The Grand Canal of China（大運河; pinyin: Dà Yùnhé）, also known as the Beijing-Hangzhou Grand Canal（京杭大運河; pinyin: Jīng Háng Dà Yùnhé）is the longest ancient canal or artificial river in the world. (Wikipedia)

The Grand Canal also runs through Tianjin, the city where I live. This afternoon I took some pictures along the river bank.

Tan Siok Siok, the Director of the Olympic documentary Boomtown Bejing（北京沸腾）gave a welcoming message and then a Q & A session after the screening at Yugong Yishan（愚公移山）. All proceeds from this event went to the Library-Project.ORG.

My short review:

Boomtown Beijing is more than a documentary of the Beijing Olympics. It shows the spirit of the Olympics through the life of common people and tells us their dreams.

Olympics as a large-scale international sports event has more meanings than competing for medals. We should also remember and practice “Citius, Altius, Fortius” (swifter, higher and stronger) in our lives and I think this is one of the reasons why the Olympics are held all over the world and loved by the world. Boomtown Beijing shows us the people who really uphold the Olympic spirit.

Unlike some ‘official’ Olympic films, what you are going to see is all real. There will be no hyped talks or propaganda. No wonder after seeing the movie, some people changed their views about Bejing, China and also their attitude toward the Beijing Olympics.

NOTE: If you are on FB, do check out http://snurl.com/25viy instead for faster video. Thanks.

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Florence Xu, the Event Manager from the Library Project made a brief introduction to the charity at the Boomtown Beijing’s screening on April 20th. All proceeds from the screening went to this organization.

The book selection process includes listening to children’s opinions about what they’d like to read. They choose high quality books and some of them are printed with Pinyin (phonetic Chinese) to aid reading.

If you are interested in learning more about the project, please visit Library-Project.org.

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Boomtown Beijing is arranging a screening in the USA this June. For the latest information visit Boomtown Beijing web site.

Enjoy the trailer:

Interested in helping organize a local screening? Please contact: boomtownbeijing [at] gmail.com

The ideal venue should have:

1. A capacity of 80-120 audience;
2. Good sound facility;
3. Ready marketing database to help publicize the screening;

Examples are:
1. Popular club, theatre or arts cafe;
2. Universities and colleges;
3. Business associations and clubs;

The pictures it used to attract attention are Dalai Lama and Ma Ying-jeou (current Taiwan ‘President’ and Nationalist Party leader). The advertisement uses the following text to go with the pictures:

• East China or West China, which region has better IQ? (title)
• Take our survey and raise the average IQ of the East region. (Tagline)

Obviously the ad indicates, although not necessarily intentionally:

1. There’s an IQ difference between people living in the East China and the West China;
2. The IQ of the East is lower (at least before you take their survey);
3. Dalai Lama is representative of the West, while Ma Ying-jeou is of the East.
4. Dalai Lama’s intelligence could be higher than that of Ma Ying-jeou’s, while Ma Ying-jeou is cleverer than most people living in the East of China.

At this sensitive time, using such culturally and politically sensitive pictures and insulting title/tagline to target the Chinese community shows the advertiser doesn’t have much intelligence, do they?

According to the site’s Chinese ‘About’ page, of the three guys behind the site, two of them are very clever.