How to Enjoy the Olympic Games before It Starts? ---- Contemporary Chinese nationalist discourse and Beijing Olympic Games.

Through analyzing the initial (textual) reactions to Beijing's winning the 2008 Olympic bid, the authors argue that the paradoxes inherent in contemporary Chinese nationalist narrative are the very loci that establish the fantasy frame that makes the ecstatic reactions possible. Using a Lacanian/Zizekian framework, the authors examine the position the Chinese political regime takes in manipulating both populist nationalist discourse and the developmentalist discourse by staging similar events. Different from the argument that such staging is forced and reversed Orientalism, the authors argue that the regime's operations agree with Lacan's pervert/analyst's discourse. It is the very distance the regime sustains from the nationalist discourse and the public's willingness to erase the regime's operation/manipulation from it that render the nationalist ideological discourse effective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]