First go to the New York Times website and read David Brooks' column about collectivism and the opening ceremony:

The world can be divided in many ways — rich and poor, democratic and authoritarian — but one of the most striking is the divide between the societies with an individualist mentality and the ones with a collectivist mentality.

This is a divide that goes deeper than economics into the way people perceive the world. If you show an American an image of a fish tank, the American will usually describe the biggest fish in the tank and what it is doing. If you ask a Chinese person to describe a fish tank, the Chinese will usually describe the context in which the fish swim.

Then go to James Fallows' blog and read his fisking of Brooks' column:

This is the kind of thing you can say only if you have not the slightest inkling of how completely different a billion-plus people can be from one another. Beijingers from Shanghainese,  Guangdong entrepreneurs from farmers in Sichuan, Tibetans from Taiwanese, people who remember the Cultural Revolution from those who don't, people who remember the famines of the Great Leap Forward from people who've always had enough. The guy across the street from his brother. His daughter from his wife. People hanging on in big state enterprises from those starting small firms. People who stayed in the villages from those who came to the city for jobs. Christians from Buddhists. Hu Jintao from Jiang Zemin,  Olympic weightlifters from Olympic tennis players, Yao Ming from Liu Xiang, Wen Jiabao from Edison Chen  -- and while we're at it, Filipinos from Koreans,  Japanese from Chinese, Malaysian Chinese from Malaysian Malays. Lee Kuan Yew from Kim Jong Il. People from Jakarta from people in Seoul. Hey, they're all "Asians".

A few quick and unworthy thoughts to add:

When pat "scientific" examples are offered to make sweeping points I really like a citation (although the newspaper column format isn't particularly friendly to that, a hyperlink will do).

In semi-defense of Brooks, I don't think an inclination to collectivism at a social level excludes personal individuality or even sub-cultural differences.

Still, I think Fallows is right to take Brooks to task on this one*. I think using the Olympic opening ceremony to draw large conclusions about Chinese society is a dangerous game. Better to use it to draw large conclusions about the government's obsession with micromanagement of propaganda.

*Plus I'm sympathetic to Fallows because of his approachable writing style and endearing nerdy streak.

Update:

Speaking of "nerdy", don't miss Language Log's dissection of Brook's use of scientific studies to support his assertions. It's somewhat academic (perforce, perhaps), but interesting. The money quote:

As for David Brooks, he wants to use this stuff as the scientific foundation for the hypothesis that western societies are fundamentally and essentially individualist while Asian societies are fundamentally and essentially collectivist. That might be true, but it's a long and winding road to that conclusion from the complex and equivocal results of various experiments on how people group various triples of words and pictures, or describe undersea scenes. And we should be wary of following David Brooks too far down that road, given that he can't be bothered to keep straight who did which experiments, or whether the subjects were Chinese or Japanese, or whether it was the Americans or the Asians who more often mentioned the focal fish, or essentially any of the evocative details that he loves to use to bring his ideas to life for his readers.

 Indeed. H/T SYZ and Thomas Crampton.