Yao Ming and Beijing 2008

It is impossible to discuss Yao Ming without discussing China and this seemingly simple photo tells us several things about that country and the context of the Olympics.

Yao wears a suit, but is a basketball star; the child wears basketball clothing, but is not a professional basketball player. This reversal is the clue that tunes us in to the intricate swaps that constitute the symbolic order of the picture.

In the background, we should know that Yao himself is the central symbol of the future of China- the first Chinese superstar of an American (for that read 'modern') sport. The child, obviously enough, is a symbol of youth, innocence, incompleteness. Yao (the future of China) wears the suit of globalised capitalism. The child stands in for Yao at the present (a basketball player). This then builds into a story about national maturation and development: Yao is China's future, which is holding up China's present (the child). Thus, China's present is in a state of immaturity and growth - a child (when Yao plays basketball, he is China's present) while China's future is one in which Yao (China) has grown out of his basketball shirt into the suit of business. And now we see how effortlessly Yao, China's future, holds up China's present: unwaveringly, easily, confidently, looking straight into the camera. Interpreting this, it becomes: the future of China, sustaining and guiding its present deliberately and confidently, without doubt or fear, looking out to the world.

China in this picture is therefore a place where the future sustains the present - it is driven by hope. It is a place in which nationhood can find symbolic form in one man, a basketball player who works mostly in America. It is a place where, fun and games over, the future is business. Finally, the CCP doesn't need to force the population to these conclusions, like they once did – it is willingly consumed in the Chinese version of a global men's magazine. Free markets and sport now do China's nation-building work.