What is the relationship between the 2008 Olympics and Chinese politics?
In general, I think the outside world doesn’t realize that the 2008 Olympics are being used to press China’s government to do things for the Chinese people. Change usually occurs slowly here, but the Games have sped Beijing’s political process up. There has been a huge push to clean up the city, for example. There is a lot of inertia in Chinese government. A big reason for that is China’s enormous population. The country is so big – it takes a lot of effort to accomplish anything. And the nature of Chinese politics contributes to that inertia as well. In Beijing, government consists entirely of guanxi wang (‘webs of personal relations’). When you do something, as an official, you must consider how that something will affect everyone connected to you and everyone connected to them – ad infinitum. So political actions are like stones dropped into ponds. They send ripples moving outwards. No one particularly wants to make waves, and so only very slowly do things normally get done. Consequ
