The blue army serving the Olympics

IIf anyone has visited Beijing during the last month, or has seen any of the games or Olympic news on TV or the internet....these blue 500RMB ADIDAS uniformed volunteers are everywhere within your view. They stake their presence in every corner of Beijing.....in every Olympic venue, every Olympic house, every press center, every hospitality center, every hotel, every school, every street corner, every street intersection, airport, train station, bus station, subway station, every car with a foreigner in it, every park and historic site in Beijing.

Besides the 200,000 blue army volunteers occupy every corner of the city as mentioned, there are 1 million "citizen volunteers" - people who keep every neighborhood, every community, every street safe. They literally sit in front of A large segment is composed of retired citizens. They wear plain civilian clothes....no 500 RMB adidas blue uniforms.

They are officially "volunteers". Unlike American volunteers, they are handpicked and literally ordered by the central communist party to serve the Olympics. This is a real army of volunteers....1.5 Million strong. If a foreigner who's visiting China for the first time and is confused by the supposed Chinese "communist regime" juxtaposed with the starbucks, mcdonalds, budweiser clubs, the price gouging of everything from Olympic tickets to a Chinese abacus, and the larger selection of everything in every department store than America....and is wondering where is a trace of the "communist regime"....then the blue army is a blatant reminder of why China is China and not the West.

As one sees on TV for a basketball game, whenever the game is called out by a coach, the blue army "fly" onto the field in a perfect formation....each soldier carrying a mop. The way they jog and carry their mops are all perfectly choreographed believe it or not..... so that they'll appear "pretty" on TV. And the thousands of volunteers standing solemnly facing the spectators with their back to the athletes on the field...and occasionally turning around for a split second peek of the game; the volunteers at the security checkpoints with loudspeakers speaking in monotone the perfunctorily rehearsed punchlines; the volunteers standing outside directing human and vehicle traffic in the baking weather;

Mostly amazingly are the volunteers who spontaneously and purposefully form human shields, human barriers, barricades to direct the Olympic human traffic.

For the Chinese people and the volunteers themselves, serving the Olympics is not only an obligation, but an honorable one, even though the state really forced them to give up this summer. That's why millions more of students applied for a volunteer position. But in the end, Beijing decided to fill most of the volunteer positions with students from Beijing. In fact, from every university in Beijing, creating a massive drafted army of Beijing college volunteers.

The more prestigious the school, the more prestigious the venue. For example, bird's nest is full of Peking University volunteers, while the water cube is full of Tsinghua volunteers. Peking and Tsinhua are analogous to Harvard and MIT, respectively (Peking and Tsinghua are also next to each other geographically). While volunteers like us (not for the beijing olympic committee) were hastily "trained" for two days, the Beijing volunteers were trained for an entire month. Basically they were working for the Olympics from the first till the last day of their summer vacation.

The perks they get in the end: 3 classic 500RMB blue uniforms and the bragging right of being involved in the most important, grandiose, symbolic state sponsored entertainment extravaganza