How heartening it must have been to Hu Jintao when, on the opening day of the Beijing Olympics, Vladimir Putin succeeded at the difficult task of looking like a more primitive leader than George Bush. The gargantuan scale of the ceremonies and Putin’s cameo performance as the Russian invader of Georgia marked the successful completion of a global media reorientation, focusing not on trajectories between east and west but between east and east on a corridor linking Beijing and the Central Asian choke points of the world’s oil and gas pipelines.
