In China, It's About More Then Sports

As the 2008 Olympics draws to a close, I believe that something important has been accomplished, and it has little to do with sports. Thanks to the extensive TV coverage, average Americans have been given their first in-depth look at the country that will pass the U.S. to be the dominant nation in the 21st century. The Chinese people are willing to work, both smart and hard, to make this happen, and this applies most of all to the young Chinese people.

Those tiny little Chinese female gymnasts do much more than lie about their age and win gold medals. They also study biology, chemistry and physics. These studies are mandatory for 100% of the high school students in China, while in the U.S. 18% of our high schoolers are willing to tackle the sciences. The young Chinese idolize Bill Gates. The young Americans idolize Miley Cyrus. Educated predictions say that by 2020, 90% of the world’s scientists and engineers will be working at their trade in China and India. The prestigious American scientific universities such as MIT have been heavily attended by Chinese and Indian students for decades now, but in the past, most of those students stayed on and built their careers in the United States. But now, most all of them go back to Asia.

You might ask why everyone in high school needs to study the sciences. After all, not everyone can go on to be a scientist. I believe, and this is just my personal opinion, that such a curriculum is necessary for a person who wants to be truly intelligent about the modern world. We live in a scientific world, and scientific ignorance is a recipe for failure in such a world. If you want an example of this, look no farther than the millions of people who listen to Rush Limbaugh tell them that oil doesn’t necessarily come from decayed prehistoric plants, and they believe it “because Rush said it.” With Limbaugh working on our side, the Chinese have a huge advantage given to them in their quest to be number one. But that’s just my opinion.

And Now a Message From Our Sponsors

At a time when GM is struggling just to remain viable as an American corporation, the car maker has now bet the farm on advertising during the Olympics. Along with Coca Cola, McDonalds, and Exxon Mobil, GM is one of the major sponsors for NBC’s marathon Olympic coverage, but their ads are a mystery to me. Most of them feature various GM models parked unattended next to a gas pump at the filling station, and while the car owner is off camera (presumably inside paying his obscene fuel bill), the gas nozzle comes to life through the process of computer animation, and begins playing various pranks on the helpless, inanimate, vehicle.

The intended message is that gas pumps dislike Chevy vehicles because of their miserly fuel consumption. There are two other interpretations, both equally valid. One, that GM products spend an inordinate amount of time sitting in gas stations. And two, that GM car owners aren’t smart enough to pay at the pump.

The GM Volt is also featured in a few of the ads (see my article 7/31). The target date for the start-sale of the Volt is now pushed back to 2010, and from the sounds of the ad, the Volt will use hybrid rather than fuel cell technology. The once-futuristic body is not looking any newer than it was eight or nine years ago. GM might as well put it all on the line with this 2008 Olympic telecast, because it’s not a sure bet that GM will be around for the 2012 games in London, and the company has already announced their decision to not advertise during that event.

As for the other big players in the NBC ad pool, the Coke and McDonalds spots are fresh and entertaining. Coke and McDonalds do advertising far better than they do human nourishment, but that’s another story. Exxon Mobil gets the award for having the most chutzpah . With their oil profits at obscene levels, their ads focus on their work curing malaria in Africa. For each million dollars in oil profits, Exxon Mobil evidently contributes one mosquitoe net valued at roughly one dollar. The spokesman in the ads for the malaria project is some guy with an M.D. after his name. I don’t know if he’s a real doctor, but he plays one on television, and in the past that was always good enough for TV commercials hyping medical messages.

The real tragedy of this year’s TV advertising is that the Olympics occur in election years. That’s always the case, and there’s nothing worse in the electronic world than political ads. It’s a wistful thing to imagine what it would be like to see the Olympics presented without televised messages tearing down political candidates.

Also see: It’s The Infrastructure-- Stupid

Only 100 Days Until the Orympic Games

There are no birds. You don’t notice it at first, but then after a day or two you realize that you just never see a bird. In China, nobody has seen a bird for almost thirty years. Back around the time of the Cultural Revolution, Chairman Mao convinced his population that the birds were competing with hungry Chinese children for precious grain and seed morsels, and he declared that the people should kill the birds to save their food supply. The people obediently complied, as they have always done in China. Final score: Mao 1, Birds 0. End of story.

There are other problems in the air as well. While you are looking upward for birds in China, you can’t help but notice the sky, and you eventually come to realize that it’s never blue. The pollution is always there, even on windy days, and the color of the atmosphere fluctuates between a very light, almost-misty gray, and the kind of dark ominous gray that would precede a storm in most other parts of the world. This perpetual gray sky has become something of a PR problem as China looks forward to hosting the Orympics (phonetic spelling). At least one world-class marathon runner has announced his intention to boycott the race rather than breathe the polluted air.

To me, a discussion of the Chinese sky seems like the best way to highlight the environmental problems faced by the world’s most populous nation. The startling statistics are another way to define the problem, but you can’t actually see statistics. We read them so often that we can probably recite them from memory. One third of all the concrete poured on the planet is poured in China. One new coal-fired electric power plant comes on line every nine days. The largest telecom company on earth is China Wireless, and they clear a spot for a new cell tower every three minutes. Automobile congestion on Chinese roads is the worst on earth, and this is at a time when only one out of every one-hundred Chinese citizens owns a car. With the completion of the Three Gorges Dam, the upper Yangtze River is now the most polluted natural body of water on earth, with bacterial levels comparable to the holding ponds in sewage treatment plants. I saw this for myself recently, and I held my nose as I watched the prow of my boat slice through a foam of floating feces. Happily, the Orympic rowing events will not be held on this venue.

At the western end of this new cesspool stands Chungking, known in China as “The Furnace.” Temperatures there in summer hover around 130 degrees Fahrenheit, in spite of the fact that the sun seldom penetrates the perpetual cloud cover. I was in Chungking on a day in June when the temperature was only 115, and it bore no resemblance at all to a hot day in Phoenix or Las Vegas. In Chungking, the sun doesn’t cast a shadow. The reason, again, is that Chinese sky. In another 100 days, with the Orympic Games taking place in August, the whole world will know exactly what I’m talking about.