To a surge of jubilant national pride China for the first time has won more gold medals at the Olympics than any other country. For China's leaders, the gold medal haul is wonderful news after a grim few months that have seen crippling snowstorms, upheaval in Tibet and a deadly earthquake.
America, the sporting superpower, has been defeated. Russia, third-ranking at the Athens Olympics in 2004, has been left in the dust. But some Chinese are openly questioning China's route to Olympic triumph: unfettered investment by a gold-fixated government that controls the careers of athletes.
And it's not as though China squeaked past the competition -- its margin to say the least was comfortable. The state-controlled press has so far mostly avoided crowing (as indeed it should, if China's huge population is taken into account).
Officials have doggedly pretended that China cares more about promoting international friendship than about winning. But the gold tally achieves a long-standing goal of Olympic supremacy.
A few newspapers have already called the medal count a symbol of the nation's rise. Doubtless many others will join in when the games are over and tact allows.
This year China is celebrating the 30th anniversary of the launch of the "reform and opening" policies that have swept away state controls over much of economic and cultural life. But the sporting system, modeled on the Soviet Union's, has survived.
Under a regime known as "juguo," or "whole nation," the state identifies talented young children, puts them into special schools and, if they are good enough, employs them as athletes, with government-paid coaches.
Juguo's impact has become evident internationally only since China rejoined the International Olympic Committee in 1979 and competed five years later at the Soviet-boycotted Los Angeles games. China's gold medal tally fell at Seoul in 1988, when the Soviet Union turned up, but has soared since then.
Central planning in sports has its limitations. After the 2000 Olympics in Sydney, China adopted a new strategy to maximize gold medals. It was dubbed "project 119" after the number of golds in China's weakest sports: track-and-field, swimming and other water events such as rowing. The idea was to win more golds in these by pouring more state financing into them.
The results have not been striking, so far anyway. In 2000 China won one gold in these sports. In 2004 it won four, and three so far this year.
An injury forced China's best hope for a gold on the track, Liu Xiang, to abandon his defence of his 110-metres hurdles title. Some Chinese media have described Liu's win in 2004 as a breakthrough for the yellow race in an event dominated by black people.
Amid great enthusiasm in China for the country's sporting achievements, there has also been some remarkably frank questioning of the juguo approach.
The Web site of Xinhua, China's state-run news agency, this week published a commentary by a provincial newspaper which described profligate spending on sporting facilities reserved for the athletic elite as a "waste of the state's precious financial resources" and "extremely unfair" to the public.
It argued that the General Administration of Sport (the sports ministry) should be scrapped and state funding for professional athletes withdrawn. Government money should go instead to sport in schools and universities. Juguo, it said, "seriously deviated from the Olympic spirit."
China Youth Daily, a newspaper controlled by the Communist Party's Youth League, published a commentary on its Web site saying China should learn from America (not something Chinese officials often admit), with its sports clubs and commercial backing for athletes.
More and more Chinese athletes are taking commercial sponsorship but they have to share the rewards with the government. Another newspaper lamented that young athletes missed out on a normal childhood.
Supporters of juguo argue that without it China might end up like India, which only this year won its first individual gold medal (in air-rifle shooting). But an article on the Web site of a Shanghai newspaper argued China should give up sporting elitism even if it meant getting fewer medals. "I'm afraid India is already ahead of us in this respect," wrote this heretic.
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