After the successful Olympic opening ceremony, director Zhang Yimou rode a carousal1 of media interviews. In one of them he revealed that a member of the organizing committee of the 2012 London Games invited him to their show. Zhang turned down the offer.
In China, Zhang is the kind of celebrity2 about whom anything is newsworthy, and this remark instantly gave rise to a debate. Some argued that Zhang should have accepted the offer, using it as another opportunity to promote Chinese culture, or at least the Chinese way of doing things. One commentator3 suspected Zhang had fabricated the story to make himself look good.
Well, without calling London for the truth, I'll offer my two cents worth:
First, I don't think Zhang made it up. But I also don't believe London gave him the position equivalent to what he had for the Beijing Games. I guess the London people were impressed with the Beijing show and one of them said something to congratulate him, something like Hey, it was the greatest Olympics show I've ever seen, and you should come to London to do our show.
Even if the remark was serious rather than perfunctory. One person, no matter how senior, would not have the power to make that kind of decision on the spur of the moment. I don't know what the British decision-making process is, but it is surely more rigid4 than what Zhang's remark seemed to suggest. Most likely, it was just an invitation to bid for that position.
Nothing could be more natural. Organizers of the Beijing Games invited hundreds of famous artists to bid for it. They whittled5 the list down to five.
The Chinese language can be beautifully or agonizingly ambiguous, depending on your position. I remember in the early days private enterprises might say they earned a million bucks6 without specifying7 whether it's revenue or profit. Vagueness prevents one from losing face if you don't want to draw attention to the embarrassment8 of losing money. It also enhances your face when you want to use positive feedback about one tree to cover the whole forest.
Chinese media have a tradition of amplifying9 good words from outsiders. A Chinese performance in a foreign country is often reported to be exceptional. Gradually, people at home get the impression that people in that country have never experienced good performing arts.
You might think that with the Internet and so many people learning English it'll be harder for this kind of misunderstanding to occur. On the contrary, things have not got much better. It's just the power of interpreting foreign commentaries have shifted from the few in the traditional media to a few in online media. Those in the traditional media may be politically motivated to focus on the details that suit them, and those in the online media may simply lack the language proficiency10 to render correctly the original observation, or they may even have personal agendas to be selective.
For example, when a major Internet portal quoted The New York Times extolling11 Guo Jingming as China's most successful writer, it was obvious the writer did not read or understand the whole piece on NYT. Otherwise, he or she would have known that by successful NYT meant selling books, not literary value.
Had portal sites like this wanted to denigrate12 Zhang, they could have selected one of the rare negative reviews from overseas, translating the vicious remarks out of context and put it in the most visible place on the homepage. Many in China would believe Zhang had flopped13 disastrously14.
