While the athletes compete for gold, silver and bronze, we're going to be all too aware that not only nations, but nationalisms, are flying their banners over the Olympics this summer.
As Hitler once stood on the dais to assure a dubious world that a renewed, rebuilt and rearmed Germany had returned, chiefs of the Politburo will next month accept the patriotic homage of their 1.3 billion citizens to mark the global re-ascendance of another nation.
China is rising. And all the world wonders, what does it want?
"To get rich," said Deng Xiaoping, "is glorious." And China, if not yet affluent, seems to be racing ahead to ever greater rewards in the pursuit of that brand of happiness. Of course we congratulate the country's progress. But no matter how irrepressible the happy drumbeat of public relations, flags of the People's Republic still cast uncomfortable shadows of 72 years ago, of repression, violence, dictatorship. Should we again fear the sinews of naked power visible on the arms outstretched to welcome the world to offer its homage?
It's a useful uncertainty for Japan, for Europe, for India, for many countries, but especially for America. Because the image of rising world power we study in China mirrors more than a few questions we now hold about ourselves.
Should we welcome a self-glorifying People's Republic, or should we fear a parvenu power elbowing its way up to the table of global influence, a place where we ourselves feel pride of primacy? How much more oil, employment, cash, capitalist mastery will we give up to make room for a power that is least of all a democratic partner? More darkly, how much extra military fear will we need to feel?
Now that we salute it, what else will China seek?
We can start by admitting that China wants to know just that about us. It watches a Washington moving political and security interests around its region, the Pacific, Northeast and South Asia, the thinly-disguised khanates to its West, like pieces on the chessboard of world dominance. Are we moving to accommodate Beijing, or oppose it?
We cannot forget China's modern past " the revolution, the ruthless takeover by the Communists, the Korean War, the murder of twenty million in the Cultural Revolution, the border battles with India, the repression of Tibetan freedoms -- as we weigh the possible futures across the Pacific.
Then again, how do the Chinese see us? Not only our 'Open Door' policies during the colonial dismemberment of the hapless giant, our gunboat diplomacy, the Boxer Rebellion or the postwar containment policies of Washington " but our own War of the States, our history of enslavement of blacks and repression or slaughter of the American Indians, our Mexican-American war for territory, our interventions in the civil wars of Korea and Vietnam, our preemptive invasion of Iraq to guard ourselves against " what?
Like the athletic contenders who line up before us this summer, we both know we face strong opponents, and we both have studied each other's weaknesses.
The Chinese leaders no longer have the ideological sympathies, let alone the spiritual allegiance, of their people. They are not unlike the dynasties of old China, fearful that through malfeasance or corruption or simply bad fortune they could be turned out with the loss of the 'mandate of heaven' in some grand Tienanmen showdown as their subjects measure their uses of the mandate.
They are frightened people, these rulers, insisting they are in absolute control when they are not even sure what it is possible for them to control. Their mandate derives from their blessing of the people's pursuit of self-interest, their cry of revolutionary unity is now a monotone of nationalism, of carefully nurtured resentments toward the barbarians in the carefully propagandized people.
In a nation with the largest Internet online population in the world, how long can they disguise these expediencies?
Much of the fear in the Politburo is that already this does not work, whether the guards outside the walls face a few weak practitioners of Falun Gong, or entire Tibetan and Muslim minority nations within China's own frontiers, whose lands make up a third of the geography of the country and whose affections are not disposed toward the Chinese autocrats who demand to rule them.
What will happen when all can see the barbarians turn out to be nothing but tourists and investors, when the narrow sluices of prosperity begin to run dry?
And how do the Chinese see the Americans? In fact, as a people preoccupied in pursuit of their own self-interests, whether material or personal. As a nation led by politicians convinced that unbridled pursuit of happiness, met with success at least for some, will satisfy most of the people most of the time, and convince them that democracy, not religion or monarchy or enlightened despotism, is the truest and best leadership system of all to reach the holy land of the middle class.
And as a political leadership in fact ready to drive home that conviction with cavalry, repeater rifles, dogs, bullwhips and firehoses within the country, and with troops, tanks, bombers and illegal prisons outside it.
There is so much we understand about each other, we Chinese and Americans. And yet perhaps not enough that we really know about ourselves.
Both our nations now face enormous problems of scarcity and inequitable distribution, frustrating social complexity, misgiving, corruption and uncertainty about who the national "we" really are. Both of us have cause to wonder if the mandate, of heaven or the people or both, is running out for those who direct us, signaling time for a change of rulers and rules by ballot here, by resistance and rebellion there.
Both of us tend to see the world all around as galleries of misunderstanding, mistrust, perhaps mortal opposition. Will the dollar be broken? Will India's nuclear programs be abetted? We can't help but wonder what China will do. China can't help but wonder what we will do. All we can both be certain of, in other words, is our mutual fate: there is nowhere else to go but the undefined future.
Let the games proceed.
- Robert Cutts is a career journalist who has been a news reporter, magazine writer and editor, author of two nonfiction books and a college journalism teacher. He lives in Gardnerville and Japan.