By Julianna Goldman

June 7 (Bloomberg) -- Barack Obama's political career boasts a long list of firsts. He is the first presumptive presidential nominee to be a native of Hawaii and the president of the Harvard Law Review. He's also the first candidate with more than 1 million contributors.

Obama, an Illinois senator, is the first presumptive presidential nominee in modern times to have a father who wasn't a U.S. citizen, the first to earn an undergraduate degree from Columbia University in New York and the first to have attended Occidental College in Los Angeles.

``Obama's nomination would be historic in almost every respect that you can think of,'' said presidential historian Michael Beschloss.

Obama has also chalked up many near-firsts in the race for the White House. He is the fourth Illinois elected official to clinch a party presidential nomination; if elected he would be the first since Abraham Lincoln. Ronald Reagan was born in Illinois and was governor of California. Obama is the only first-term senator to lead a major party since Warren Harding in 1920.

No presidential nominee since Republican Wendell Willkie was so unknown to the American public and political establishment just a few years before he ran for president. Republicans recruited Willkie, a low-profile utilities executive, to run against two-term incumbent Franklin Roosevelt in 1940.

The first Democratic convention Obama ever attended was Los Angeles in 2000 and his credit card bounced at the rental-car station. He also wasn't able to secure a floor pass and watched most of the speeches on television screens.

Peanut Farmer

Even former President Jimmy Carter, often described as an obscure peanut farmer when he was nominated in 1976, had become governor of Georgia in 1971 and appeared on the cover of Time magazine.

Obama is the only presidential nominee in modern times whose father wasn't American. The parents of Michael Dukakis, the Democratic nominee in 1988, were Greek immigrants who became naturalized U.S. citizens. Obama's father, Barack Obama Sr. was a graduate student from Kenya who returned to Africa after his studies.

Senator John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee, was born at a military base in the Panama Canal Zone, while his father, a Navy officer, was posted there.

Harvard has been in the presidential game since the first U.S. election in 1789. There have been seven Harvard graduates to make it to the presidency: John Adams, his son John Quincy, Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt, Rutherford Hayes, John Kennedy and George W. Bush.

Harvard Ties

If Obama were to win, he would be the first U.S. president from Harvard Law School since Hayes, who graduated in 1845. Presidential nominees with Harvard degrees include Michael Dukakis, who graduated from the law school, and Al Gore.

Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt went to Columbia Law School; Obama will be the only nominee to have attended Columbia as an undergraduate. Dwight D. Eisenhower was Columbia University's president after World War II and before he ran for president in 1952. Obama transferred to Columbia in 1981 from Occidental, where former vice presidential candidate Jack Kemp graduated in 1957.

Through April, the Illinois senator raised money from a record 1.5 million donors, bringing in $256 million for the primary election, just behind the $262 million taken in by Bush in 2004. His campaign confirmed that he has now surpassed Bush's record, becoming the biggest fundraiser in U.S. history.

Obama's success runs counter to the requirements set out by Cornell University political scientist Clinton Rossiter when the Illinois senator was just 3 years old.

Experience Requirement

The presidency, Rossiter wrote in his 1964 book ``Parties and Politics in America,'' is reserved for someone who appears ``experienced.'' Obama served eight years in the Illinois state legislature and has spent three and a half years in the U.S. Senate.

A presidential candidate, according to Rossiter, should be a ``small-town boy'' and a ``Northerner'' or a ``Westerner.'' Obama grew up in Honolulu, population 371,657, and Jakarta, Indonesia, population 8.4 million, before coming to the mainland for college. He has made his home in Chicago, population 2.9 million, since 1991.

Rossiter also specified that a president must be ``of northern European stock,'' adding: ``He cannot be a Negro.''

Obama, who will officially be nominated at the Democratic convention on the 100th birthday of Lyndon B. Johnson and will deliver his acceptance speech 45 years to the day after Martin Luther King Jr.'s ``I have a Dream Speech,'' has become the first black candidate to lead a major U.S. party.

"To laugh often and much;
To win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children;
To earn the approbation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends;
To appreciate beauty;
To find the best in others;
To give of one's self;
To leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch, or a redeemed social condition;
To have played and laughed with enthusiasm and sung with exultation;
To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived —
This is to have succeeded."
Ralph Waldo Emerson

韩寒：控告CNN　我要两块钱
2008-05-03

这个新闻很早前就听说，她代表13亿中国人去何CNN打官司。我被人代表，去向CNN索赔了。但我又有几个想法：

1：强烈建议不要美元！我要7块人民币！美元天天在贬值，万一我们赢了，这过程里，我可能损失几毛钱。而且赔偿人民币更显得我们爱国。

2：你没有得到我的授权书，所以我想要两美元。

3：我们都很高兴，我们的高兴建立在美国法院受理的事实上。

4:我们法院一定要想好办法，万一哪个美国人起诉我们，一定要按常规办理，不能受理。毕竟我们的报纸几十年前没少辱骂人家。

5：对诉讼理由的第二条和第三条我不能同意：第二：被告故意给中国人造成精神损失；第三，被告重大疏忽对中国人造成精神伤害。我觉得应该是极其严重的精神损失和精神伤害，你CNN一句话，我们的精神得到了不可弥补的巨大伤害，那个谁，你轻轻松松随口一句，你知道中国人民遭受了多么大的刺激吗？全国人民几乎崩溃，大家都快成精神病了，你说，这精神损失和精神伤害应该不应该赔？要你13亿是少的。

6：鉴于官司一般不会赢，但我们会不遗余力的告到联合国。如果你们不赔偿，就不允许你们报道奥运。我们的超女和快男也永远不会上你们的节目！奥运在我们家开，所以奥运就是我们家的，我让你不准报道，你就不能报道，奥委会准许你报道都没有用那！我们居委会不允许！

7：综上所述，你输定了。但是如果你愿意调解，我代表十三亿中国人，我代表起诉你的那个亮女士，我代表她的律师，可以给你打个一折。也就是一亿三千万美元。按照中国的砍价法，砍掉一个零头，就是一亿美元。你赶紧把这个一亿美元赔付给我们的代表梁女士。然后你就可以看好戏了。

8：……没有第八条了，但我们中国人喜欢讨个吉利，所以写个8.

CNN，你姓CN，五百年前是一家，现在你居然欺师灭祖，赶紧向我们赔偿，当然，道歉也可以，示好也行，反正我们就喜欢道歉和示好。

***************************

新闻背景：

本报讯(记者张乐) CNN主持人卡弗蒂的辱华言论引起了全世界华人的愤慨，记者昨日获悉，纽约华人委托当地律师对CNN和卡弗蒂提起了诉讼，要求赔偿每位中国人一美元共13亿美元，而当地一家联邦法院已受理此案件。

　　纽约居民梁淑冰以及一位中国公民李女士22日委托纽约海明律师所6名律师对CNN及其主持人卡弗蒂提出集体诉讼，要求赔偿13亿美元。其中一位律师称， “赔偿每位中国人一美元，并不算多。”诉讼内容和理由包括：第一，被告侮辱和污蔑全体华人；第二，被告故意给中国人造成精神损失；第三，被告重大疏忽对中国人造成精神伤害。

　　昨晚，记者从当地几家媒体的网站上搜索这一消息时，发现《纽约邮报》等都市媒体“不约而同”地保持低调，仅发布了几百字的短消息。

　　对此，中国政法大学副教授许身健对记者表示，纽约华人起诉CNN和卡弗蒂的事件更具“象征意义”。从感情上讲，这是维护自身权利的积极举动，是华人的合理诉求；从法理上讲，由于西方的新闻自由和法制规范的关系一直比较复杂，而法官个人的态度也是一个影响因素，因此案件胜诉的前景有待.

April 27, 2008 Elite Korean Schools, Forging Ivy League Skills By SAM DILLON SEOUL, South Korea — It is 10:30 p.m. and students at the elite Daewon prep school here are cramming in a study hall that ends a 15-hour school day. A window is propped open so the evening chill can keep them awake. One teenager studies standing upright at his desk to keep from dozing.\ Kim Hyun-kyung, who has accumulated nearly perfect scores on her SATs, is multitasking to prepare for physics, chemistry and history exams. “I can’t let myself waste even a second,” said Ms. Kim, who dreams of attending Harvard, Yale or another brand-name American college. And she has a good shot. This spring, as in previous years, all but a few of the 133 graduates from Daewon Foreign Language High School who applied to selective American universities won admission. It is a success rate that American parents may well envy, especially now, as many students are swallowing rejection from favorite universities at the close of an insanely selective college application season. “Going to U.S. universities has become like a huge fad in Korean society, and the Ivy League names — Harvard, Yale, Princeton — have really struck a nerve,” said Victoria Kim, who attended Daewon and graduated from Harvard last June. Daewon has one major Korean rival, the Minjok Leadership Academy, three hours’ drive east of Seoul, which also has a spectacular record of admission to Ivy League colleges. How do they do it? Their formula is relatively simple. They take South Korea’s top-scoring middle school students, put those who aspire to an American university in English-language classes, taught by Korean and highly paid American and other foreign teachers, emphasize composition and other skills key to success on the SATs and college admissions essays, and — especially this — urge them on to unceasing study. Both schools appear to be rethinking their grueling regimen, at least a bit. Minjok, a boarding school, has turned off dormitory surveillance cameras previously used to ensure that students do not doze in late-night study sessions. Daewon is ending its school day earlier for freshmen. Its founder, Lee Won-hee, worried in an interview that while Daewon was turning out high-scoring students, it might be falling short in educating them as responsible citizens. “American schools may do a better job at that,” Dr. Lee said. Still, the schools are highly rigorous. Both supplement South Korea’s required, lecture-based national curriculum with Western-style discussion classes. Their academic year is more than a month longer than at American high schools. Daewon, which costs about $5,000 to attend, requires two foreign languages besides English. Minjok, where tuition, board and other expenses top $15,000, offers Advanced Placement courses and research projects. And, oh yes. Both schools suppress teenage romance as a waste of time. “What are you doing holding hands?” a Daewon administrator scolded one adolescent couple recently, according to his aides. “You should be studying!” Students do not seem to complain. Park Yeshong, one of Kim Hyun-kyung’s classmates, said attractions tended to fade as students gritted their way through hundreds of hours of closequarters study. “We know each other too well to fall in love,” Ms. Park said. Many American educators would kill to have such disciplined pupils. Both schools reserve admission for highly motivated students; the application process resembles that at many American colleges, where students are judged on their grade point averages, as well as their performance on special tests and in interviews. “Even my worst students are great,” said Joseph Foster, a Williams College graduate who teaches writing at Daewon. “They’re professionals; if I teach them, they’ll learn it. I get emails at 2 a.m. I’ll respond and go to bed. When I get up, I’ll find a follow-up question mailed at 5 a.m.” South Korea is not the only country sending more students to the United States, but it appears to be a special case. Some 103,000 Korean students study at American schools of all levels, more than from any other country, according to American government statistics. In higher education, only India and China, with populations more than 20 times as large, send more students than South Korea. “Preparing to get to the best American universities has become something of a national obsession in Korea,” said Alexander Vershbow, the American ambassador to South Korea. Korean applications to Harvard alone have tripled, to 213 this spring, up from 66 in 2003, said William R. Fitzsimmons, Harvard’s dean of admissions. Harvard has 37 Korean undergraduates, more than from any foreign country except Canada and Britain. Harvard, Yale and Princeton have a total of 103 Korean undergraduates; 34 graduated from Daewon or Minjok. This year, Daewon and Minjok graduates are heading to universities like Stanford, Chicago, Duke and seven of the eight Ivy League universities — but not to Harvard. Instead, Harvard accepted four Korean students from three other prep schools. “That was certainly not any statement” about the Daewon and Minjok schools, Mr. Fitzsimmons said. “We’re alert to getting kids from schools where we haven’t had them before, but we’d never reject an applicant simply because he or she came from a school with a history of sending students to Harvard.” South Korea’s academic year starts in March, so the 2008 class of Daewon’s Global Leadership Program, which prepares students for study at foreign universities, graduated in February. One graduate was Kim Soo-yeon, 19, who was accepted by Princeton this month. Daewon parents tend to be wealthy doctors, lawyers or university professors. Ms. Kim’s father is a top official in the Korean Olympic Committee. Ms. Kim developed fierce study habits early, watching her mother scold her older sister for receiving any score less than 100 on tests. Even a 98 or a 99 brought a tongue-lashing. “Most Korean mothers want their children to get 100 on all the tests in all the subjects,” Ms. Kim’s mother said. Ms. Kim’s highest aspiration was to attend a top Korean university, until she read a book by a Korean student at Harvard about American universities. Immediately she put up a sign in her bedroom: “I’m going to an Ivy League!” Even while at Daewon, Ms. Kim, like thousands of Korean students, took weekend classes in English, physics and other subjects at private academies, raising her SAT scores by hundreds of points. “I just love to do well on the tests,” she said. As bright as she is, she was just one great student among many, said Eric Cho, Daewon’s college counselor. Sitting at his computer terminal at the school, perched on a craggy eastern hilltop overlooking the Seoul skyline, Mr. Cho scrolled through the class of 2008’s academic records. Their average combined SAT score was 2203 out of 2400. By comparison, the average combined score at Phillips Exeter, the New Hampshire boarding school, is 2085. Sixty-seven Daewon graduates had perfect 800 math scores. Kim Hyun-kyung, 17, scored perfect 800s on the SAT verbal and math tests, and 790 in writing. She is scheduled to take nine A.P. tests next month, in calculus, physics, chemistry, European history and five other subjects. One challenge: she has taken none of these courses. Instead, she is teaching herself in between classes at Daewon, buying and devouring textbooks. So she is busy. She rises at 6 a.m. and heads for her school bus at 6:50. Arriving at Daewon, she grabs a broom to help classmates clean her classroom. Between 8 and noon, she hears Korean instructors teach supply and demand in economics, Korean soils in geography and classical poets in Korean literature. At lunch she joins other raucous students, all, like her, wearing blue blazers, in a chowline serving beans and rice, fried dumpling and pickled turnip, which she eats with girlfriends. Boys, who sit elsewhere, wolf their food and race to a dirt lot for a 10-minute pickup soccer game before afternoon classes. Kim Hyun-kyung joins other girls at a hallway sink to brush her teeth before reporting to French literature, French culture and English grammar classes, taught by Korean instructors. At 3:20, her English language classes begin. This day, they include English literature, taught by Mani Tadayon, a polyglot graduate of the University of California at Berkeley, who was born in Iran, and government and politics, taught by a former Wall Street lawyer, Hugh Quigley. Evening study hall begins at 7:45. She piles up textbooks on an adjoining desk, where they glare at her like a to-do list. Classmates sling backpacks over seats, prop a window open and start cramming. Three hours later, the floor is littered with empty juice cartons and water bottles. One girl has nodded out, head on desk. At 10:50 a tone sounds, and Ms. Kim heads for a bus that will wend its way through Seoul to her home south of the Han River. “I feel proud that I’ve endured another day,” she said. The schedule at the Minjok academy, on a rural campus of tile-roofed buildings in forested hills, appears even more daunting. Students rise at 6 for martial arts, and thereafter, wearing full-sleeved, gray-and-black robes, plunge into a day of relentless study that ends just before midnight, when they may sleep. But most keep cramming until 2 a.m., when dorm lights are switched off, said Gang Min-ho, a senior. Even then some students turn on lanterns and keep going, Mr. Gang said. “Basically we lead very tired lives,” he said. Students sometimes report for classes so exhausted that Alexander Ganse, a German who teaches European history, said he asked, “Did you go to bed at all last night?” “But we’re not only nerds!” interrupted Choi Jung-yun, who grew up in San Diego. Minjok students play sports, take part in many clubs and even have a rock band, she said. Ambassador Vershbow, who plays the drums, confirmed that with photographs that showed him jamming with the Minjok rockers during a visit to the school last year. There are other hints of slackening. A banner once hung on a Minjok building. “This school is a paradise for those who want to study and a hell for those who do not,” it read. But it was taken down after faculty members deemed it too harsh, said Son Eun-ju, director of counseling. Kim Hyun-kyung, center, hopes Daewon Foreign Language High School in South Korea propels her into a top American college. Daewon Foreign Language High School in Seoul, South Korea, prepares students who want to attend prestigious universities in the United States. Kim Hyun-kyung, center, has accumulated nearly perfect scores on her SATs and has dreams of attending Harvard, Yale or another brand-name American college. A student talked with a teacher at the Minjok Leadership Academy, Daewon's major rival. Both schools have a spectacular record of admission to Ivy League colleges. The two schools emphasize composition and other skills key to success on the SATs and college admissions essays, and urge their students on to unceasing study. Jung-yun Choi, left, studied in Minjok's library. Though the students' schedules are daunting, some take volleyball class, left, at Daewon. At Minjok, students play sports, take part in many clubs and even have a rock band. A banner once hung on a building at Minjok. "This school is a paradise for those who want to study and a hell for those who do not," it read. But it was taken down after faculty members deemed it too harsh. Park Yeshong, a senior at Daewon, studied after class. Both schools reserve admission for highly motivated students.

Perhaps in Alia Sabur’s wildly advanced studies she came across a famous quote from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

“Knowing is not enough. We must apply,” the German writer once observed.

That could serve as explanation for what prompted the 19-year-old to become the youngest college professor in history.

Read about this article on Varsity (The BETTER and MORE OBJECTIVE student newspaper in Cambridge!) It is really great to see Chinese students writing for the newspaper! (At least I feel represented and especially in this case!)

The Truth about Tibet---By Lilian Li

The recent Tibetan protests have done little to further the cause of Tibetan suffrage. If anything, it has set things back by antagonising China and misrepresenting

events in Tibet. From a Chinese perspective, there is a feeling that the West doesn’t understand the issue, never took time to understand the issue, but stands ready to hand out judgment on the issue.

It’s easy to dismiss China as a oppressive dictator in Tibet but really, the human rights records of China in Tibet is mixed. On one hand, high estimates of 800,000 people werekilled over 20 years from 1959 onwards and immense damage was done to Tibetan cultural heritage during the Cultural Revolution. But China suffered a loss of at least two million during the same turbulent time.

On the other hand, the Chinese government has abolished a feudal system and poured much needed money into establishing education, healthcare and infrastructure in rural Tibet. In the last 30 years, the standard of life in Tibet has increase rapidly – with life expectancyjumping from 35.5 years in 1950 to 67 in 2000. The issues of human rights in Tibet, and in China, will surely be addressed (and needs to be addressed) for China as a country tomove forwards. Yet after a century of poverty and political turmoil, issues such as clothing the rest of the population have been higher on the agenda.

Clarification is also needed on the recent riots in Tibet and the Chinese military response. The riots in Tibet were just that – riots, and the crackdown of the Chinese government should be viewed in this context. As James Miles of The Economist, one of the few western journalists in Tibet at the time, reported, only non-Tibetan businesses and people were targeted in violence; the injured were Han Chinese.

The main cause of the riots wasn’t oppression, but a growing dissatisfaction with the faster economic development of the bettereducated Han Chinese in Tibet. The growing gap between rich and poor is a common story in China but the Han Chinese have become an easy scapegoat due to their growing presence in Tibet in the last few years. Even the billions of investment poured into Tibet by the central government are not enough to reduce the gap between Tibet and rest of China. The frustration of poverty and the golden opportunity of worldwide Olympic publicity have only added fuel to the fire.

The hard truth is that Tibetan independence will not make the Tibetan people better off. Economically, the Tibetan people rely on the Chinese – 90% of Tibet government spending comes from the central Chinese government. The fastest growing sector of the Tibetan economy is tourism, which would grind to a standstill as soon as China withdres its flood of tourists. Out also goes access to higher education in mainland China (where the Tibetans are favoured with lower entry requirements) and immigration of more skilled workers. Tibet will be left with a damaged economy at a time of much needed stability, especially when they have to sort out the prickly task of separating a ruling government from a ruling religion.

Even if the recent protests have been raising awareness in the wider world, the audience it’s targeted at – the Chinese people and government – have long switched off, unplugged the TV and thrown it out the window. The western media coverage in the recent weeks have instigated a wave of nationalism in China that has drowned out the moderates. The Western media has become a symbol of Western bias. In Chinese slang, ‘Don’t be too CNN’ means ‘don’t ignore the truth’, as a response to CNN reports which vastly exaggerated the scale and intent of the Chinese military intervention. Conspiracy theories are rife in the Chinese blogosphere (yes, it does exist), where the 

whole ordeal is seen as the latest move in the West’s attempts to suppress china as a growing world power.

The Chinese see the West as hypocritical, reaping the benefit of buying cheap goods from developing China but judging its human rights record as that of a developed nation. It preaches morality while encouraging mob demonstrations that attacked a wheelchair bound torch carrier and wags its finger about censorship while filling the airwaves with cropped photos and misleading captions.

The West seems to lament China as an oppressed brainwashed mass, too controlled by a single party government to withstand criticism. There seems to be little interest in dealing with Chinese as ordinary individuals and engaging on an equal basis. The fact that the Olympics represents the Chinese people more than it represents the Chinese government has not been made clear, and criticism sounds more like cultural imperialism.

China’s failings of inflexibility and a series of unfortunate public relations events has done nothing to help the situation. Insistence that that the Dalai Lama is the puppet master behind this theatre of humiliation, heavy handedness with the demonstrations with the dubious guards in blue, leads to saving face as the main objective of the day. There are no winners with these protests. The Tibetan people blare out a skewed view to the rest of the world, the West agrees and damages fragile international relationships, and the Chinese people and government become more adamant about not being seen as weak rather than listening to either.

The effects of these are already being felt, in the hostility of Chinese immigrants whenever Tibet is mentioned, the waves of pro China protests around the world, and the boycotting of French businesses in China. This may be the issue that finally forces the reticent China to take centre stage and start speaking, but what’s going to be said may not be what we’ve been waiting to hear.

Just saw this article on Varsity (the MORE OBJECTIVE Cambridge student run News paper )
I am really delighted to see Chinese students writing article for the Newspaper.

Oasis has gone! No more air ticket for £273. BA for £469, Hopefully Terminal 5 works smoothly by then!! Going home on 9th June!!

Observing the behavior of children reveals the inherent learning habits we humans are born with. It is as fascinating as it is inspiring.

Children are born full of curiosity about the world around them. They love to grab stuff, explore their environments, and are are often able to absorb concepts and things such as a new language much faster than adults.

It is also during those youngest years, up until five, that learning is fun and even effortless. Our dreams are big and the possibilities seem endless but then for too many of us, something eventually goes horribly wrong. Something happens.

… school happens.

Courtesy of Symic

All of a sudden our inherent learning habits begin to get crushed mercilessly. We can’t learn at our own pace anymore. Rules get enforced and we’re made to sit inside a box with four walls, in neat rows filled with other kids whom we can’t even interact much with.

We get placed within a restrictive learning environment, one in which we get told what, when and how to learn. If you’re lucky enough to be living in a free democratic country, then at least you grow up getting taught democratized knowledge. If you’re unlucky, the knowledge can contain all kinds of subtle misinformation which usually results in the intended conformity it was designed to achieve. In extreme cases our minds even get treated like empty vessels meant to be filled with supposedly important facts.

Luckily some teachers, ones who are deeply talented and passionate, successfully manage to create great classrooms where “fun” and “learning” are fused together creatively. My high school physics teacher was one of them and until this day, I still remember something he told us. He said “there is no such thing as a boring subject. There are only boring teachers.”

Needless to say, he made physics, a subject I initially hated, a lot of fun. He made it so through his style and by reminding us of how naturally curious we are born as young kids.

Instead of nurturing and enhancing the amazing inherent learning habits we are born with as children, schools unfortunately kill them but it’s never too late though. Luckily, you can still revive your inner child.

1- Learn to Dream Again

One of the first things you should do is to simply learn how to dream again. Throw away the mental constraints, relax and go for it.

2- Deschool Yourself

You are the master of your own mind. It’s time to re-ignite your lost and forgotten passions for learning the things you love.

3- Create a Personal Learning Environment

Embrace the power of the internet and immerse yourself in the infinitely vast ocean of democratized knowledge it provides. Enjoy the freedom of nurturing your mind the way you want.

We are all born passionate learners. It’s not something that “special” people invent for themselves. It’s there with all of us at the start but then it gets buried. You don’t need to create it. You just need to bring it back. Revive your inner child.

Did they really understand what has happened and what is happening in TB? By just watching the footage on BBC?? They definitely had every right to have their own opinions and make their voice heard, but whether their opinions were biased or flawed was another thing.

All day long, BBC was showing "every metre of the relay", as they themselves described. The live broadcast was mostly emphasising on the extent of the protests rather than the Olympic torch itself. The few video shots of the earlier scuffles were played again and again, "so that the international audience" could see how the relay had turned into a fiasco. 

It was humiliating. A few collegemates were around watching the live broadcast.I sort of entered a debate with some of them. A German and a British. I was trying to tell them some of the altered picture I  have seen, and at the same time trying to defend China, (or perhaps the government). I tried my very best not to get too nationalistic and pro-government. It was undeniable that I deeply feel that China was victimised in many ways.

We have always said (or been told )that we are a big country with 5000 years of history and how strong China has been and would be. But in reality? China is like a new comer just entering this big community with all the big brothers, who are not really happy with you but still have to be nice to you sometimes.

But why have so many people misunderstood China?

Why are they saying that saying Human right situation in China is despicable? Why do they call it an invasion when China freed TB in 1950 and the "Operation Iraqi Freedom" when the US and UK sent troop to Iraq in 2003?

There is definitely unfairness in all these report and discussion! However, we should also look at our own governement for reasons. What will happen if the Chinese media are at the same time broadcasting the other side of the story, rather than all the good news? The reasons that people tend to believe in all these so-called "western media coverage" is simply because they are more trust-worthy than the "all good news" Chinese media.

I would rather the Chinese media to be critical about the government rather than hearing slander from other people who know very little about the country and the situations. In the end, everything boils down to a freer press and fairer media coverage.

"Let the world understand China", that was some of the slogan that i have seen on Youtube. However, we need to do something ourselves so that they can PROPERLY understand China.

Patriotism aside, the integration of China into the world will also require overseas Chinese who possess the necessary language prowess and critical thinking skill to make the connection. The reason that we have spent years and years of hard work into learning English is not to make us English, but to allow other people to better understand our own culture and our difference. By doing so,we can disagree with each other without being disagreeable.