It was a big deal. Palace Square was packed with people waiting to see the torch on the final leg of its journal through the city. There were music groups, concession stands, a skate park (they hired local kids to perform stunts on skateboards), a curling sheet (WTF?! Who's garage did that come from?!), and a whole lot of advertisements for Samsung and Coca Cola. The ground was littered with all the nick-knacks they were handing out, and they had two street-cleaners working full-time to keep the mess in order.
A giant stage was set up on the south end of the square and with two large bleachers. These were reserved for VIPs and distinguished guests––all others were kept at least 150 feet from the stage by a row of barriers and many humorless Russian security guards.
I settled down to wait for the torch in front of a jumbotron showing Chinese/Olympic propaganda that would have made Leni Rosenthal proud. I realized that despite all the recent bad publicity, China has a lot of positive images to work with. I, for one,didn't need to see Chinese volunteers cheerfully preparing for the games––always working after hours and slapping each other on the back––to associate them with hard-work, concentration, modesty, and team spirit (my Korean roommate has very different ideas, most of them negative).
The other fifty percent of the film was devoted to Chinese 'culture', a peculiar set of colorful hobbies that never interfere with a Chinese person's ability to be a polite, well-groomed, civilized member of the global economy from 9 to 5. One minute the Chinese woman is greeting Arab visitors at the airport, the next she's in a pristine river valley practicing ribbon dances, or on a plateau beating drums.
Unlike China, Russia has a lot of rebranding to do before it hosts the Olympics in 2014. Do you associate Russia with warmth, hard-work, and efficiency? Would you want to go to a little city in southern Russia to see the Olympics, or pay millions of dollars to sponsor them? Russia uses just two themes to attract tourists: 'tsarist grandeur' for Petersburg and 'tsarist grandeur + glitzy metropolis' for Moscow. 1917 to 1991 is still the elephant in the room. If Russia figures out how to deal with it, 2014 could be the year it finally sheds its Soviet image in the eyes of the world. Its going to have to confront it head on; no number of palaces or even kerchief-wearing, balalaika-playing, pelmeni-cooking babushkas can overturn ninety years of bad publicity.
Today's Link:
http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2008/04/photo_of_the_day.cfm
No comments:
Post a Comment