<p>Laugh but go back and look at the huge number of empty seats at every event except the opening and closing. Even the Gymnastic Final had big swathes of empty seats.</p>
<p>Every Chinese national was fizzing with pride–they would have been thrilled to be in those seats.</p>
<p>For a country with 1b citizens, the inability to produce 500K “conformist” spectators for two weeks of Olympic games, less than 1/20th of 1% of that population, is worrying.</p>
<p>Shame on the Western media for dropping the issue too.</p>