Orville Schell on Moving Beyond Old Wounds - 2008 Olympics - The NYT’s Olympics blog interviews China scholar Orville Schell on whether the Olympics have, or can, alter China in any way. His answer: “Yes, I believe it can … potentially both for the worse and the better.”

China Firms Dial Up Debt Issues - WSJ.com - Corporate China becomes interested in bonds | none

Black and White Cat › How the New York Times (should have) covered the Olympics - A New York Times article, before and after "translation" | none

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It’s been a relatively good week for the fund. We’re up about 3% over last week, down 33.02% since June 3, slightly worse than the market overall in that time (the SCI is down 30%). Friday was a particularly good day, with Anhui Conch rising almost 4.5%, and even Hubei Guangji up more than 4%. Old faithful ICBC (601398.SH) also rose modestly, and is down just 3.33% from mid-June.

On Monday, we’ll risk cracked lips and a low red-blood-cell count, and get out of riboflavin for good. We figure we can deal with losing around RMB670 on the investment since with a bit of extra cash freed up, we’ll be able to look for some better deals.

Main Press Center - The Official Website of the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games - For those with a robust disposition… transcripts of every BOCOG press conference

We Can Help China Embrace the Future - WSJ.com - Everyone’s favorite statesman Tony Blair on the Olympics and the future of China

Traffic restrictions lifted-英语点津 - Fun times on the second ring road are here again!!!!

Letter from Beijing: Fun and Games: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker - Anthony Lane's second week in Beijing

China’s merger control laws - an event of Olympic proportions - 22 August 2008 - Law firm Mallesons on the implementation regulations for China’s anti-monopoly law

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China Journal : Get Well Soon: A Message from Liu Xiang’s Sponsors - Words of comfort for Liu Xiang from his sponsors. Perhaps Liu will be less comforted by Ping An's silence regarding his RMB100 million insurance policy | none

Anthem Arrangements Raise A Red Flag Over Authorship - washingtonpost.com - IPR controversy swirls around the anthems played during the Olympics medal ceremonies | none

SCMP.com - the online edition of South China Morning Post, Hong Kong’s premier English-language newspaper - Li Ka-shing, Asia's richest man, goes into negative mode | none

Nike tweaks ad Campaign with Liu Xiang - BusinessWeek - The infamous ad… and some interesting stuff at the end about Liu Xiang's freebie RMB100 million accidental insurance policy from Ping An. Who pays? | none

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We’re quite frankly running out of words to describe the state of the markets - “grim” and “dismal”, which sounded so appropriate at first, no longer seem to capture the pervading sense of inevitable doom around A-shares. That’s despite – or perhaps because of – noises from Beijing that the government could step in to prop things up. We noted in the CER Weekly Email Briefing yesterday that half-hearted moves by the government earlier this week only strengthened the sell-off. As trading stops for lunch on Friday, the Shanghai Composite Index (SCI) is down another 2.4%, to around 2,372. Remember when everyone was so sure that the government wouldn’t let the SCI fall below 3,000? Ha.

So how is the fund doing? We’re down 36.9% as of this writing, meaning that the value of our initial RMB10,000 fund has been reduced to RMB6,310. Of course, those are just paper losses (or so we keep telling ourselves) because we still haven’t sold anything. As has been the case, the only good news is that the bad news isn’t getting significantly worse. Anhui Conch (600585.SH) continues to wallow around 52% below the price we bought it, and Hubei Guangji Pharmaceutical (000952.SZ) is still down about 40% - more or less the same as last week. Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (601398.SH) has also been blessedly boring.

So, still no action from us, and we won’t make any forecasts for the coming weeks. We just hope that we don’t keep going down the only road we’ve ever known.

Stryde Hax: Hack the Olympics! - A US blogger sets off an investigation into Chinese gold medal gymnast He Kexin’s real age (dubbed “babygate” by Imagethief) | none

Liverpudlian scalpers, scam Web sites, and other highlights of an Olympic-sized ticketing fiasco. - By Jacob Leibenluft, Tom Scocca, June Shih, and Tim Wu - Slate Magazine - You can still get Olympics tickets in Beijing, but it’s tricky. A CER editor went so far as to impersonate a Dutchman, but to no avail. | none

Letter from Beijing: The Only Games in Town: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker - More from the New Yorker: Anthony Lane on the first week of the games | none

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Olympics Postcard: Bug Wars: The Talk of the Town: The New Yorker - Kari Heliövaara, the man behind the greening of Beijing | none

ESPN - Opening Ceremony performers faced harsh conditions - Olympics - Heatstroke, injury, adult diapers, and one unforgettable Olympics opening ceremony | none

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(Volkswagen: Nice dancing show. China Mobile: Does the huge imitation TD-SCDMA handset sticking out of the side of your building work any better than the real things? Johnson & Johnson: Tasteful decor. Adidas: Pretty interesting from a sporting perspective, particularly a display that includes Jesse Owens’s running shoes and Ian Thorpe’s swimsuit. State Grid: Given that many people don’t actually get to choose whether they use your services or not, do you really need to be there? Why not spend the money plugging holes in the grid?)

Entry into the National Stadium (the Bird’s Nest) is equally smooth. And not only does the lattice design look good from the outside, but it works from the inside too. The stairwells thread in and out of the beams that form the stadium’s outer shell, creating plenty of vantage points from which you can catch glimpses of the surrounding area (Fortunately, the weather was great on Saturday.)

Crucially, the sight lines from the seats are good. This is generally the case with most modern sporting arenas but if you’ve been to a few of the older English football stadiums and seen how the other half lives, it is much appreciated.

As the day’s feature event was the final of the 100 meters, the crowd was large and responsive. Some of the biggest cheers went to the Chinese shot putters, which makes you wonder just how intense the reception will be for 110m hurdler Liu Xiang later in the week.

And now for the criticism: Food. Or, more to the point, the lack of food. No complaints about the drinks. Coca Cola has a stranglehold on the soft beverage offerings while Budweiser, Tsingtao and Yanjing are engaged in a three-way battle for the beer market (the result of a bidding war laced with local politics).

But barely two hours into the evening athletics program, food outlets in the Bird’s Nest were devoid of hotdogs, sandwiches, chips and noodles. The last bread roll went to a guy several places ahead of me in the queue. I eventually returned to my seat armed with pots of yogurt and packets of cream crackers - much to the disappointment of my hungry friends.

So are the media just being a little mean to China? It does at times feel akin to if coverage of the Atlanta Olympics were focused on the failings of the U.S. health care system and the plight of the American Indian. One foreign correspondent for a major American newspaper agreed, telling me, “In Athens the traffic jams were presented as the outgrowth of a hip Mediterranean lifestyle. Here they become yet another product of state repression.”

John Pomfret at the Washington Post agrees, saying further that the Olympics have proven irresistible bait for Western pundits to seize on in support of pet theories about China’s supposedly “collectivist” model. He takes two particularly egregious op-eds that have popped up recently in US newspapers to task, starting with the NYT’s David Brooks (full column here; also see James Fallows’s diplomatic but thorough dissections of the piece here and here):

“It was part of China’s assertion that development doesn’t come only through Western, liberal means, but also through Eastern and collective ones,” Brooks states. He then broadens this theory to say: “If Asia’s success reopens the debate between individualism and collectivism (which seemed closed after the cold war), then it’s unlikely that the forces of individualism will sweep the field or even gain an edge.” Takeaway? China is a challenge. Not just because it’s big and bad but because they think different over there and the Olympic Ceremony proves it.

I wonder if Brooks has ever seen American marching bands, or line dancing, or visited a high school where the coolest kids are always part of a group - say, the football or basketball teams. I would argue that in many way Americans bow more to the group than the Chinese, which explains why the Chinese party-state has been so intent on forcing comformity.

Even more, I wonder if Brooks has ever driven in China (look out for grandma!), or sharpened his elbows in the scrum that forms each time you try to get off an airplane, or tried to get Chinese co-workers to band together. Let’s just say in the decade that I’ve lived in China (over the course of 30 years), I haven’t seen or heard much collectivist impulse except when it was rammed down the throats of ordinary Chinese.

And as to Brooks’ point about China’s rise being attributed somehow to collectivist impulses. Wait a second. The most dynamic sector of China’s economy is the private one. It’s a nation of entrepreneurs. It’s a culture of entrepreneurs. Look at Hong Kong, or Sydney, or Main Street Flushing and now Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Chengdu. That’s Chinese and it’s “individualist” up the wazoo.

Then he deals with the Post’s Harold Meyerson (full column here), who for some reason took 2,008 drummers drumming in unison as a more frightening omen than, say, an invasion of South Ossetia:

Meyerson noted that during the parade of athletes China’s flag bearer, Yao Ming, was accompanied by a 9-year-old boy who dug two classmates out of the rubble of the Sichuan earthquake. When asked by NBC why he did it, the boy said “he was a hall monitor and that it was his job to take care of his schoolmates,” Meyerson wrote, adding “that answer may tell us more than we want to know.”

Huh???