You would have thought, perhaps, that the embarrassing ad photo of the Spanish Olympic basketball team in the eyelids-pulled-back, "Slanty-eyed Chinese" pose was just a one-off thing. I mean, if they had done this before, they would have had a better apology ready, right? But maybe Asia-mocking is actually a favorite pastime of all Spanish athletes-because their 2008 Federation Cup Tennis team, which beat China to move into the finals, was photographed in the same god damn pose!: Photo from the Spanish Tennis Federation's site:

Olympic sponsors spent $150 million setting up flashy pavilions on the pedestrian-friendly Olympic Green. But China made security so strict that barely anyone can get onto the Green to see them. As the old saying goes, "China is a paranoid police state." [WSJ]

Since 2000, every time BBC news writes a story on China, their online editors slap up this stock photo of a Chinese police officer looking at a computer. Probably censoring something! Or cracking down on freedom! Or, like, updating his MySpace. Though since the picture dates back to 2000 he's probably just buying a cup of coffee from Kozmo.com. Regardless, there are at least 14 separate instances of the BBC using this same photo to illustrate a story, which is evidence of their anti-Chinese bias, obviously, repeatedly reinforcing the old "Chinese people sit too close to the monitor" stereotype. Also it's not clear whether the Beeb is actually revealing that the photos are not related to the stories they illustrate, which seems like a sketchy practice. Examples after the jump!

It was quite an embarrassment for the nation of Spain yesterday when an ad surfaced showing their entire national Olympic basketball team posing in the "Slanty-eyed Asian" position, pulling their eyelids back. We imagine the photo shoot was followed by several minutes of mimed karate moves and Enter The Dragon reenactments, only adding to the awkwardness. So the entire nation of China has been waiting expectantly for an apology. And today they got...outrage that anyone would think Spain is racist! Why, some of their closest friends are from China or somewhere like that!

Activist Twitterer noneck (aka Noel Hidalgo) was in Tiananmen Square on Saturday for a free-Tibet protest. After he Twittered the event and broadcast it live over Qik, Chinese authorities deported him. He's one of 28 activists bounced from China during the Olympics, but the only one who documented his actions live, with over 30,000 views. Rather foolish of the Chinese government: Had they not deported Hidalgo, it's unlikely so many people would have paid attention to his lifecast. His video of the pro-Tibet die-in runs below:Click to view

In a post a few hours ago about the Times's 32 reporters in Beijing for the Olympics my colleague Hamilton estimated that each reporter sent to cover the event was writing one story per day for an average of two weeks. Industrious! But somewhat akin to estimating that smelting everyone's rusty pots and pans in the backyard is going to yield a dominant steel industry. Reporters need to get over their jet lag! Collect their thoughts, and convert them from hackneyed touristy "Ha ha ha they weren't kidding about that smog!" thoughts into publishably learned-sounding "Smog? You should see it when the GDP is in working order!" ones! A more realistic Olympics output has been generated by Gawker's favorite media gay couple, Timesman Andrew Jacobs and his freelancer boyfriend Dan Levin, who have in two or three weeks in the Middle Kingdom…Two stories, a man on the street scene piece about…uh, men on the street, and one piece about foreigners who live in nice houses that resemble the old houses that average Chinese used to live in before they were all bulldozed except they are nice and that's why they get to stay. We checked out some other people we knew in China, including our Times reporting friend Nick Confessore, who is actually in town on vacation, and reports on Facebook that he recently ripped off the idea of Chicago Sun-Times columnist Jay Mariotti and climbed the Great Wall, which was "more effective against the Mongols than against the Japanese." (Not to mention opiates and naval warfare! ) Our former Beijing correspondent friend professed to be "not doing much of anything," saying she'd write more when it was more timezone-appropriate. Oh yes, and Gawker legal counsel Gaby Darbyshire is in Beijing right now, "doing a deal." Sure. Finally we received this email from a friend at Paris Review who is also in Beijing:

They were the Olympic opening ceremonies that wowed the world with their stunning displays of Socialist sophistication— but were they on the level? Allegations are flying that Chinese authorities faked certain parts of the broadcast, even going so far as to replace a singing 7-year-old who organizers deemed not hot enough to serve as the face of young China. Says HuffPo of the last-minute switch:

First, it was revealed that the giant fireworks footprints in Beijing's Olympics Opening Ceremonies were digitally manipulated fakes. Fakes! Sickening! Then came a more shocking revelation: even China's adorable little girls are forgeries.

The Olympics, we're told, is a delicate dance of geopolitical maneuvering dressed up as an athletic contest. In reality, it's the world's largest assembly of dumb jocks. All of whom are now in a position to cause international incidents! Spain and China may have poisoned their diplomatic relationship because the entire Spanish national basketball team thought it would be cute to make an ad for some courier company posing with the "Slanty-eyed Asian" gesture: fingers pulling the eyelids to make them slits. I imagine they were all saying "Ah, soooo" at the time and laughing uproariously. The full photo is bad enough that someone should have realized it was mistake:

It goes without saying that we will not be in Beijing to cover the Olympics. Furthermore, we've never been to Beijing, and our Olympic experience is limited to one pair of first-round tickets to see the Dream Team crush Kyrgyzstan or somebody in Atlanta in 1996. None of this precludes us from rounding up all of the information on the Internet in order to tell the media that actually is covering the Olympics in Beijing how to do its job. So listen up! Don't be just another sap writing about Michael Phelps while being beaten by Chinese police. After the jump, the only guide to covering the wondrous 2008 Olympics you will ever need:

Although the Chinese government has restored access to many blocked news websites after a public uproar, one is still blocked completely: Huffington Post. Oh god, come on, Chinese government. Are you prepared to answer for the self-righteousness this will unleash? [HuffPo]

Ha ha, China unblocked much of the internet this week as it moved to allow "free and unfettered" reporting around the Olympics, and look what happened: the entire country discovered that American "news" is full of lies written by cheap robots. This one was made by a cyclon photo director at Yahoo who wants the world to believe that China is still slaughtering people in Tiananmen Square, using furries. See, communists? This sort of madcap fun could be yours if you had a First Amendment! [Guardian]

Over at Jerry Yang's shareholder snoozefest today, Chinese political protesters showed up outside the hotel lobby. They set up exhibits shaming Yahoo for handing over bloggers' Yahoo Mail accounts to the Chinese government. Although Jerry Yang has already answered to Congress and settled with the bloggers' families, the protesters who showed up are still mad. Or opportunistic, given the expected media attention this year on Yahoo's normally sleepy annual meeting. The bloggers remain in Chinese prisons. As I tried to take more pics — on a public street outside the hotel — guys in suits came out and told me to leave the premises. And here I thought I was in the United States.

The Chinese government may have assured the International Olympic Committee that reporters would enjoy Western freedoms while covering the Olympic games, such as unfettered access to the Internet. Once on the ground, however, journalists have discovered that's not exactly the case. The IOC has been busy backtracking. Olympics reps now have clarified that open Web access is only for sites about "Olympic competitions" — not, say, Amnesty International, one of many sites that has been blocked. The question no one has asked, however, is why China should feel compelled to act in any other way?

You can't trust the Red Chinese for a single second. (Kidding! Trust them all you want). Nor can you trust multinational corporations! When they combine, they tend to be exceptionally devious. For example: Major companies are running ads featuring Chinese athletes having tender moments with their own parents, in preparation for the Olympics. But while the athletes are real, their parents-the catalysts for the ad's emotional strength-are played by actors. You have to see it to believe it! In one ad, a Chinese hurdler poses on a billboard (pictured) with two actors who are kind of like his parents, but probably more attractive. A Coke ad shows athletes and their parents bonding by doing sports together, something that their real parents would never do, I guess. "From an acting standpoint, we prefer to use trained actors who can match our creative requirements for the TV commercial," says a Coke spokesman, while urinating on the concepts of truth and familial honor. Watch the Coke ad below, and trust no one: Click to view [via WSJ]

On one hand, we're sort of ashamed to have doubled our knowledge of Chinese culture today with one glance at the Los Angeles Times. On the other, a spoonful of sugar — or, more specifically, of Kung Fu Panda — made the medicine go down that much easier as we learned the deep angst gripping China in the wake of the film's success. It's not frustrating enough, evidently, that DreamWorks usurped Chinese authority over everything from animation to the sacred panda itself; rather, the hero Po's abject laziness and mild prurience has an angry 1.2 billion souls searching as we speak:

We have Olympic fever! But not as much as Beijing-ians. The Chinese government is like an overanxious mama, worried her kid might start picking his nose on stage at his preschool graduation. So they're bombarding the wayward citizenry with propaganda posters directing them how to act when all the weird foreigners get to town. The oddest thing is that they go to great lengths to explain how to make pale Westerners feel at ease, when in fact much of the etiquette advice seems totally unrelated to American life. It's a culture clash that will make you chuckle! Below, actual instructions to the Chinese: Whatever you do, don't ask what someone does!

You may never find a better moment in history to marvel at the craven pseudo-patriotism of international corporations than now, when all the world's major consumer companies are fighting to ingratiate themselves to Chinese consumers. That's China, the Red Menace! Did you know that Pepsi ran a promotion changing the color of its cans to red to honor China('s communism)? It's true! Did you know McDonald's ads now say "I'm lovin it when China wins"? The traitorous scum! Where is the xenophobic backlash? Also, ad execs are scoffing at the robot-like sameness of all these new commercials touting various companies' Chinese patriotism. Below, one McDonald's spot, and one Pepsi spot. Do the Chinese really scream so much?

You are pretty much everything that is wrong with everything. Read a goddamn book. You are seriously the worst. [The Tumblr That Represents All That Is Wrong and Evil In This World]

A Fiat commercial featuring Tibet supporter Richard Gere tooling around in a shiny new Lancia and chilling with some Tibetan monks has the Reds in China all steamed. Why the hell would the Italian car-maker give a crap what China thinks? Zillions of dollars in slave labor! So naturally they're apologizing to the thin-skinned, human rights-abusing regime. "Gere is well known for supporting Tibet's independence from China, which subjected the tiny state to a brutal crackdown this year. Fiat CEO Sergio Marchionne backed the commercial when it was shown to reporters on June 4. 'I obviously like it,' he said. Chinese newspapers responded with reports criticizing the ad, however, and Fiat issued an apology on Friday. 'Fiat reiterates its neutrality in connection with any political matter, be it on a national or international basis,' it said. 'Fiat Group extends its apologies to the Government of the People's Republic of China and to the Chinese people.'" [Variety] See the offensive ad after the jump.