Overseas briefing

Author: Brian Fung

BEIJING - The stands are finally empty at the National Stadium. The Water Cube keeps pulsing gently at night, for nobody in particular. The athletes have all gone home, the reporters and photographers back to their day jobs covering golf or baseball. Even the Chinese tourists have vanished. Beijing is alone once more. But never again will it be lonely.

China is a country whose greatest breakthroughs and toughest setbacks have been marked by the arrival of foreigners. Think Mongol imperialism. Or the Opium Wars and the Rape of Nanjing. Ping-pong diplomacy and Richard Nixon. It's clear that despite a reflexive Chinese tendency to view foreigners as reckless meddlers, China's fortunes have historically waxed and waned with the tides of visitors from afar. Fitting, then, that the Middle Kingdom should announce its return to global influence just as all the world's people have gathered in its own backyard.

So, were this year's Summer Olympics a breakthrough for China? Depends on your rubric. Commerce? I'd say so. Gold medals? Absolutely. Prospects for political reform? That's the million-dollar question.

Whether China's celebration of sport represented a true step forward, or simply a feint in that direction, remains to be seen. The Games themselves were a spectacular success, garnering effusive praise. The opening and closing ceremonies were nothing but dazzling, and August was virtually crisis-free. No surprise-such smooth execution was almost guaranteed from the start, thanks to some of the heaviest crowd control this planet has ever seen. With as many as 100,000 official Chinese volunteers laboring day and night for the Games, there were enough to have at least one watching every time you did your laundry, ate breakfast or - I'm not kidding - took a pee. And that's just the volunteers. Then there were the private security guards, the traffic wardens and, of course, the military police in camouflage body armor cradling light assault weapons, all there to make sure we felt welcome.

This insistence on control is characteristic of a government that's hyper-aware of its own image. China's temptation to micromanage the Games - down to instituting cuteness standards for the opening - suggests the country's top leadership might still be unready for the unpredictability of modern capitalism and the international order. Indeed, Westerners tend to think that China should now increase the pace of reform after hosting the Games. By contrast, many Chinese say Beijing 2008 was the prize for coming as far as they have.

It's a strange dichotomy, to be sure, and representative of another historical truth: that China's relationship with the rest of the world has been nothing if not tortuously complicated, filled with painful tales of, alternately, friction and isolation. But I suspect that Beijing need not worry about being marginalized anymore. Just think about how many people stood up in their seats to applaud the opening ceremony. It didn't go over like the rest of Chinese history. This time, China and the world stood as one.