In the men's team gymnastics final, no one lost.
Reuters/Dylan Martinez
Members of the U.S. team pose on the podium after winning the men’s team artistic gymnastics bronze medal at the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games August 12, 2008.
In our victory-obsessed, self-absorbed society, losing always has to mean something. It isn’t enough just to say you had an off day, or were simply beaten by a superior opponent. No, defeat must have some larger significance. It must reveal some fault, some flaw, some weakness of character or preparation or will. In our narcissistic grandiosity — a grandiosity secretly driven by self-doubt — we see ourselves as the heroes in a quasi-mythical narrative. It is preordained that we must triumph. And so if we do not triumph, we must be to blame. The fault lies not in the stars but in ourselves.
We take this tendency to extremes with sports. We endlessly analyze, and psychoanalyze, athletes who lose. Sometimes this is legitimate. But much of the time, it’s cheap speculation, often verging on voyeurism. It’s uninformed and mean-spirited. Pay a dime and pass judgment on someone else. You can hear them braying at every baseball game and every sports talk-radio show, the all-knowing inquisitors, loudly condemning the character and ethics of perfect strangers.
This judgmentalism derives largely from our belief that losing is unacceptable — a belief that has deep roots. Vince Lombardi’s famous dictum “winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing” pretty much sums it up. There is an opposing view, one reflected in the maxim “it isn’t whether you win or lose, it’s how you play the game.” But that countervailing perspective is getting weaker and weaker. In a noisy and frenetic age when victory drowns out self-insight and process has been replaced by information, it’s easiest to just move “losers” to the trash and hit delete.
This is a travesty of everything that sports is about. For those who lose sometimes achieve things even greater than those who win. Those achievements are often invisible. But if we could read the secret history of defeat, we would find amazing and heart-quickening things in it.
One of the great things about the Olympics is that it acknowledges this. First, simply to be an Olympian, no matter whether you’re Michael Phelps or the last-place table-tennis player from the Maldive Islands, is to be a winner forever. At the very end of the great Sydney Games, I will never forget the vast crowd in the Olympic Stadium rising to its feet and saluting the very last runner in the marathon, Elias Rodriguez of the Federated States of Micronesia, as he wearily made his way around the track. The roars that poured down were our salute not just to Rodriguez, but to all the athletes who competed, whether they won or lost. They were our salute to something that doesn’t appear in any box score, but is what the Olympics are all about: the human spirit.
U.S. gymnast Raj Bhavsar expressed thiswith singular eloquence. After sittting on the sidelines as an alternate on the team in Athens, Bhavsar hit the lowest point in his life. But he found his way out of the pit by coming to understand what the Olympics are really about — or can be. “I found being an Olympian was not about the title, it was more about the heart; it’s about the spirit that you had put into the journey and it’s about the struggle,” Bhavsar said. “The word ‘Olympian’ — it’s not like ‘doctor’ or ‘mister’ or something like that. There’s always a story to be told with a much deeper meaning to it.”
The other way that the Olympics expands our narrow view of what it means to win and lose is by awarding three medals, not just one. To see the glowing faces of an athlete as she receives a silver or bronze medal, eternal confirmation that she was the second or third best in the world at some incredibly difficult thing, is to be reminded of how arbitrary it is to deem that there is only one winner. Yes, gold is the goal, and all athletes want to win. Competitiveness is innate to sport. You couldn’t force yourself to go through what you have to go through as a world-class athlete without being intensely competitive. But what the three medals remind us is that you can lose and still win.
Sometimes, by serendipity, there’s a specific event that highlights this. Last night’s men’s team gymnastics final was one of them. Only one team won gold, but all three medal-winners came through like champions. There were truly no losers in this event.
The three teams that won medals, China, Japan and the U.S., each faced a unique challenge. The Chinese team, of course, was bearing the weight of an entire country on its shoulders. The Chinese men are the best gymnasts in the world by far, but they had faltered disastrously in Athens. Now, at an Olympics held in their native land, they had to win. If they didn’t, they would not only disgrace themselves, but their country. Other than that, no pressure.
The Japanese, the defending gold medalists, were considered an equal lock to win silver after Paul Hamm, by far the best American gymnast, broke his hand and had to withdraw. After Hamm’s brother Morgan was also a late scratch because of injury, it was a no-brainer: The Japanese had to win silver. But they got off to a slow start last night, and disaster struck on the fourth event, the vault: two of their three vaulters made major mistakes, leading to the worst score on the apparatus of any of the eight teams. With just one apparatus remaining, the Japanese stood in third place, behind China and the U.S.
As for the U.S., their team was in shambles. Two members were alternates, who only found out they were going to be on the team shortly before the games. One of them, Sasha Artemev, was informed only the day before the Opening Ceremony. The U.S. team placed sixth of eight teams in the qualifying round, trailing China, Japan, Russia, Germany and South Korea and ahead of only France and Romania.
Each team, then, faced a different challenge. China had to live up to its nation’s high expectations and overcome a history of choking in the big events. Japan had to fight back from serious mistakes and the resulting shell shock: Midway through the competition, NBC’s commentator said the Japanese team appeared listless and demoralized. And the patched-together U.S. men had to figure out a way, any way, to get onto the podium.
And they all came through.
China did it gloriously, seizing the lead after four apparatuses and never looking back, its gymnasts performing at their accustomed, mind-blowing level on rings, vault and the horizontal bar. When the final event was done, the expression on their leader Yan Wei’s face said it all: Mission accomplished. The monkey was off their back, never to return.
The Japanese men had a bumpier road, but they gutted it out. In their final routine they needed three clean routines on the bar to overtake the U.S. The bar is a beautiful, risky apparatus in which the tiniest error can instantly transform a soaring performance into a crumpled failure. But the Japanese men didn’t make a mistake. Their earlier malaise was forgotten. They flew through the air with the greatest of ease, and for their daring they won silver.
The Americans had performed superbly throughout the evening. Led by all-arounder Jonathan Horton, who looks like that brash crew-cut kid who always appointed himself quarterback in the pickup games of your youth, is built like a spark plug and has the heart of a lion, the U.S. was in position to medal. But things went badly wrong on the last apparatus, the pommel horse. The first American, Kevin Tan, fell and received only a 12.775 — the gymnastics equivalent of an F-minus. Then the steady alternate Raj Bhavsar, who had come back from deep depression after being left off the team in Athens, made a couple of mistakes and only posted a 13.750. It all came down to the last U.S. gymnast of the night, Sasha Artemev.
Artemev, son of a Russian champion, is one of the best in the world on the horse, but he’d fallen three out of four times in the U.S. team trials, which is why he was left off the team in the first place. In a memorable performance, he’d come through huge in the qualifying to help earn the U.S. men a spot in the finals. But this was the first and only event of his entire night. He’d been sitting and watching for hours. Could he do it?
Artemev got up — and stopped. The bizarrely slow Olympics scoring process forced him to wait, and wait, and wait some more — three minutes’ worth. It was like an NFL coach trying to “ice” a kicker by calling three timeouts in a row. But when Artemev mounted the horse, he was the one who turned out to have ice water in his veins. His legs scissored back and forth in gorgeous precision, and his hands gripped the horse as if he was carrying his child in his hands over a 10,000-foot drop. When he dismounted he was mobbed by his teammates, who knew he had just sealed the deal. His 15.350 was enough to keep the Germans in fourth and put the Americans on the stand.
Afterward, Artemev said, “This was the one time I needed to hit. I told myself I was not going to fall.”
During a team huddle as the competition neared its climax, the camera caught Horton telling his teammates, “No fear, no regrets.” That’s a lot easier thing to say than to do. But last night, all three teams lived up to that slogan. They performed without fear, and now, forever, they need have no regrets.
U.S., China need a green peace, not a trade war
As Obama meets Xi, the U.S. is investigating China’s practices in the solar and wind sectors
Solar panels in the city of Baoding in China. (Credit: Reuters/David Gray)
Chinese Vice President Xi Jinping’s visit to the United States comes at a contradictory time in clean energy relations between the two countries. On the one hand, significant progress has been made under the clean energy cooperation agreements signed by Presidents Hu Jintao and Barack Obama in the fall of 2009. On the other hand, the two countries may be on the verge of a clean energy trade war. As a result, the positions that Xi and Obama take on these issues over the next week may well set the tone for that relationship’s future, for better or worse.
China and the United States have launched numerous energy cooperation initiatives during the past 30 years. Only over the past decade, however, have they become global leaders in the relevant technologies, both as users and manufacturers. China now leads the world in wind power deployment, followed by the United States. Chinese investments in clean energy exceeded those of any other country in both 2009 and 2010, but the U.S. was back to No. 1 in 2011 (where it had been for several years prior to 2009).
The seven new bilateral clean energy initiatives launched in 2009 focused on key areas, including renewable energy, advanced coal technology, energy efficiency and electric vehicles. The US-China Clean Energy Research Center (CERC) (a virtual center that sponsors work in several locations in both countries) in particular has established a new model for cooperative clean energy research, development and demonstration that spans the public and private sectors and involves top researchers from universities and national laboratories in both countries. These programs have propelled numerous other collaborations, some of which — if the two sides decide to emphasize clean energy cooperation over competition — may be included in major announcements during Xi’s visit.
However, at the end of last year the United States initiated antidumping and countervailing duty investigations into China’s practices in the solar and wind sectors, and the Department of Commerce will decide soon whether to impose duties on Chinese solar panels and wind turbine components. In the meantime, election year politics and a slow economic recovery are fueling competitive tensions.
President Obama announced in his State of the Union address last month that he would establish a new trade enforcement unit to speed investigations of unfair trading practices by China. Beijing has (not surprisingly) responded with its own investigation into American clean energy support programs. This comes as the U.S. renewable energy industry is increasingly divided over China’s role. For example, the Coalition for Affordable Solar Energy (a U.S. solar industry association) has asked the Coalition for American Solar Manufacturing (another U.S. solar industry association) to drop its petition that launched the solar panel investigation. A CASE report estimates that higher U.S. import duties on Chinese solar panels will eliminate up to 60,000 American jobs and hurt U.S. consumers even more than U.S. producers.
We are entering a period in which the incentives for conflict may overpower the incentives for cooperation. China and the United States are the world’s two largest economies, and should be leaders in establishing and enforcing the rules of the global trading system. But as the largest producers and consumers of energy, as well as the largest greenhouse gas emitters, they also have a responsibility to develop domestic, clean and affordable sources of energy for themselves as well as for others.
Both nations recognize the vital importance of strengthening innovation systems to inspire economic competitiveness, and both are increasingly becoming the leaders of the clean energy industry. These technologies are global industries with global supply chains, however, and national technology providers increasingly are crossing borders for both innovation and production. Our leaders would be well served to focus on how the two nations can work together to develop crucial energy technologies for the future, rather than on how to create even more obstacles.
WikiLeaks sheds light on Adelson’s Asia business
Cable describes shutdown of a $100 million Adelson nonprofit in Beijing and refers to "missteps" in China
Sheldon Adelson, chief executive of Las Vegas Sands Corporation, and his wife Miriam attend the ribbon cutting of the Four Seasons Macao hotel and casino in Macau. (Credit: Bobby Yip / Reuters)
We’ve learned this election cycle that casino magnate Sheldon Adelson isn’t afraid to throw around vast sums of money to get what he wants — he and his family have given at least $11 million to help the Newt Gingrich campaign.
It hasn’t gotten any notice since Adelson became a player in presidential politics, but it turns out that the trove of diplomatic cables published by WikiLeaks contains an interesting anecdote about how Adelson aggressively promoted his casino and hotel business in the Chinese territory of Macau — and a run-in he had with the central government in Beijing.
First, some context. The news broke last March that Adelson’s Las Vegas Sands Corp. is under federal investigation into whether it has complied with the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. The act makes it illegal to bribe foreign officials to obtain business deals.
The investigation reportedly came about after a breach-of-contract lawsuit was filed by former Sands executive Steven Jacobs that floated the possibility of an FCPA violation by Sands:
Jacobs alleges, among other things, that Adelson wanted him to conduct secret investigations of the dealings of the Macau government officials to dig up dirt so they could be intimidated, and that Adelson wanted the corporation to continue using the services of a Macau attorney with a bad reputation “despite concerns that [the individual's] retention posed serious risk under the criminal provisions of the United States code commonly known as the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.”
A confidential September 2009 cable sent from the U.S. consulate in Hong Kong back to Washington describes Adelson’s business practices in Macau. Unlike its competitor Wynn, Adelson’s Sands was lobbying Chinese government officials in Beijing rather than focusing exclusively on local officials in Macau, according to the cable. The issues of concern to Sands included “foreign labor visas, gaming oversight and regulation, infrastructure development, and perceived interference in personnel management decisions affecting Macau resident workers.”
The cable goes on to describe Adelson’s personal interest in direct engagement with Beijing and the intriguing matter of the “Adelson Center for U.S.-China Enterprise” in Beijing, a nonprofit that was to be financed with a whopping $100 million. A former Sands executive told an unnamed American official that the Chinese government forced Sands to close the center following government inquiries about “funds transfer mechanisms used by [Sands] to establish the now-closed USD 100 million Adelson Center.” The nature of those mechanisms is not specified.
The cable continues that Sands’ “current efforts in Beijing are designed in part to offset these early ‘missteps’” — but there is no elaboration on what the “missteps” were. Sands did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
As for what the Adelson Center was supposed to do, the New Yorker reported in June 2008 that it was to act as a kind of facilitator for U.S. businesses looking to operate in China:
In early August [2008], during the Olympic Games, Las Vegas Sands will launch the Adelson Center for U.S.-China Enterprise, in Beijing, which seems positioned to wield substantial influence. If you were an American businessman coming to China, the Sands’s Bill Weidner testified at the Suen trial, “you might need a logistics partner to deliver your goods. You might need a manufacturer to manufacture your goods. You might need a law firm. You might need an accounting firm. Whatever it would take to get you involved in business in China, we would-the center would help arrange for you.”
Here is the logo for the center from a filing with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office; it’s not clear that it was ever used:
Below is the relevant section of the cable. Another interesting moment comes further down in the cable when Sands executive Jacobs (who later sued the company) is quoted as saying that a new regulation about how much Macau casino junket operators could be paid “will be routinely violated.”
LVS [Las Vegas Sands] Macau President and CEO Steve Jacobs told EP Chief on September 17 that LVS restarted its government outreach efforts in Beijing over the past several months, and achieved “great success” in building direct relationships with senior officials. Jacobs said LVS’s direct engagement in Beijing is designed to build goodwill, explain the company’s current and planned contributions to Macau’s economy and society, and encourage freer movement of PRC residents into Macau. LVS CEO and majority shareholder Sheldon Adelson highly values direct engagement in Beijing, according to Jacobs, especially given the impact of Beijing’s visa policies on the company’s growing mass market operations in Macau.
LVS’s pre-Olympic outreach efforts were suspended in early 2009, after the PRC forced the company to close its newly established non-profit Adelson Center for U.S.-China Enterprise in Beijing. The PRC’s State Administration of Foreign Exchange in China, according to LVS’s latest quarterly report published in August 2009, “made inquiries and requested and obtained documents relating to certain payments made by the company’s wholly foreign-owned enterprises to counterparties and other vendors in China.” A former LVS senior executive told Econoff that the PRC inquiries relate primarily to funds transfer mechanisms used by LVS to establish the now-closed USD 100 million Adelson Center. LVS’s current efforts in Beijing are designed in part to offset these early “missteps.”
Justin Elliott is a Salon reporter. Reach him by email at jelliott@salon.com and follow him on Twitter @ElliottJustin More Justin Elliott
Zbig: Israelis “bought influence” and outmaneuvered Obama
The president "should have stuck to his guns" on Mideast peace, says Zbigniew Brzezinski, former NSC advisor
The unorthodox Zbigniew Brzezinski (Credit: AP)
Zbigniew Brzezinski’s new book, “Strategic Vision,” imagines a world without American power. He envisions profound instability, faltering international cooperation and weak states falling prey to their more dominant neighbors. Describing the dystopia that would emerge if America goes under is a trick British historian Niall Ferguson pioneered. Unlike the jingoistic Ferguson, however, Brzezinski is able to envision China replacing America as the stabilizing force in world affairs. “I don’t think liberal states are more restrained or stabilizing,” he says. “The United States’ actions in the last 20 years, especially with the war in Iraq, do not give reassurance on that score.”
Such unorthodox thinking has made the Polish-born Brzezinski arguably the greatest living scholar-practitioner in Democratic Party ranks. As a scholar, he was erratic but he also foresaw the Soviet Union’s crack-up long before it occurred. As Jimmy Carter’s national security advisor, he was controversial and even reckless, but he imbued the president with strong doses of reality concerning the Soviet Union and the Middle East. Since the end of the Cold War, he stayed relevant presciently opposing the Iraq War and supporting presidential candidate Barack Obama at a crucial, early date.
In a telephone interview from his office at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C., Brzezinski has both praise and criticism for the president: “He was an improvement by a very large score over his predecessor, but he could have been better.” He thinks the Obama administration “should have stuck to its guns in promoting a fair settlement” in the Middle East. A longtime foe of Israel’s partisans in the United States, he says the Obama team “fumbled by getting outmaneuvered by the Israelis.” Then he gets blunter: “Domestic politics interceded: The Israelis have a lot of influence with Congress, and in some cases they are able to buy influence.”
Brzezinski is still a believer in the two-state solution for Israelis and Palestinians, and is hopeful that Obama will again take up the cause if he gets a second term. “He would have time and the historical immunity to do so, because he wouldn’t be facing an election.” He also thinks space has opened up in the United States to be more critical of Israel. “The American public is becoming more discriminating, and the Jewish public in America is becoming more discriminating,” he says. “They realize that extremist sloganeering and warmongering are not the most helpful approaches.” Brzezinski is careful to note that he was never an official advisor to either candidate or President Obama but lets it be known they are still in touch: “I have a relationship where from time to time I am able to share my views with him,” he says.
The focus of “Strategic Vision” is not on the Middle East, but further to the east. Unlike other adherents to the foreign-policy school known as realism, Brzezinski does not see war between China and the United States as inevitable. Conflict, yes, but war, no. “You can have conflicts but avoid a real collision,” he says, arguing there is only a “remote possibility” of war between China and the U.S. over the next 10 to 15 years.
What makes Brzezinski relatively optimistic for the chances of Sino-American cooperation are his views on history. Many times when great powers have shifted positions in the international hierarchy, they have gone to war. Those predicting China and the United States will inevitably come to blows are relying on history and international relations theory, Brzezinski says. “That’s fine as long as there is historical continuity,” he says, but he thinks the world has changed. “I think major wars have become too prohibitively costly for both sides” for states to want to engage in them, he says.
Two things could potentially ruin the chances for good relations between China and the United States, he suggests: a technological-military revolution, and ineffective leadership. “If there are fantastic breakthroughs in military capabilities that allow one side to neutralize each other’s,” Brzezinski says, the delicate balance necessary to maintain stability would be thrown off. Fortunately, there isn’t much chance of such a technology developing in the foreseeable future, he believes.
The quality of leadership is Brzezinski’s real wild card. Prudent leaders from both countries that prepare their respective publics for the compromises that will inevitably have to be made are badly needed. But the “mindless hypocrisy” of the Republican presidential candidates gives little ground for hope. He won’t single out any of them, finding all of them deeply flawed and uninspiring. Noting the Republican names attached to the blurbs for ”Strategic Vision” — among them former Defense Secretary Robert Gates and National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft — Brzezinski believes there still is the “possibility for consensus.” But men like Scowcroft and Gates, who come from the center-right of the political spectrum, are no longer much welcomed in today’s Republican Party. “That is part of the problem,” he laughed, not sounding entirely amused.
Playing Margaret Thatcher in China
I hoped my acting gig would be a history lesson for the Chinese. But it was a lesson for me in government control
I’m teetering in ill-fitting high heels at the top of a flight of cement steps. A stiff wind kicks up, threatening to blow the red wig off my head. Below me, I see a bewildered film crew and its director. He is shouting: “Take a step!”
Behind them, Tiananmen Square stretches out in all directions. I can see Mao’s tomb and swirling crowds of tourists and police and the imposing entrance to Beijing’s ancient Forbidden City. At my back is China’s imposing Great Hall of the People, where the fate of a billion people is routinely determined by a handful of aging men.
Like Meryl Streep, I am playing Margaret Thatcher. But this is no Hollywood production. This is a Chinese government TV movie showcasing the accomplishments of Deng Xiaoping, the country’s late paramount leader.
Again, the director yells. My translator barks out his message: “Take a step forward! Fall down the steps!”
No stunt coordinator, no safe place to land off camera. No net. Just 50 feet of steep cement. I may break my neck doing this, I tell the translator. She shoots me a blank stare. The camera rolls. And the Iron Lady falls.
—–
For weeks, we’d been shooting pivotal scenes that chronicled Thatcher’s meeting with Deng in 1982 to negotiate the handover of Hong Kong in 1997, at that point still 15 years away. This tiny, awkward moment — a re-creation of Thatcher’s brief stumble while walking down these very steps after that meeting with Deng in the Great Hall — seemed more important to them than any of her powerful speeches.
They needed the villain to be brought low.
They saw her not as a real person but as a cartoon bad guy – the embodiment of an empire that, in their eyes, had taken a piece of China more than a century before and held the Middle Kingdom hostage when it tried to get the island back.
This was, of course, a biopic about their man – Deng Xiaoping, the “little bottle,” who emerged from Mao’s shadow and persecution to set China down the road of “reform and opening up” – its reengagement with the world.
How do you portray a world leader when the people who hired you see her as nothing more than a parody? That was my acting challenge as I, with almost no Mandarin to my credit, tried to negotiate the politics of the Chinese movie industry – and of China itself.
My challenge became clear on the first day of filming.
As I slumped in a makeup chair at 5 a.m. one morning in Shanghai, a young woman presented me with a single page photocopied from a textbook. It included one small news photo of Thatcher beside Deng during their negotiations. This grainy, black-and-white image was all they had to go on as they transformed my 35-year-old blonde self into a 57-year-old, red-headed British politician.
The half-dozen crewmembers buzzing around me treated the page like a rare document. They assumed I’d never seen a picture of the woman who forced Deng to negotiate for China’s “stolen property.” The makeup artists laughed uncomfortably when I asked if we could find more photos to work with, especially ones printed in color. They were shocked when I explained that, as a teenager, I’d seen countless photos and tons of video of Britain’s prime minister.
I told them all I knew about Thatcher’s face, hair and style of dress, hoping to fill in the creative blanks as they tried to transform me. They were skeptical that I could know she was married to a man named Denis or had children. They didn’t seem comfortable with the idea that any of this could be true, that she could possibly be someone’s mother.
We were documenting a piece of history. But with information so tightly controlled, there was no room for verisimilitude. China’s information blackout, which persists even in the age of Twitter, means their leaders can still be presented as unblemished, epic figures. And those who oppose them can be cast as one-dimensional, Voldemortian bad guys.
A few weeks ago, a New York Times story quoted Phyllida Lloyd, the director of Streep’s new film, as saying she wanted to bring some subtlety to the world’s image of Thatcher. “In parts of England, now it’s a transgression even to consider her as a human being,” Lloyd said. “She’s that monster woman, the she-devil. For me the point of the film was to find the human side.”
That was exactly what I wanted – to add texture and depth to the grainy photocopied image I had been handed. Here was my chance to show a small cross-section of China that Margaret Thatcher was not a cartoon. She was a real, three-dimensional person.
—–
Weeks later, I caught an early flight to the seaside city of Dalian. Thatcher had been invited to christen a Chinese ship there in 1982, so I stood in the shadow of an available stand-in – an Iranian tanker ship – to capture that photo-op moment.
It should have been a quick scene, but the morning came and went with nothing shot. For hours, the director idled in a black Mercedes while the crew smoked a lethal number of unfiltered cigarettes. We were getting nowhere. Much of the crew had begun to nap. Then we heard that the director had gone back to the hotel for lunch.
I was due back in Beijing in a few hours, so I found my translator and asked about making my flight. Not possible, she said; the director had decided I would stay for one night, or maybe two, in Dalian.
I cautiously pushed back, explaining that they’d booked me only for the day and I needed to get home to my newborn son in Beijing. The few crewmembers milling about fell silent. They’d already seen me ask to adjust my hair and makeup to look more like the real Maggie Thatcher. They’d seen me balk at falling headfirst down the stairs at the Great Hall. Now I was objecting yet again.
To many Chinese raised on bootleg DVDs, Americans are the spoiled 20-somethings of “Friends,” fretting over minor inconveniences while living lives of casual luxury. Did I seem just as spoiled for standing my ground in a culture where it’s not acceptable to tell your boss that anything is wrong?
I managed to get the scene shot and made it back to Beijing by midnight. I had just one scene left to shoot – a conversation between Thatcher and her entourage as they flew from London to Beijing. A jet that was once Mao’s private plane, now a museum piece, would double as Thatcher’s aircraft.
After three months of shooting, I was owed thousands of dollars. I’d been paid less than $100. An American actor friend who made his living in Chinese movies was blunt with me: If you shoot the final scene of a government film without the money already in your pocket, he said, they’ll never pay you anything.
As the red bouffant wig was glued onto my head one final time in a small building on an airstrip outside Beijing, I quietly reminded my translator that she’d been promising me further installments of my pay for several months but I’d gotten nothing. She looked away.
“You’ll be paid tomorrow,” she said. Then she quickly left the room.
Minutes later, as I boarded the plane, I asked her to tell the director that I couldn’t play this scene without being paid. He refused, so I refused to act.
“Paying you is impossible,” he said.
“I’m sure you can find a solution,” I said.
We all sat. Then we sat some more.
Finally, they began to realize I wasn’t bluffing. Furious, the director summoned an assistant, who appeared with a bulging black leather case. Unzipping it, he pulled out thick wads of Chinese currency and counted out the cash. With my pay sitting in my backpack under those same ill-fitting shoes I wore tumbling down the steps at the Great Hall, I played my last scene as Margaret Thatcher.
Between takes, no one spoke. I’d proven them right about me – and about her. I had forced their director to negotiate with me, just like the Iron Lady had forced Deng. Face had been lost. My hope that playing this role might humanize Thatcher for Chinese audiences had failed. I had fallen down those steps for nothing.
Nearly eight years after my film wrapped, access to information is still so tightly controlled in China that Barack Obama (and David Cameron, for those who know his name) may well seem like caricatures, too. How will this change for Chinese young people as technology makes their government’s control of information more difficult to enforce? Will they ever see that leaders aren’t angels or devils but, like all of us, something in between?
I hope Lloyd and Streep’s film accomplishes that in a way that mine couldn’t. Especially if, just like “Friends” and so many other Western TV shows and movies, it finds its way to the streets of China.
Asia’s rampant cheating problem
Determined to get into U.S. colleges, more and more students turn to fake transcripts, essays and SAT scores
Students attend their college graduation ceremony in Shanghai's Fudan University July 2, 2011. (Credit: Carlos Barria / Reuters)
BANGKOK, Thailand — From sleep to social lives, there is little Asia’s most upwardly mobile students won’t sacrifice for education. Though they belong to the so-called “Asian Century,” American colleges remain the premier destination for the elite from Shanghai to Singapore to Seoul.
The path to U.S. college acceptance, however, increasingly compels students to sacrifice their integrity. For the right price, unscrupulous college prep agencies offer ghostwritten essays in flawless English, fake awards, manipulated transcripts and even whiz kids for hire who’ll pose as the applicant for SAT exams.
“Oh my God, they can do everything for you,” said Nok, 17-year-old Thai senior in her final year at a private Bangkok high school. (She asked GlobalPost to alter her name for this article.) “They can take the SAT for you, no problem. Most students don’t really think it’s wrong.”
Among Asian high society, and particularly in China, parents’ obsession with sending their offspring to U.S. colleges has given rise to a lucrative trade of application brokers. Depending the degree of assistance, families can expect to pay between $5,000 and $15,000.
“The parent says, ‘My kid needs this GPA but, frankly, his scores aren’t that strong.’ Then the unscrupulous agent says ‘Don’t worry. We’ll figure that out,’” said Tom Melcher, chairman of Zinch China and author of a Chinese-language book on choosing American colleges.
A 250-student survey by Zinch China, a Beijing wing of the California-based Zinch education consultancy, suggests college application fraud among Chinese students is extremely pervasive. According to the survey, roughly 90 percent of recommendation letters to foreign colleges are faked, 70 percent of college essays are ghostwritten and 50 percent of high school transcripts are falsified.
“For the right price,” Melcher said, “the agent will either fabricate it or work with the school to get a different transcript issued.” Admission into a top 10 or top 30 school, as defined by the U.S. News & World Report, can bring a $3,000 to $10,000 bonus for the agent, he said. The magazine, Melcher said, is commonly confused in China for an official government publication.
Demand for such agents is high and getting higher. Rapid economic growth across China and other parts of Asia has sparked an explosion in foreign students hoping to secure their ascent with a Western diploma.
Chinese citizens currently account for more than one in five foreign students studying at U.S. colleges. Nearly 158,000 Chinese students are enrolled at any given time, a full 300 percent jump over mid-1990s numbers, according to the Institute of International Education.
Chinese, Indian and South Korean students comprise roughly half of America’s foreign college student population. Vietnam has sent 13 percent more students to the U.S. within the last year, and Malaysia has added 8 percent, the institute reports.
But many American college officials are oblivious to the application fix-it men these foreign students may have paid back home. Worse yet, remaining blind to the deception is often financially incentivized.
America’s economic downturn has drained the state tax coffers that provide a funding lifeline to many U.S. colleges. Many schools have resorted to unpopular tuition hikes. But many are also courting wealthy foreign students whose families gladly fork over money for housing and tuition along with out-of-state or even out-of-country fees.
“International students are seen as a source of revenue … and the trend has exploded in the past two years,” said Dale Gough, international education director for AACRAO, the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers.
Foreign students, through tuition and living expenses, contribute $2.1 billion to the U.S. economy, according to the U.S. Commerce Department. “In short,” Gough said, “they help the bottom line.”
Excuses abound for ignoring fraudulent applications, Gough said. Some assume that kids who cheat will inevitably flame out anyway and never score a degree. Some admissions officers, he said, contend that “that’s just the way it’s done over there.”
Many schools also make sloppy attempts to translate foreign transcripts, calculated by an “indigenous” and unfamiliar methodology, into America’s GPA or “grade point average” system, Gough said.
His association publishes a guide to deciphering foreign scores, the only one of its kind, but fewer than 500 of the 3,500 institutions represented by AACRAO bother to buy a copy.
“Translating foreign grades into a GPA system is meaningless,” Gough said. “They attempt to do it anyway.”
Gough fears that universities’ lax standards, and focus on big foreign tuition payments, will eventually undermine the pedigree of an American diploma. The damage, he said, would be nearly impossible to undo.
“This scenario spells disaster,” Gough said. “Even if a lot of the students who cheat are bright, and they go on to succeed, is this fair to American students? Or [to] the foreign students who play by the rules?”
While America has ceded manufacturing power and foreign influence to China, an American degree remains the gold standard of educational prestige. Nok, who is currently applying for colleges abroad, never considered applying to universities in Asia.
“Students who study in America are elite, the privileged,” said Nok. “It shows you’re smarter than the others.”
But like most Asian students, Nok has felt baffled and overwhelmed by America’s complex application system.
“Here, you take a big test one day and report the score. That’s how you figure out where you’ll go to college,” she said. “The Americans are different. They want to know the big picture. All these essays. All this stuff about your life.”
America’s liberal arts application system is “fundamentally more confusing,” said Joshua Russo, director of Top Scholars, a college prep and tutoring agency in Bangkok.
Asian families unfamiliar with the process, he said, are justified in seeking an agency’s help with application strategies and tutoring to build the skills U.S. colleges demand. But Russo’s refrain to parents, he said, is that kids who can’t write their own essays are likely to burn out once enrolled in America.
“Some consultants will promise the world … and they’re fundamentally preparing students to fail,” Russo said. “Beyond fabricating an essay, they’re fabricating a whole life story. Students will start to believe in the lie. It’s wrong.”
The allure of America’s universities, and the pressure-cooker drive to succeed among Asia’s expanding upper class, will continue to propel Asian students into American schools. Many Chinese teenagers applying abroad, Melcher said, are the sort of highly motivated students colleges desire.
“Chinese kids are typically great,” Melcher said. “They’re not at the tailgate parties drinking. They’re busting their butts. Failure is not an option.”
But college application fraud will continue, he said, so long as the risks are low and the rewards are so high. His consultancy suggests interviewing all Chinese students via online video chats, conducting spot tests in English, and hiring a mainland Chinese staffer in the college’s home office.
“Frankly, I feel really bad for Chinese families who are trying to be honest,” he said. “They’re driving 55 while everyone’s zooming past them. After a while, they throw up their hands and say, ‘Fine, I’ll speed up.’”
Page 1 of 123 in China
Killing Me Softly (With This Economy) 
The GOP’s Assault Upon Economic Reality 
The next generation of color geniuses 
I found my orgasm 
A witty, tragic series concludes 
Pick of the week: Escape from Putin’s cult 
What are Republicans thinking? 
Freedom of religion is freedom from religion 
Reality, exploded 
Now Mitt’s refusing to debate 
Hollywood’s real-life night at the museum 
Mitt’s ticking Maine time bomb? 
