I helped Loretta Chao from the Wall Street Journal produce this video on a kid from Henan she saw filming a protest on Tian’anmen Square yesterday. A fantastic, fascinating character. High on China like he’d injected some sort of narcotized liquid patriotism. Wish I could have used more of him, but Internet attention span research tells us to keep everything to under four minutes. Alas.

From the Beijing Bureau: A tale of two Olympic cities
Park Record, 2008.07.22

This was fortitude of historical proportions. On September 11, 2001, just as people in northern Utah had started decorating their cities in earnest for the Winter Olympics, a global party more than a decade in the making, two planes veered murderously off course 2000 miles to the east. The story from there hardly bears repeating: tens of thousands killed, a nation plunged into morning and, months later, an Olympics held despite it all. For years, it seemed the 2002 Winter Games would go down in history as the only Olympic gathering to take place so fast on the heels of a national disaster.

No longer.

On May 12th this year, with Beijing entering the feverish final stages of preparation for China’s first Olympics, a magnitude 8.0 earthquake struck roughly a thousand miles away, in rural Sichuan Province. Seventy thousand were killed, the nation was plunged into mourning. And next month, yes, the Beijing Games will go ahead despite it all.

On the surface, Beijing 2008 has so little in common with Salt Lake City 2002 it seems ludicrous to even begin to compare them. The 100-meter dash versus the downhill. The Forbidden City versus the Mormon Temple. Five hundred thousand volunteers for one versus 22,000 for the other. The two Olympics feel about as comparable as the foods for which each city is best known: Roast Duck, meet Jell-O Salad. But look a little harder and striking parallels begin to emerge——parallels that suggest Utahns are in better position than most to understand what may be going through the minds of people in Beijing as their big day approaches.

The background of catastrophic national misfortune is far and away the most obvious, and wrenching, of the similarities that tie Utah to Beijing. Parkites who remember the torn American flag recovered from Ground Zero being carried into the opening ceremonies in Salt Lake, and the string of solemn 9/11 tributes from American medal winners that followed, can expect something similar in Beijing.

Park City tennis fans who watched Wimbledon last month already saw a preview of this when Chinese player Zheng Jie, a native of Sichuan ranked No. 133, make an improbable run to the Wimbledon women’s semi-finals, then went on to donate her winnings to victims of the earthquake.

But there is more.

The fear of protests by “anti-China forces” and possible terrorist attacks by extremists amongst China’s marginalized Uighur Muslim community—a fear sharpened by two bus explosions in the southern city of Kunming this week—has led in recent months to a new slogan for the Games: “Olympics, Security First.”

They are not empty words. Yesterday while traveling around town, your correspondent was forced to put his bags through three baggage screening devices and saw a pair of visitors pulled over on the side of a major highway being guarded by a soldier carting an assault rifle. If that sounds familiar, it might be because several of the anti-terror experts brought into secure Salt Lake City for the Olympics in the wake of 9/11 have been hired by Beijing to do the same in China.

Perhaps more importantly, China shares with Utah the misfortune of being both a complex and a polarizing place. As a result, China, like Utah, is susceptible to being rendered by the lazy or the polemical in the broad strokes of stereotype and caricature.

Last October, a reporter for the UK’s Channel 4, in town to do a story on China’s illegal detention of petitioners, confounded residents of Beijing by describing their city as a “disaster zone,” full of “unhappy people” standing in “piles of faeces” and seething with discontent-this despite the fact that most piles of feces to be found on the Beijing streets come from the hordes of well-manicured mini-dogs kept as pets by the city’s generally content middle class.

Where Utahns had to endure endless comments about polygamy and questions about whether Salt Lake 2002 would end up being the “Mo-lympics,” residents of Beijing have been subject to a barrage of commentary about life in a police state and have had their games re-branded, with similar lack of imagination, the “Genocide Olympics.”

As with the Salt Lake Games, the cartoonish portrayals of Beijing have some basis in fact. But these pictures have been sketched with a prejudice against complicating details and exaggerated for effect. None of this is to suggest the Beijing’s Games are a mirror of Utah’s. Considered a coming out party by many Chinese and a judgment day of sort by outsiders, the Beijing 2008 Olympics have no precedent. But if anyone is in a position to understand-maybe even sympathize with-the hordes of average Beijing residents clutching their Olympic tickets to their chest as they bounce dizzily back and forth between anticipation and apprehension, it is the readers of this paper.

It’s happened at last, I thought. Well, then, let it come.

I was relieved (and also, I will admit, a little disappointed) to discover I had nothing to fear. There were no new entries in the comments section. No jingoistic outbursts accusing me of hating China. No obscenities leveled at my family. No response whatsoever. Visiting the page that linked to my blog, I was surprised to discover all of the vitriol had instead been bestowed on TBWA, the group that had dreamed up the Adidas campaign.

What landed TBWA on Anti-CNN’s shit list is not the Adidas campaign, which appears to have thrilled most Chinese people, but its contributions to a separate 2008 Games PR blitz being undertaken by Amnesty International.

As one might expect, the Amnesty International ads aim to portray the Beijing Olympics as a travesty for human rights. The organization has taken a variety of approaches in service of this goal, including one ad that replaces the candle in its logo with an Olympic torch, but most of the series uses the Olympic events themselves to highlight the various ways in which Chinese authorities mistreat Chinese prisoners. There appear to be five of these—boxing, shooting, swimming, weight lifting and archery—with TBWA responsible for the last three (Slovakia’s WUW Saatchi and Saatchi did the others).

Like the Adidas ads, TBWA’s work for Amnesty International is striking, with tremendous attention to detail. In the swimming ad, a prisoner lies shirtless and prostrate between the starting blocks, grimacing as one of the two Chinese policeman straddling him lifts his head out of the pool. Likewise, in the archery ad (see above), a Chinese policeman is shown strolling away with a smile on his face, having strapped a prisoner to the front of a target——the poor man’s fate made clear by another blood-stained target lying on the ground opposite a previously dispatched victim, barely visible in the bottom corner of the frame. Each ad is rendered in gritty, washed-out blues and grays with a message proclaiming, “After the Olympic Games, the Fight for Human Rights Must Go On.” The series earned TBWA a 2008 Cannes Press Lions bronze medal.

The ads attracted the attention on the popular Chinese Internet forum Tianya not long after the Cannes Lions awards were announced, and from there to Anti-CNN, where it quickly amassed six pages’ worth of comments. Predictably, the response in these venues has been less than enthusiastic.

A significant part of the Anti-CNNers’ anger over the ads seems to stem from the fact they were produced out of New York-based TBWA’s French offices. Thanks to the disastrous Paris leg of the Olympic torch relay earlier this year, Chinese nationalists now seethe with hatred for anything having to do with France. Hence, Anti-CNN, Tianya and other Chinese discussion sites are now rife with “fuck TBWA, fuck France”-type commentary.

But not all of the criticism has been unhinged.

“One company, two completely different ways of acting,” one poster wrote on Anti-CNN’s discussion board. “If a company doesn’t know the difference between right and wrong, is willing to make money no matter where it comes from, then it shouldn’t be allowed to make a cent here.”

For all its ignominy as a symbol of frothing-at-the-mouth Chinese nationalism, Anti-CNN doesn’t seem entirely unreasonable. It’s basic position on CNN, after all, is one many people have taken at one point or another, regardless of nationality. And in the case of TBWA, at least a few users of the site make valid points, regardless of where one stands on the Olympics human rights issue.

As far as I can tell, no one at TBWA has been publicly forced to explain how the company justifies gorging itself on rah-rah Olympic sentiment one moment only to vomit it all back up the next. How does the company account for itself? Is the Amnesty campaign an effort to balance the corporate karma ledger? Was there some breakdown in communication between the French and Chinese offices?

With a slogan like “Disruptive Ideas Expressed Through Media Arts,” it seems more likely the company is simply trying to milk a controversial event for all its worth——in which case, they deserve whatever abuse they get, whether from within China or anywhere else.