Wouldn't it be ever so cool to have a Nuremberg Rally Olympic Opening Ceremony every day?
Less than a year after China hosted the Olympics, Beijing is planning to put its stunningly choreographed opening ceremony back on as a regular evening show at the “Bird’s Nest”, the main stadium built for the games.
Hard to collect a cash flow from all those pirated DVDs, I guess.
Zhang Hengli, vice-president of the National Stadium Company that now runs the Bird's Nest, said: “. . . We need to find an investor and deal with potential issues of intellectual property of the International Olympic Committee.” [emphasis added throughout]
Oh, the IOC is gonna be THRILLED about this. Kinda takes the sense of occasion out of a once-in-every-four-year event, don't it?
But they'll probably cave. Faster than a Szechuan schoolhouse.
UPDATE: Readers may encounter a registration page for the original story in the Financial Times if they've read more than three FT articles over the past month. For those not interested in registering, this blog link contains the full article, verbatim.
UPDATE #2: Just ran across this year-old opinion piece about last year's torch run from an Indian (uh, INDIA-Indian). Interesting to see it from his perspective:
By this real-life, modern Chinese Opera on the “pilgrimage of the Sacred Flame of the Holy Olympics” one is reminded of the ancient Hindu ritual of Ashwamedha Yajna during which the sacred horse passing through any territory had to be protected by the vast army of soldiers of the King performing the Yajna. If anyone interfered with the journey of the sacred horse, that person was eliminated on the spot by the army guarding the sacred horse. The land through which sacred horse passed had to either accept the suzerainty of or fight the King-Emperor performing the yajna. There are clear parallels in the grandiose Chinese plan for the Olympic torch relay route and the pressure by the Chinese government on the host nations for the security of the torch as well as on the IOC to support the Chinese government’s action against the Tibetan protesters on foreign soils. The “sinister men in blue” accompanying the torch everywhere have been scuffling with policemen and the public as if naturally entitled to do so. These blue track-suited Chinese commandos guarding the “sacred flame” and brutally man-handling the protestors on the soil of third countries concretely symbolize the geo-political aspirations for world domination by a resurgent and aggressive China. [emphasis added]
"World domination" may be a bit much. But we can see the Chinese Nationalist Party's idea of allowing PRC police to operate on Taiwanese soil is bound to go just SWIMMINGLY.
UPDATE #3: Chinese black jails. Coming soon to a Taiwanese town near you? (Hat tip to That's Impossible: Politics from Taiwan)