The 2008 Olympic logo alludes to three Chinese characters: ren, person; wen, culture; and jing, capital city. The character ren clearly shows a side view of a person walking. In the logo, however, the artist drew ren to show the person running - thus creating an emblem of the Beijing Olympics that is apt in more than one way.
The significance of the Games is not that China has arrived at its modern incarnation, the search for which has been so long, so full of false starts and so frustrating. It is, rather, that China is finally in rapid motion - running, not walking, toward its goal of a modern nation commensurate with the greatness of its past.
Yes, criticism of China often is in order. But energy also should be devoted to cultivating the many seeds of potential cooperation. To understand China's complex role in the world today, and the significance of the Beijing Games, it is helpful to examine its turbulent modern history.
For the residents of Beijing, as for other citizens of the People's Republic, the theme of running, of catching up, has overtones far beyond athletics. From about A.D. 600 to 1600, China was the world's most impressive state, the source of brilliant achievements in art, technology and government. But it fell behind as other leading peoples industrialized in the 19th and 20th centuries. Many painful moments that resulted from China's weakness occurred in Beijing, as European powers naturally chose the capital for punitive actions (including the burning of the Summer Palace in 1860 and triumphal parades in the Forbidden City in 1900).
In 1911, the Qing dynasty was overthrown by a nationalist revolution. Its initial leader, Sun Yat-sen, was in a great hurry to establish China as a modern nation-state. Beijing remained the capital until 1928. But republican government did not work out and regional "warlords" seized power. At Beijing universities, despair caused by these events produced a drive for intellectual modernization. Mao Zedong and other founders of the Chinese Communist Party in 1921 were deeply influenced by those ideas and by the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia in 1917.
In 1928, a new nationalist leader, Chiang Kai-shek, united China by co-opting or defeating the warlords and moved the capital to Nanjing. Beijing, now no longer a capital as it had been almost continuously for a thousand years, struggled economically and militarily. After war between China and Japan broke out in 1937, first Beijing and then Nanjing came under Japanese control until the end of World War II.
