November 2008 | Vol 1 | Issue 47
China relieved to forget Olympic spirit, gets back to blowing up monasteries
BEIJING. As the last Paralympians leave Beijing, Chinese officials say they are relieved that they can stop smiling and can get back to important official business such as arresting elderly Tibetan monks, blowing up monasteries, and putting toxic chemicals in baby food. "But both Games served their purpose," said one party official. "The West lapped them up. Suckers."
Speaking to the embedded Chinese press corps at the Bird's Nest Stadium as soldiers rounded up the last Chinese athletes who had failed to win a medal and had gone to ground in the stadium's foundations, Communist Party spokesman Zhu Pang said that China was "relieved but not surprised" that the West had bought into both the Olympics and the Paralympics with so much enthusiasm.
"You speak English to them and smile, and that seems to work," he said. "It's quite repulsive but somehow endearing that people can be so naïve."
He said the treatment of visitors had been a hotly debated topic for the four years building up to the Games, and that there had been "three competing schools of thought" on the issue.
"The Confucians, they say, 'Olympics like warm typhoon of change: either bend like river reeds or snap like mountain cedar tree.'"
"The liberals said we should engage in a meaningful and sincere way with the West, by learning certain cheerful phrases, smiling until our faces cramped up, and wearing go-go boots whenever possible.
"And the pragmatists, who were in the majority, said it was important to allow the Games to happen, but without undermining Chinese authority.
"Basically this meant keeping athletes in bamboo cages, beating visitors who failed to show identification, and carrying out reprisals in Tibet whenever a Western tourist took a photograph of key strategic installations such as park benches or decorative fountains."
However, he said, China's leadership had grudgingly accepted that rounding up athletes and kicking down the doors of tourist hotels "might have left a taste in the mouth", and had opted for the liberal approach.
He also conceded that Beijing's much-vaunted cleanup of its polluted air had been "somewhat less sustainable than previously indicated".
He explained that the pollution had been sucked into a massive underground bag and would be released over a phased period once the last tourists had returned home.
He urged Beijing residents not to panic when they began coughing up blackish blood over the next few months or years, and confirmed that the authorities were working on a plan, codenamed Operation Consumption Resumption.
Pang said that the central thrust of Operation Consumption Resumption would be "the large-scale handing out of Olympics-themed memorabilia to those being treated for lung diseases in hospitals", while for those who had been discharged to die at home with their families, the Party would give special commemorative models of the Bird's Nest Stadium, to be used as spittoons and ultimately as urns.
"The Party and the People's Republic of China will keep the Olympic dream alive," said Pang.
"Our citizens, not so much. And we can't guarantee anything in Tibet. But the dream, most definitely."
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