I was wondering if anybody was going to present an alternative view of what was happening in China during the Olympics. Thanks for this, there was more to think about from this than all the articles I've read in the MSM since this started.

This short but evocative piece puts into print what I think a lot of outsiders are wondering about the games. China is massive, fascinating, a marvel, repressive, disgustingly governed, headed for disaster or headed for hegemony. That ordinary Chinese span a range from the meek to the repressed to the brave to the bold is both a revelation and, in hindsight, obvious. This is the one of the few time I feel better after reading something with "Olympics" tag (non-sporting that is, how could one not be positively amazed after seeing Bolt and Phelps fly like no one else in their sports ever have).

I look forward to your next piece where after covering a US Presidential election event, you head out to document the homeless only a few miles from the convention.

Today's Chian has taught its party members that politics will yield wealth for all party members in due course. I am surprised that the party is not inundated with applications. Perhaps I do not see the impending end of the party because I am so far away.

Interesting story. But for a moment I thought you were talking about the U.S. media, not the Chinese...."modern means of suppressing news and Celebraty Mythmaking...efficient means of repression."

Isn't this really CNN, MSNBC, NBC etc. and the media misogynist agenda who brutalized Hillary Clinton's candidacy that truly are an accurate mirror of the suppression of political truth in American media?(see "Sexism Sells..." in Women's Media Centre for a compilation of non-fiction gender brutalizations that you'll be covering your eyes and ears to avoid viewing)

Why blame the Chinese media when the American media are far worse and not only suppress the truth in the process of "reporting" on celebs but have as anchors a bunch of misogynist frat-boys who think the newsroom is their playpen of misogyny!

But then again you have to question "Journalists" who receive their on-the-job training chasing bimbos out of rehab and so have an easy job of promoting their political Obambis without looking into their anorexic resume, background dealings, incompetence and dirty politics. (see "We will not be Silenced" by G. Gaston-- re massive Caucus fraud)

Before you cast your stone, look in your own backyard!

I'm afraid you've lost the plot. Part of the conceit of this piece as evidenced by the body and then the final line was that the Chinese government is becoming perhaps just as adept at shutting down honest political thought amongst it's populace through media manipulation, shallow self-interest and vapidity just as skillfully as we, IE the west, have been doing for a long time.

So essentially you've just tried to attack both the choir and the pulpit by preaching to it in an accusatory fashion.

More than this though, and rather ironically, you've further proven the point by virtue of your focus on fake problems. The recent alleged martyrdom of HDRC and her undue victimization is as much a creation mythology as reporting of fact. Her politics were no cleaner and I would argue her battle no more uphill than her main democratic challenger - not in a country in which supposed "political" dissenters may promote wild inventions of religious falsehoods designed to prey on bias and prejudice (HDRC's own employees started the "Obama is a secret Muslim" storyline later spread through the republican rumor mills, or have we blinded ourselves to that truth?). If you cannot recognize that her being female made her position no less precarious than the person who was since intercut in television ads with pictures of young, white women (a crystal clear code to the south of this country that he is primed and ready to come rape all the young white women after he breaks into the white house) than you are surely a victim of our culture.

The difference, as near as I can tell, is that the nominee is not actively seeding discontent born out of vitriolic self-interest. Clinton, in her language, still does on occasion. Clearly so too do a small percentage of her ardent supporters - or at the very least those with other agendas who skillfully read from her script book.

Finally I am rather surprised that the more obvious correlations haven't been made when considering police states. Protest "zones" were set up well outside and away from the Olympic areas, and even this obvious absurdity was locked down. This is precisely what Bush did during the last election cycle and beyond - setting up protest zones sometimes miles away from his public appearances, surrounding them with temporary walls making it completely impossible to see inside and then having the perimeter patrolled by armed National Guard troops.

It defies logic that a culture such as ours, as scared and suspicious as any - one in which the basest, most crude and easily debunked lies invariably gain the most traction in our truncated infotainment cycle - would not latch securely onto that conspiracy element. Instead, in fact, the only people who are displaying outright protest (not the slow-burning disgust, disenfranchisement and quiet fury of those of us watching the political system be ever more corrupted than it were and then the process ignored by the largely useless and broken media, which is hard to imagine much less take) are those with some imagined and over-dramatized personal slight.

Because it's not about America, is it? It's not about The People for some people. It's more about Some People - isn't it? You're happy to fight that fight, aren't you? This position seems to come down the this essential argument; that one highly eligible candidate of a marginalized social class is fundamentally more deserving of the position, and in fact will do better in that position (or to hell with it let's be honest - simply "deserves" to be in that position independent of ability or outcome), than any other highly eligible candidate from a marginalized social class because they are from "your" marginalized social class.

If you don't see the failure in that... If your position is that a highly educated Senator, Professor and Lawyer is by this definition unfit to be President of the United States of America in the end... Well I don't know what to tell you.

Still, you've proven the author right. China, the United States... We have created the enemy, and the enemy is us. How's that for a small world?