标题: Made-in-America China the worst of both worlds
地址:
http://olympics.thestar.com/2008/article/470895
来源: The Toronto Star 多伦多星报
翻译: rlsrls08
【声明】本文翻译仅限Anti-CNN使用，谢绝转载。
Made-in-America China the worst of both worlds
August 1, 2008
Rosie DiManno
Chinese shoppers flock to the opening of Wal-Mart in Beijing on May 18, 2005.
Twenty-four billion cans of Coke were sold in China last year.
That's a cultural revolution.
Without a shot fired, the Middle Kingdom has been invaded, swamped by the West, gluttonous in its appetite for all things foreign and bourgeoisie, racing at warp speed toward a different kind of class conformity than that espoused by Chairman Mao – who's still dead, still on embalmed display, but increasingly a red-faced embarrassment to China un-bound.
Is this even a Communist country anymore?
Wouldn't know it, from the Pizza Guy and KFC outlets on almost every block in the capital, the world's biggest McDonald's franchise, the designer label shops that cater to a well-heeled clientele, the five-star hotels sprung up alongside ancient temples, the neon-lit nightclubs and the free-wheeling capitalism fuelling a heated economy.
No-logo advocates will decry the development but the swoosh of global branding – marketing imperialism – is vividly scrawled across the landscape: Put your corporate imprint here.
Blame, or credit, goes largely to the Olympics, the Games a hyper-torque for China reinventing itself, not as a reformed state of reasonable political morality – as many had hoped when Beijing was awarded the hosting gig seven years ago – but rather as a hybrid freak of ideology, retaining much of its totalitarian character while embracing the go-go avarice and consumerism of the West. The worst of both worlds, you might say.
Where Coke pioneered, other multinationals have followed, drawn by the lure of Olympic association and the sales potential in a population of 1.3 billion.
Even Pepsi, arch-competitor to Coca-Cola, went temporarily and symbolically red, switching from its own iconic blue can to a limited edition "Go Red for China" version, which must have been hard to swallow for boardroom traditionalists. There's no discretion among profiteers. The Games have long been mined, exploited by corporate carpetbaggers. But Beijing has set new records for sponsorship whoring. Sixty-three companies signed on for official affiliation, with plenty more – such as Nike and Pepsi – cut out of the "Olympic Family" yet seizing the Games by the coattails, mounting advertising campaigns that suggest a formal relationship where none actually exists.
Their brands might be kept out of Olympic facilities but their logos are omnipresent in Beijing, on billboards, in television commercials, and through personal contracts with high profile athletes or via product endorsements with national teams. Oodles of side deals have been made. Marketing analysts estimate that Olympic-related advertising, in-country, could reach as high as $6 billion this year.
Beijing looks like one big sandwich board, a bewildering kaleidoscope of pitches and promotions in a weird juxtaposition of East and West.
It's also dismaying, at least to a visitor who last passed this way in 2001, to see how bowdlerized the capital has become, gleaming and modernized, but denuded of its distinctiveness, homogenized into Anywhere, World. Times Square, just down the road from Tiananmen Square, might as well be a patch of New York City, with the gargantuan pixel advertising displays and the fast food courts, the Nike emporium and the mega-mall.
This is, essentially, a made-in-America China, where once – and still – so much of what was sold on the shelves in the United States was made-in-China and cheesy.
The payoff, at least for profit-hungry corporations, is assumed. However, deals made years ago may not have anticipated the possible blowback from an Olympics increasingly politicized and demonized by critics and human rights activists.
Their I-told-you-so's are ringing in the ears right now, with the International Olympic Committee outed this week for cutting a deal with Chinese authorities that permits the censoring of websites embarrassing to the regime.
Olympic officials described the content on those sites – mostly dissident commentary – as "pornographic."
The rest of us would simply call it free speech.
"They are doing something illegal or transmitting something illegal, based on Chinese laws," Sun Weide, communications vice-director of the
Beijing Organizing Committee for the Olympic Games, said yesterday. "For instance, they are propagating this evil cult, Falun Gong."
Beneath the glitzy veneer, the dollar signs and the open-for-engagement rhetoric, China is still China.
It drinks Coke but it spews red bull.
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本帖最后由 rlsrls08 于 2008-8-2 04:30 编辑 ]
