Five days are left in the Beijing Olympics, or as they are called in the U.S., the Michael Phelps reality show. NBC surprised even itself at the enormous U.S. viewing audience that was generated by Michael Phelps every time he swam, though in China he is not much of a story. There the press talks about China’s record 43 gold medals, twice as many so far as they achieved in the Athens games.

It does look like China’s state-sponsored athletic training program, modeled on the old Soviet and Eastern European medal producing machines, is performing as requested by the Politburo (I didn’t know they still had one of these in China). China is destined to grab the gold medal lead from the United States, proving that collective national spirit ultimately trumps the American individualistic ethic. That may be what it proves, but a lot of questions have come up about how little a role the individual plays in China’s state-organized games.

China has been relatively tight-lipped about its Project 119, designed following the Athens Olympics to boost the country’s gold medal count in 2008. What is known is that scouts were sent around the country looking for young athletes who might be able to compete in sports otherwise unknown in China. There is, for example, no amateur or professional kayaking circuit in China, which is also true for dozens of other sports, so China has had to create de novo athletes who can not only perform at the Olympic level but surpass all other competitors to take home the gold.

In many cases, there wasn’t even professional coaching or training staff, so China imported experts and put them under close governmental supervision so they understood the importance of achieving Project 119 goals. For the most part this has succeeded, though the government has not always chosen well. It only takes a modest knowledge of American sports culture to realize that you aren’t likely to go far in Olympic baseball if you’ve selected a former coach of the Chicago Cubs as your team manager.

One of the Project 119 organizers did let on that children with athletic potential were “given opportunities to mature quickly.” There is a natural pace at which any child’s body matures, so exactly what this means isn’t clear, but it doesn’t sound healthy. Many of China’s gold medal winters don’t look like they’ve matured much at all, especially in gymnastics where light body weight wins medals. All of them, judging by what we know of the training process, have practiced their skills over and over for as long as 12 hours a day, at least six days a week, for up to four years. They have been sequestered in training centres all this time, and it’s no wonder many of them after winning a medal express the hope that they can now visit their families for longer than a few days a year.

Olympic medalists from any country have more than likely lived and breathed their sports for years to achieve their success, but this is often in the company of family and friends. In China, the state becomes your family, friend, coach, counselor, provider, and task master. In state-sponsored sports programs, very little is left to chance, which is why the old Communist bloc countries were so keen on doping and steroid use.

To judge the intensity and focus of this form of athletic training, we can take some clues from China’s approach to the games outside of the area of competition. Everyone knows about the young vocalist at the Opening Ceremonies who at the last minute was replaced (at the request of a Poliburo member) by a much more photogenic girl who lip-synced the song. The original vocalist’s teeth were crooked, and apparently no individual imperfections were going to be allowed in this Olympics.

Take as an example the young women who assist the judges in the awards ceremonies, holding a platter of medals or bestowing bouquets of flowers. Among thousands of applicants, several hundred were chosen who fit a particular standard of beauty. The ratio of the width of the nose to the length of the face had to fall within a certain range, and the eyes had to be 30% of the length of the face. Complexion and body fat were all taken into consideration. These young girls, all within a limited age and height range, have been practicing this role for over a year. They have spent hours each day standing in high heels, and they have been required to practice their smile by holding a chopstick between their lips so that exactly eight teeth are showing.

Do you recall the young women who were wearing short white outfits and spent nearly two hours in constant motion as cheerleaders during the parade of nations portion of the Opening Ceremonies? These perky girls, who also performed an opening umbrella scene in the ceremony, practiced their performances for three years, and this was after they went through a selection process that included a examination of their naked bodies to ensure minimum standards of body fat, weight and height were met.. The rehearsals lasted at least 10 hours several days a week, and on days when the girls started rehearsal in the afternoon, they could go as late as 4:00 a.m. the next morning.

I was admiring one part of the Opening Ceremonies where a large rectangle of boxes moved up and down in constant motion, sometimes simulating ocean waves, other times mountains, always with a precision that left me thinking what a clever computer program they had devised. At the end, however, a surprise was revealed – there was no computer program. The hundreds of boxes were lifted up and down from inside by hundreds of men in flawless synchronization. How many years of practice did that take?

And what was the point? The performance until the end didn’t seem all that extraordinary because we have seen many similar things done by computers. We didn’t get to admire the men who put on this performance, because they received maybe 10 seconds of television time, and they weren’t the point anyway. What we were supposed to admire was the organization and management of this exercise. This was a metaphor for what the state could achieve in organizing over one billion Chinese for particular goals.

This was also an example of the diminished role of the individual when it came to state enterprises and governmental goals. Zhang Yimou, the Chinese filmmaker who directed the Opening Ceremonies, said that no matter the technical difficulty faced, he could always fall back on one basic resource – an unlimited supply of people. An unlimited supply of people has been the backbone of the Chinese manufacturing miracle, where industrial processes done by machinery in the West are duplicated much more cheaply in China using human labor.

True enough, some of these gold medal winners are going to be famous in China for a long time, so the individual is allowed a degree of personal recognition once the state’s goals have been met. But the tens of thousands of extras who spent years practicing even such basic tasks as smiling have only their fleeting moment of fame, and the knowledge that they served China’s interests. For most of them, that is apparently more than enough.

In America, on the other hand, we have an Olympics where one individual is responsible so far for over 30% of all the gold medals the country has achieved. Nobody is bemoaning this fact or worrying about what would have been accomplished if Michael Phelps wasn’t in Beijing swimming for the U.S. Instead, everybody is celebrating his success and athletic skill, and to be sure, a number of his medals were awarded for team efforts.

I can’t say whether the American method or the Chinese method of achieving success in the field of sports is better. Probably neither is ideal, and maybe a healthy approach would be somewhere in the middle. What can be said is that these approaches are very far apart, and they emanate from practices deep within these cultures. China and the U.S. are destined to interact with each other politically, economically, and militarily more and more as this century progresses. What these Olympics have shown is that we can expect these two cultures to clash, and a lot depends on how these conflicts are managed.