The opening ceremony of the 29th Olympiad in Beijing was celebrated in China as an opportunity for the country to “tell its story to the world.” This article offers a forensic analysis of that story and how it was created under Party fiat with the active collaboration of local and international arts figures. In a scene-by-scene description of the ceremony, the article also reviews the symbiotic relationship of avant-garde cultural activists and the party-state, a relationship that has continuously evolved throughout the Reform era (since 1978). It also discusses contentious historical issues related to the revival of real and imagined national traditions in the era of China's re-emergence on the global stage.

This article presents Aiyan, an electronic house church publication, as a case study of a resistance community using up-to-date technology in the dual context of China's modernization and government repression. Based on detailed content analysis supported by results from fieldwork, the article introduces Aiyan's background as an underground publication, its online existence, its visual character, its content and its aims. It then analyses Aiyan's attempts at identity formation within the complex realities of religious activity in China, and finally identifies five main areas of political engagement within Aiyan: freedom of religious belief and legalization of status; rights awareness and rights education; defiance against the regime; rural–urban co-operation; and engagement of liberal intellectuals. The article concludes with an evaluation of the possible influence this sector of the house church community may have on China's political transformation.

Starting in 2005, the largest “Olympic education” programme ever implemented by an Olympic host country was carried out in schools in Beijing and across China. By looking at the ways in which the policies for this programme were created and implemented, this article challenges the common perception that there was a “master plan” surrounding all aspects of the Beijing Olympics that was imposed by the party-state from the top down with the singular goal of promoting nationalist and communist ideology. It makes the point that by contrast with the suzhi (“quality”) education that preceded it, Olympic education contained a de-politicized patriotic education that linked national identity with sports heroes rather than political systems, and re-situated Chinese national identity within an international community in which it would now take its place as an equal partner.

China's evidently unstoppable “rise” energizes PRC political and intellectual elites to think seriously about the future of international relations. How will (and should) China's international roles change in the forthcoming decades? How should its leaders put the country's rapidly-increasing power to use? Foreign China specialists have tended to use an overly-streamlined “resisting” the West versus “co-operating” with it (or even simpler “optimistic” versus “pessimistic”) scale to address such questions, partly reflecting the divide between Realism and Neoliberalism in American international relations theory. By 2002, a near-consensus had developed (though never shared universally) that China had become an increasingly co-operative power since the mid-1990s and would continue to pursue the policy prescriptions of Neoliberal international relations theory. But using more nuanced “English school” analytical techniques – and examining the writings of Chinese elites themselves, aimed solely at Chinese audiences – this article discovers an unmistakably cynical Realism to be still at the core of Chinese thinking on the international future. Even elites who appear sincere in their promotion of co-operation firmly reject “solidarism” among the world's leading states and insist upon upholding the difference between China and all others. Many demand – and foresee – China using its future power to pursue world objectives that would depart in significant respects from those of the other leading states and non-state actors.