Confucius lost in the fireworks

“We’ve been bombarded by Western prejudice for years. So much of the Australian media’s analysis of China over the past century has been on Western terms, serving Western ideological and political ends.”

Harms concedes that such understandings are not uniquely Australian. “The Chinese have had to deal with the implications of Western views for many years,” he observed.

Isn’t Harms a product of his time? How come he’s such an odd man out? The morning his article was published, he had been on the ABC TV sports program, Offsiders, and basically said the same thing.

The New Sunday Times caught up with Harms. No, he doesn’t accept that he’s the odd man out. Fellow Offsiders guest panellist Gerard Whateley shares his sentiment, he finds comfort. Harms offers as further evidence his Fitzroy beer mates.

Australians are known for their rite of passage travelling the world after their break from studies before they launch into work. There are those whom Harms describes as “yobbo” travellers as much as there are others socialised into “the spirit of human fraternity".

Harms sees himself as no different. It’s just incidentally that you discover that the former high school teacher is a student of culture.

He’d completed his Master’s in Australian Studies part-time. And he knows a bit about the Olympic ideal, having “graduated” from a two-month sabbatical at the International Olympic Academy in Olympia, where he gave a presentation on the nexus between sport and nationalism.

Harms affirms his published view, talking to the New Sunday Times: coverage of Beijing 2008 had been of Western expectations on Western terms. There is no concept of what China has been over its long history.

Harms’ is a view informed by University of Melbourne sociologist Dr Gao Jia, who hopes Beijing 2008 would mark a point of departure for China - and the world - from the trauma of imperialist intervention such as the Opium War.

Gao takes a view of the Olympics beyond the sporting arena of the founder of the modern Games, Baron Pierre de Coubertin. It encompasses the sociology of politics, economics and international relations.

The Chinese national, who has lived in Melbourne for 20 years, is optimistic - for China, and the world. And not just out of wishful thinking.

Beijing 2008 validates a trend Gao had picked from the mid-1990s. That’s the “he” (Hanyu pinyin second tone) that Gao sensed from then, of a revivalism of Confucianism.