small neighbourhood where they have a reasonable sized screen, which I expect will be for the sports. If every such neighbourhood has this, then Beijing will have delivered the most extraordinary Live Site programme in history.
I'm not watching much news here. We've CCTV9 on from time to time and it's covering all the news you'd hope. I didn't see anything about the 'pole' protest at the stadium yesterday, but the violence in the North West of China was given the air space it deserved. Still frustrated that I can't upload to Flickr and have found that I can't access my university or personal servers either. Was it something I said?