Chinese Flash-Card Supremacy

If visitors from China ever show up at an American college football game, one sight won't require an explanation --the half-time flash-card show. Reason: those sweeping murals created in the stands by massed thousands of people holding up brightly colored cards are also a feature of sports events in China The one big difference there is that instead of producing innocent U.C.L.A.s and expanding Stanford s's, the Chinese concoct giant propaganda posters (see color) and execute them on a scale and with a precision--that is awesome.

That was evident in Peking recently at the Third National Games, a 17-day internal Chinese Olympics. The huge grab bag of a gala involved more than 10,000 athletes vying in dozens of events including track, rowing, shooting, martial arts and chess. During the opening ceremonies at the 80,000-seat Workers' Stadium, the Chinese practiced their flash-card magic; more than 8,000 people were pressed into service to flash poster-size cards. The result of this collective enterprise: "Ode to the Red Flag," a kaleidoscope of socialist realism scenes, beginning with the message:

Translation: Hail the Victorious Opening of the Third National Games.

From there on out, the propaganda intensified, as the card-carrying faithful created an oversize portrait of Chairman Mao, a blockbuster mural of Chinese industrial development and pictorial tributes to China's performing arts, medical services (including a flash-card diagram showing acupuncture of an ear) and table tennis, the nation's No. 1 sport. After the mass-performance art, the games could have seemed anticlimactic. But since China is making a concerted bid to participate in next summer's Olympics in Montreal, the National Games became unofficial Olympic trials. At least three world marks for pistol shooting were set. Not to mention standards for flash-card displays.

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