Changing China

Just who is “Second Brother on the Right”?

His picture is all over Chinese Web sites and media. He has multiple proposals of marriage. And he became an overnight nationalist hero. But just who is China’s anonymous “Second Brother on the Right”?

The young man with classic good looks guarded the Olympic flame during its protest-ridden passage round the world. His prominent position (always standing second to the right of the flame) wrestling demonstrators and standing proudly next to the torch has brought him fame across China. 

“He is so hot and he is the pride of China! What more could a girl want?” wrote one female fan.

Second Brother’s popularity has tapped into two cultural under-currents in China — anger among many that foreign protests, mainly in favour of Tibetan independence, have tarnished their Olympics; and weariness with quickly-manufactured domestic pop and TV stars.

By contrast, Second Brother’s embodiment of classic values is compared by fans to Lei Feng, an idolised soldier of the Mao Zedong era. Chinese guess Second Brother must be a policeman or soldier, but his real identity is a closely-guarded secret.

That’s a shame for those queuing up to offer him homage and gifts, plus his many would-be wives.

PHOTO: A Beijing Olympic torch relay guard known as “Second Brother on the Right” poses for a photo on an airplane from Sanya to Beijing, May 4, 2008. Picture taken May 4, 2008. REUTERS/China Daily

The earthquake and the Olympics

The tenor of China’s Olympic year changed dramatically over the past two weeks.

What had been a building crescendo of celebration and national pride turned into an outpouring of grief and support for the earthquake-hit province of Sichuan.

Wall-to-wall television coverage of the torch relay, a blissful affair once on Chinese soil, gave way to heart-rending reports from the devastated epicentre and uplifting scenes of a nation pulling together to confront disaster.

And though the declared three-day period of national mourning has ended, China will carry its grief into the Olympics.

But if there were any questions about whether Beijing would, bit by bit, shift itself back into gear for the Games, these were put to rest for me the other night on the subway.

As I walked into Fuxingmen station, on the edge of downtown, I came upon a scene of the feverish yet meticulous work that has characterised Beijing’s Olympic preparations.

Two dozen high-school boys were running round and round in tight circles through the turnstiles. They were testing the resilience of a new ticketing system. With magnetic swipe cards in hand, they ran, one after the other, through the automatic turnstiles non-stop for nearly half an hour.

Where next for the torch?

Preparations for the Beijing Olympics have understandably taken a back seat to the tragedy in Sichuan.

On Sunday, it was announced that the torch relay would be suspended from Monday to Wednesday to mark three days of national mourning.

The question officials at the Beijing Organising Committee for the Olympic Games (BOCOG) returned to wrestling with after observing the three-minute silence at 2.28pm today is what should happen when it restarts?

On Tuesday and Wednesday, the torch was scheduled to visit Shanghai. Can a torch relay that is supposed to visit all of China’s provinces really skip the country’s financial capital (and venue for several Olympic soccer matches)? Will Sichuan, and most particularly the city of Mianyang, really be ready to host the flame in mid-June?     

Some in China have said that it should not resume at all, despite the fund-raising for the victims that has taken place along the route since the earthquake. 

A former deputy editor of the Communist Party mouthpiece People’s Daily suggested last week in Caijing Magazine that when the worst of the destruction was cleared, the torch should be taken to the epicentre of the 7.9 magnitude quake and relayed from there to Beijing.

“Continuing the high profile torch relay must take a large quantity of resources and attention of people, which does not match  either the need of concentrating on disaster relief, or the deep grief at losing our compatriots,” wrote Huangpu Ping.

Inside the Bird’s Nest

Picking my way through chaotic traffic, dust and unmade footpaths on my way to the Bird’s Nest stadium this morning, I had a flashback to the Olympic Stadium in Athens four years ago.

The difference was that when I was stumbling through the debris in Greece, it was just a few days before the Games rather than the 114 days that remain before the Opening Ceremony here in China.

Almost lost among the thousands of words written about the torch relay during the International Olympic Committee’s visit to Beijing last week were continual statements of confidence that the athletes were going to experience a top class Games this summer with facilities that few would have seen the like of before.   

If the Bird’s Nest is anything to go by, that assessment may not be far off the mark.

Forget the aesthetics of the twisted steel exterior, from the inside it simply looks like it’s going to be a superb arena for the world’s greatest athletes to strut their stuff.

I first really caught the sporting bug when, at a tender age, I first walked into the maelstrom of a stadium packed with thousands of spectators. In my case it was an English football stadium, but friends have spoken of similar formative experiences at baseball, rugby and cricket grounds.

That feeling of awe and delicious expectation remains with me and I felt a small twinge of it when I first glimpsed the inside of the Bird’s Nest. Packed with 91,000 cheering fans in August, it will be quite a place. 

Interval over…

Last week was a busy one in Beijing after events surrounding the torch relay took over the news agenda.

I spent six days in the bowels of a five-star hotel in central Beijing chasing comments from the International Olympic Committee (IOC) President Jacques Rogge and his colleagues on events in London, Paris and San Francisco.

Unfortunately, the blog went into hibernation. But the glorious spring weather here has awoken the sleeping bears, and we’re clawing away at some interesting stuff for this week. 

Picture of Jacques Rogge at the China World Hotel by Alfred Cheng Jin

This is normal, it happens in all countries…

It arrived.

Some 5,000 VIPs, cheering workers and media gathered on Tiananmen Square on Monday to welcome the Beijing Olympic flame and launch the 137,000-km torch relay.

So let the Relay begin

The moment China has been waiting for … well one of many Olympic moments. The torch relay kicked into gear on Monday, but not without a bit of drama. (The above picture is of China’s gold medallist swimmer Luo Xuejuan.)

The Chinese media lauded the event, and several pages of newspapers were devoted to lavish descriptions of the event.

 ”At that moment, my heart was beating so hard!” the Beijing News quoted Quan Maoda, the father of a torch bearer from Inner Mongolia, as saying of the lighting.

Local papers also made much of the fact that the sun came out for the ceremony in Ancient Olympia, after overcast rehearsals. “A perfect start on the road to gold,” read one headline in the China Daily.

“Each day we will pay attention to the torch, deeply knowing that day by day the Olympics are coming closer to us,” the Beijing News quoted Zhu Yuetao, an official in the port city of Qingdao, which will host the sailing events, as saying.