Welcome to the the Sports World, China

This summer, China was very eager to tell the world how modern and advanced it was. They welcomed the world the the 2008 Summer Olympics, spent billions and billions of dollars, and went to extreme lengths to make sure everybody stayed on-message. And China did win more gold medals than any other nation this summer. However, having a well-funded sports system is not the same thing as being a member of the moder, capitalist sports world. A news story today finally convinced me that China is ready.

Wang Hao, a two-time Olympic silver medalist in Table Tennis, was arrested thursday in Shanghai and has been ordered to get counseling. Finally, a Chinese Pacman Jones! Apparently Mr. Wang emerged, drunk, from a karaoke club and decided to urinate on the outside of the building. A security guard attempted to stop him from doing so, and the two came to blows. My favorite part is what Wang reportedly yelled while trying to punch the guard: "I am the famous Wang Hao! I am the World Champion! Who cares if I beat you?" Awesome.

Table Tennis (or "Ping Pong", as we uncultured Americans like to call it), has long been one of the most popular sports in China. Wang is a major star in the country's professional ping pong league. The coach of his club, Bayi, said that he may face additional punishment from the team, though he did not elaborate.

As China becomes more of a world economic leader, and continues to shift to a more modern, capitalist society, incidents like this will become more and more common. Chinese culture is usually described as "collectivist" rather than "individualist"... it has never been a celebrity culture. But that may be changing. This summer, the world got to see just how big athletes like basketball player Yao Ming, runner Liu Xiang, and badminton star Lin Dan are in their homeland. And it turns out that, if you have enough celebrities, some of them will have trouble dealing with fame, collectivism or no.

Another aspect of this that interests me is the punishment. He has to get counseling? Time was Wang would have simply disappeared from the scene after bringing "shame" to his country in this way, but now we don't even know if he'll miss any matches for his pro team. China likes to think of itself, increasingly, as a meritocracy, a country where, if you work hard enough, you can get ahead. This is new, but it's also different from the "American Dream" we like to talk about here. Yes, Wang is being treated differently because he is a celebrity. In China, that's not really something that's questioned. If he's famous, it's because he's better. There's none of this "all men are created equal" business. If you're as good as them, why aren't you where they are, is the question that's asked.

As we saw this summer, China's going through a period of intense change, and incidents like this are a small part of that. Anyway, I think that's about enough analysis for a "guy-pees-on-wall" story.

TV Is Back: South Park and The Sarah Silverman Program

As Tuned In's James Poniewozik exclaimed yesterday, "South Park is back, just when we needed it." And it brought its friends!

I love South Park. It has an enduring ability to savage the worst parts of our society while still actually being funny, not to mention that it's ability to deal with current events is matched only by SNL, since the episodes are sometimes produced in as little as a week. There are off episodes, of course, but no other current shows has as many "great moments per capita" as South Park.

If you were looking for one of those classics last night, you were mostly sadly mistaken. The episode involved Cartman pulling Butters into his "American Liberation Front" to save us from Chinese domination (he has nightmares about the Beijing Opening Ceremonies), which quickly ascends into a hostage crisis farce where Butters keeps shooting people in the crotch. This is the good part of the episode. Unfortunately, it also includes a stupid plot involving the boys having been traumatized by Steven Spielberg and George Lucas "raping" Indiana Jones in the latest movie, which plays on the cliches of a Lifetime-style weepie. The biggest problem for me with this isn't the way they deal Spielberg and Lucas (incredibly, ludicrously disrespectful, but half the point of these guys is they don't respect anybody... and was it any worse than what they did to Mel Gibson? Well, maybe...), but the fact that it just isn't funny. In a show like this, that's the ultimate sin. There were flashes of brilliance, though, mostly involving Cartman, and I'm confident the show will return to form next week. It's stayed at the height of its powers longer than any other show in my memory.

The Sarah Silverman Program is a showcase for the "no holds barred" comedienne who gets her unique touch from making jokes about racism and bodily functions with a wink and a smile. This works on the internet and in cut-up form, but in half-hour form it has only been really funny in fits and starts. This season premiere was probably the best episode I've seen. One of the large, slovenly, geeky gay guys across the hall (Brian Posehn), introduces Sarah to pot... and she discovers that as long as she's high, she's a genius, but she can't remember her incredible insights while she's sober. So she develops a system where she leaves her sober self voicemail messages urging her to follow her instructions. This also leads to a farcical hostage crisis (two in one night!). On a normal sitcom, Sarah would eventually go the well one too many times and learn, at the very least, that pot isn't for her. But there's no comeuppance, and high-Sarah changes people's lives and takes down a corporation with little to no repercussions. I'll probably never say this again, but it was actually better than South Park.

Someone Took "Advance Wars" Too Seriously

The big news from the gaming world this week wasn't the release of the latest big game. It was the real-life murder of one Matthew Pyke, a student at Nottingham Trent University in England. Pyke, age 20, was heavily involved with the community surrounding Nintendo's Advance Wars, a turn-based war tactics game for the video game company's hand-held Advance platform. Pyke ran a strategy website for the game with his girlfriend, as well as writing Advance Wars fanfiction and regularly posting to forums devoted to the game. Authorities are now saying they believe that the murder may have been because of a grudge that started in the virtual world and seeped into the real world.

According to a report from The Times of London, detectives are investigating whether this was some sort of revenge killing for events that happened while playing the game online. Among the strange events among investigation is a post by a german citizen on the Facebook page of Pyke's girlfriend, in which the poster, David Heiss, vaguely implied he was responsible for Pyke's death. A man matching the description of the Heiss was reportedly arrested by Nottinghamshire Police.

Obviously there are a lot of details about this that are still to come out, and we will try to bring you a follow-up. Many media outlets will immediately point to video gamers being somehow disconnected from reality. But, in my opinion, this is the sort of unfortunate incident that has the potential to happen in any competition that people start caring about out of proportion to its actual importance. Is this really so different from that Colombian soccer player who was tragically murdered after allowing an own goal to the USA during the '94 World Cup? Or from Tonya Harding's boyfriend hiring someone to attack Nancy Kerrigan? As video games and online interaction become important to more people, we'll see more of this sort of tragedy, not less.

In any case, my thoughts go out to Pyke's loved ones who are going through this difficult time.