I disagree: the most important thing in the olympic games is not to win but...

[Aleaf]

Today i translated some materials into chinese and there is a senten in it :"the most important thing in the olympic games is not to win but to take part." But after a sencond thought i suddenly found that i disagreeed it. I don't agree withe the spirit of the Olympic Games.

I think it it the most important thing to win the game. Suppose you take part in a contest but you say to youself:"it doen't matter whether I win the game or not" How could you win it with this kind of mind. Especially, for an athlet who has prepared the games for ages if he doesn't have the determination to win the game, what is the meaning he/she does it?

In our life we should make every effort to win something instead of just telling ourselves to take part.

When you failed the game just admit it and accept the failure."i have made every effort so i feel pround of myself" say it to yourselves is just a kind of consolation.

conest/competition is contest/competion. The aim of it is to win.
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[NinaZara]

Hello,

I think it is very important to win but is it the most important thing?

Suppose there was a game and nobody other than you took part, can you call yourself a winner?

I guess, taking part can be the most important thing after all.

Nina

[Jamie (K)]

[NinaZara]

Not just in China or Arabic countries, in other countries too.

It's not winning. People should create or use a different verb for it.

Nina

[Aleaf]

The present chinese authorities are very popular and much more popular than the former one. In fact in my opinion it is just second to the Mao authorities. I admire Chairman Hu Jintao and Premier Wun Jiabao. I feel both of them are very easy-going. By the way Wun is my citymate.
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[Jamie (K)]

How did they take power, Aleaf?

[Aleaf]

I don't know.(
Maybe the Party CCP marked them out for leaders.Or maybe NPC(National People's Congress)(The National People's Congress and people's congresses at various levels are the organs whereby the people exercise state power. )

Chinese don't care who is the leader.They care who can make their life better. And the present leader chance to be care for the lives of common chinese.

How did Mr. Bush take power?
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[Jamie (K)]

Mao took power by force, and he kept power by arresting and exiling his opposition, or having them killed. This is well documented. After his death, the leaders were probably chosen by the National People's Congress, which I understand the "people" don't really have any influence over.

President Bush took his position through an election, and he remained in office through another election. Elections for US president are not direct. People vote, and when a candidate wins a majority of votes in a certain state, he wins "electors" from that state. After the popular election is finished, the electors assemble and they cast votes for president. They are not obligated to vote for the same candidate that the people chose, but there is only one time in history when just one of them voted differently. The reason we don't have a direct popular vote for president is that if we did, two or three very populous states, like California and New York, would have too much influence over the election, and the candidates would ignore the needs of less populous states like Montana or Wyoming.

This system of using an "electoral college" can cause results that some people don't expect. Sometimes a candidate can win a majority of states, and therefore become president, even though he didn't win a majority of the popular vote. This has happened a couple of times in history, and most recently it was the 2000 election that put Bush into office. His opponent Al Gore won a majority of the popular vote, but George W. Bush won a majority of the states' "electoral" votes. Therefore, Bush became president and not Gore. There were many attempts to "prove" that Mr. Bush "stole" the election, but no matter who counted the votes -- Gore's supporters or Bush's supporters -- it still always came out that Bush had won according to the rules.

In his second election, Bush won both a majority of the popular vote and a majority of the state electoral votes, so he clearly won, except in the minds of people with big imaginations. Because our presidents are allowed to hold only two four-year terms, President Bush is not eligible to run in the next election, so we will have a different Republican candidate. In the US system, the president can't stay in office forever, so you won't see a US president wetting his pants and being fed by a nurse.

Just for perspective, keep this in mind: In the US, most elections are not won by the person with the majority of the votes, but the one who gets a plurality of the votes. This means that the person with the most votes wins, even if he had a minority of the votes. Bill Clinton is an example. Both times he ran for president, there were three major candidates instead of two, so the vote was split three ways. Clinton always got less than 50% of the vote, but with three candidates, 45% was enough to win. So basically, Clinton was always the president that most people didn't want.

[Aleaf]

Jamie:

if the present is the one most americans don't like, do you think it is still meaningful? Besides do you think most common people really know what politics means?

Jamie many foreigners don't like mao but Mao wasconsidered as one of the greatest figures ever in chinese history and will be forever. He made mistakes just as other people but his achievement is far greater than his failure.

Don't you think in fact any party in the world keeps their power by one or another form arresting or exiling its opponent? Mao might have arrested(i was not born at that time) or exiled his opponents but if he didn't do so, those opponents would assassinate him. I think it is a chicken-and-egg thing.

aleaf
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[Aleaf]

[Jamie (K)]

[Aleaf]

Mao was a monumental figure, but he was not a great man, except maybe in Chinese government propaganda. A great man does not commit the atrocities he did.

Whether he is a great man or not is decided by we chinese. We think he is. We don't care you foreigners comments on him, because you are not a chinese and don't know the history of china.You will not understand the feeling of chinese people around a century ago.I think if you start to study now using your whole life and you will understand .

20 million people

How did you get the figure? Who these 20 million people are?

You don't need to have been born then. It's in the history books.

It is in your history book which only focus on the mistakes made by him without consiering the background of it. Differnt people explain history in different way. Japanese textbook says there was no Nanking massacre at all just calls it an incident.

When jiang jieshi killed tons of chinese you americans said nothing and supported him as usual.But you treat Mao with double standard.


A great man does not commit the atrocities he did.

He never commited the atrocities. He just made some major mistakes in Great Agricultrual Revolutionary.

Step by step maybe china will adopt the election system but absolutely now. We need a stable development environment and focus all on economic development and political reform might be a heavy hit to our economy. Iraq realizes the so-called democracy, but situation there are worse.I don't hope my country fall into a chaos.

aleaf
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[Rosalisa]

Hi

Mao is considered a great figure in China. Though a lot of people hate, criticize and say he is guitly, his people respect him as God. It's very hard to say he is very bad. Maybe to the world, he is deemed as cruel and committed atrocities, but he has done a lot of significant things in China for its development despite the killings we read in the history book. My respectable history teacher told me that Pol Pot committed atrocities and in his view he was really eager to improve Cambodia faster than the neighbouring countries but in a very wrong way. He wanted to do a similar thing as did Mao but he failed. However, Mao did all these things people found horrifying and of course it's his mistake when he should have been held accountable for it. But do you see that he left what's important for the Chinese development? Perhaps, foreigners like me, don't understand how much Mao is respected but I believe they have reasons for it. But we don't encourage anybody to kill people once again. The history shouldn't repeat itself.

Just some ideas.
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[Pamela]

I think our principal goal in any competition is to win first and then participation.

[Aleaf]

Pamela:
I have the same opinion as you. It is just what i mean.
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