Beijing Olympics: China casts off a century of shame
If the Beijing Olympics are all about propaganda, one thing is certain: the propaganda works.
By Richard Spencer in Beijing
Last Updated: 12:23PM BST 02 Aug 2008
On Wednesday evening this week, as dusk fell, the roads around China’s National Stadium went into a familiar lockdown. Traffic ground to a halt as the police barricades went up, siphoning cars away along Beijing’s many other ring roads and dual carriageways. The masses on foot, though, kept coming, lining the pavements, climbing fences, storming footbridges until the members of the chengguan, an auxiliary police force, were called in to keep order, holding hands to control the throng.
There was nothing to see other than the brightly lit outside of the stadium, the playful steel Bird’s Nest. But a rehearsal of the opening ceremony was scheduled for 8pm, and those who could not wait any longer came in their hundreds and thousands just to gawp as the excitement unfolded, invisibly, inside. Many had the national flag, with its yellow stars on a red background, painted on their cheeks. I met one man who had brought his son from Lanzhou, on the other side of China: they could not stay for the Games, but young Haopeng, eight, would nevertheless witness history. “It’s a kind of education, about sport and about patriotism,” Xu Haitong said. “It’s to show him the country is powerful and strong again.”
The Games are nothing short of a sacred ritual for this atheist state, and it is hard to exaggerate the enthusiasm. When the organisers advertised for volunteers to deal with baffled foreigners unused to local ways, a million people applied. Most of the 100,000 selected came from universities around the country, such as Wang Wenjia, a 21-year-old medical student who has trained eight hours a day for two weeks.
“First of all, it’s a great opportunity to be part of the Games,” he said, switching back and forth between Chinese and nervous but enthusiastic English, which he has been practising for this moment. “This is a once-in-a-hundred-year thing. Though I can’t compete in the field as an athlete, I can give my heart as a volunteer, give my passion. To offer my service to the spirit of the Olympics is very important.”
He defined that spirit as being based around “peace and unity”, which is the official line. But it is Mr Xu’s “powerful and strong” that resonates abroad, and in the guts of a billion Chinese. These Games, as everyone knows, are not about synchronised swimming, or inspiring teenagers to take up volleyball or weightlifting. They are about China standing up, in all its controversial glory. To those in the West who regard this as a threat, the response is at worst hostile, at best puzzled. “We are owed this chance to show the result of our endeavours to the world,” says Volunteer Wang. “It is to show the progress we have made.”
The Games have been described, to the point of tedium, as a “coming-out party”, a quaint term suggesting a shy debutante from a privileged but sheltered background. This could not be further from China’s self-image, which is rooted in poverty, shame and suffering, inflicted both from without – as the history books insist – and from within. As Susan Brownell, an American athlete, anthropologist and author of Beijing’s Games: What the Olympics Mean to China, puts it: “They are collective redemption for the national suffering of the past century.”
It is easy to put this down to the Communist Party’s manipulation of Chinese emotions. After the famines and purges of the Mao years, the one residual claim to legitimacy that the party can make is that it has unified China, after it came close to falling apart from colonial and Japanese occupation and then civil war. The message is rubbed in constantly in history books, in newspaper articles, on endless period dramas on television: before the revolution, China was hopelessly reduced, largely by malevolent foreigners – the same foreigners who now criticise the country for its record on human rights, its rule over Tibet and its lack of democracy.
This is why it has proved so hard for the West’s governments and human rights groups to use the Olympics as leverage to bring progress. For a decade, world leaders claimed that engagement with China would bring political reform. Three years ago, Tony Blair declared the momentum unstoppable. Jacques Rogge, the president of the International Olympic Committee, has been more circumspect, but he has also interwoven his insistence that the Games are above politics with assurances that they would change China for the better.
Yet in many ways the reverse is true: the Games have been an excuse for the party to assert control over an increasingly disparate society. It has knocked down hundreds of thousands of homes, many private, and relocated their inhabitants as part of its building programme. Less tolerance than ever has been shown towards dissent, with the police and assorted thugs saying little more than “Olympics” as they beat and threaten lawyers and writers. The single-party state is more entrenched than ever – and while a successful Games would make it seem invincible, one beset by protests and complaints might also serve only to unite party and people in a defensive laager.
The nationalist mood reaches its extreme in bloggers such as Sima Nan, a television celebrity turned writer who lambasts the few liberal newspapers here for selling out to America. Mr Sima says that China is not ready for personal freedom, nor suited to one man, one vote. Liberals, he claims, want to do away with “Chineseness” and turn the country into a pale imitation of the West.
When I asked him whether the Olympics were not supposed to represent universal values, he said its values were very different from those we have in mind. “There is no contradiction between Chinese attitudes and the spirit of the Olympics,” he said, defining the spirit of the Olympics, very much as Wang Wenjia had done, as “peace, competition and unity” – in short, a global festival of mutual honour and indifference to one another’s political systems. Those who want to use the Games to push other agendas are, he says, like people who “talk dirty and smash the dishes when they are invited to a party”.
The readiness with which both the young and those who think of themselves as controversialist freethinkers, such as Mr Sima, mirror the party line is among the most depressing features of modern China. It takes an exceptionally beguiled heart not to want to take “peace” and “unity”, attach them to an Amnesty International banner, and beat the regime over the head with it.
Of course, there is more to China than the party, and more even to the Olympics. It was as far back as 1907 that a group of young men – who met through the YMCA, of all places – first expressed the hope that the country might one day stage the Games. The whole idea was relatively new, and three years before the Games had been held in America – another country on the rise. This is at once a reason the Chinese talk of the “hundred years’ dream”, and a reflection of how much many Chinese – whatever Mr Sima says – see America as a model rather than a rival.
In fact, Prof Brownell argues that much of the incessant Olympic propaganda has actually been intended to bring the country closer to the West. She has sat in on classroom projects where children are taught about the history of the Olympic movement and its ideals, without the heavy overlay of Communist theory that is so prevalent in other areas. Likewise, progressives have organised international exchanges and conferences in a whole range of fields, as a means of introducing Western standards.
“The Cultural Revolution generation that is now in charge have a sense that they were not well educated,” she says. “They hope to use the Games to shape the next generation, so that they are better prepared to take up their role in the world community.”
This is a more optimistic view than the party’s continued hostility to Western scrutiny might naturally evince. And Prof Brownell is the first to admit that some of the pre-Games disasters, in Tibet and elsewhere, have triggered a conservative backlash. Others believe there are serious tensions inside the leadership about the whole future of the reform agenda, which will be increasingly exposed by the simple question: what next? The Games have been a unifying force for the party, not just the country. Without them, politics, economics and the environment, the big issues for China’s future, are a limitless book.
The crowds on Wednesday were impressive, and the packed, passionate stadiums guaranteed when the gates open will be even more so. Whatever our feelings about the party that rules them, few of us will begrudge the Chinese people a moment of triumph. But their passion is also tense; on lesser sporting occasions – such as Japan’s victory in the final of football’s Asia Cup in 2004 – it has turned actively hostile to perceived enemies from abroad.
After the Games are all over, this feeling may need a new outlet – and we are entitled to ask of that, too, what next? Where will it be directed by the all-powerful political force at the top? If patriotic fervour continues to be directed at rebuilding a still fractured society, there is little to fear, except our own ability to compete. But nerves still hang heavy in the air
If the Beijing Olympics are all about propaganda, one thing is certain: the propaganda works.
By Richard Spencer in Beijing
Last Updated: 12:23PM BST 02 Aug 2008
On Wednesday evening this week, as dusk fell, the roads around China’s National Stadium went into a familiar lockdown. Traffic ground to a halt as the police barricades went up, siphoning cars away along Beijing’s many other ring roads and dual carriageways. The masses on foot, though, kept coming, lining the pavements, climbing fences, storming footbridges until the members of the chengguan, an auxiliary police force, were called in to keep order, holding hands to control the throng.
There was nothing to see other than the brightly lit outside of the stadium, the playful steel Bird’s Nest. But a rehearsal of the opening ceremony was scheduled for 8pm, and those who could not wait any longer came in their hundreds and thousands just to gawp as the excitement unfolded, invisibly, inside. Many had the national flag, with its yellow stars on a red background, painted on their cheeks. I met one man who had brought his son from Lanzhou, on the other side of China: they could not stay for the Games, but young Haopeng, eight, would nevertheless witness history. “It’s a kind of education, about sport and about patriotism,” Xu Haitong said. “It’s to show him the country is powerful and strong again.”
The Games are nothing short of a sacred ritual for this atheist state, and it is hard to exaggerate the enthusiasm. When the organisers advertised for volunteers to deal with baffled foreigners unused to local ways, a million people applied. Most of the 100,000 selected came from universities around the country, such as Wang Wenjia, a 21-year-old medical student who has trained eight hours a day for two weeks.
“First of all, it’s a great opportunity to be part of the Games,” he said, switching back and forth between Chinese and nervous but enthusiastic English, which he has been practising for this moment. “This is a once-in-a-hundred-year thing. Though I can’t compete in the field as an athlete, I can give my heart as a volunteer, give my passion. To offer my service to the spirit of the Olympics is very important.”
He defined that spirit as being based around “peace and unity”, which is the official line. But it is Mr Xu’s “powerful and strong” that resonates abroad, and in the guts of a billion Chinese. These Games, as everyone knows, are not about synchronised swimming, or inspiring teenagers to take up volleyball or weightlifting. They are about China standing up, in all its controversial glory. To those in the West who regard this as a threat, the response is at worst hostile, at best puzzled. “We are owed this chance to show the result of our endeavours to the world,” says Volunteer Wang. “It is to show the progress we have made.”
The Games have been described, to the point of tedium, as a “coming-out party”, a quaint term suggesting a shy debutante from a privileged but sheltered background. This could not be further from China’s self-image, which is rooted in poverty, shame and suffering, inflicted both from without – as the history books insist – and from within. As Susan Brownell, an American athlete, anthropologist and author of Beijing’s Games: What the Olympics Mean to China, puts it: “They are collective redemption for the national suffering of the past century.”
It is easy to put this down to the Communist Party’s manipulation of Chinese emotions. After the famines and purges of the Mao years, the one residual claim to legitimacy that the party can make is that it has unified China, after it came close to falling apart from colonial and Japanese occupation and then civil war. The message is rubbed in constantly in history books, in newspaper articles, on endless period dramas on television: before the revolution, China was hopelessly reduced, largely by malevolent foreigners – the same foreigners who now criticise the country for its record on human rights, its rule over Tibet and its lack of democracy.
This is why it has proved so hard for the West’s governments and human rights groups to use the Olympics as leverage to bring progress. For a decade, world leaders claimed that engagement with China would bring political reform. Three years ago, Tony Blair declared the momentum unstoppable. Jacques Rogge, the president of the International Olympic Committee, has been more circumspect, but he has also interwoven his insistence that the Games are above politics with assurances that they would change China for the better.
Yet in many ways the reverse is true: the Games have been an excuse for the party to assert control over an increasingly disparate society. It has knocked down hundreds of thousands of homes, many private, and relocated their inhabitants as part of its building programme. Less tolerance than ever has been shown towards dissent, with the police and assorted thugs saying little more than “Olympics” as they beat and threaten lawyers and writers. The single-party state is more entrenched than ever – and while a successful Games would make it seem invincible, one beset by protests and complaints might also serve only to unite party and people in a defensive laager.
The nationalist mood reaches its extreme in bloggers such as Sima Nan, a television celebrity turned writer who lambasts the few liberal newspapers here for selling out to America. Mr Sima says that China is not ready for personal freedom, nor suited to one man, one vote. Liberals, he claims, want to do away with “Chineseness” and turn the country into a pale imitation of the West.
When I asked him whether the Olympics were not supposed to represent universal values, he said its values were very different from those we have in mind. “There is no contradiction between Chinese attitudes and the spirit of the Olympics,” he said, defining the spirit of the Olympics, very much as Wang Wenjia had done, as “peace, competition and unity” – in short, a global festival of mutual honour and indifference to one another’s political systems. Those who want to use the Games to push other agendas are, he says, like people who “talk dirty and smash the dishes when they are invited to a party”.
The readiness with which both the young and those who think of themselves as controversialist freethinkers, such as Mr Sima, mirror the party line is among the most depressing features of modern China. It takes an exceptionally beguiled heart not to want to take “peace” and “unity”, attach them to an Amnesty International banner, and beat the regime over the head with it.
Of course, there is more to China than the party, and more even to the Olympics. It was as far back as 1907 that a group of young men – who met through the YMCA, of all places – first expressed the hope that the country might one day stage the Games. The whole idea was relatively new, and three years before the Games had been held in America – another country on the rise. This is at once a reason the Chinese talk of the “hundred years’ dream”, and a reflection of how much many Chinese – whatever Mr Sima says – see America as a model rather than a rival.
In fact, Prof Brownell argues that much of the incessant Olympic propaganda has actually been intended to bring the country closer to the West. She has sat in on classroom projects where children are taught about the history of the Olympic movement and its ideals, without the heavy overlay of Communist theory that is so prevalent in other areas. Likewise, progressives have organised international exchanges and conferences in a whole range of fields, as a means of introducing Western standards.
“The Cultural Revolution generation that is now in charge have a sense that they were not well educated,” she says. “They hope to use the Games to shape the next generation, so that they are better prepared to take up their role in the world community.”
This is a more optimistic view than the party’s continued hostility to Western scrutiny might naturally evince. And Prof Brownell is the first to admit that some of the pre-Games disasters, in Tibet and elsewhere, have triggered a conservative backlash. Others believe there are serious tensions inside the leadership about the whole future of the reform agenda, which will be increasingly exposed by the simple question: what next? The Games have been a unifying force for the party, not just the country. Without them, politics, economics and the environment, the big issues for China’s future, are a limitless book.
The crowds on Wednesday were impressive, and the packed, passionate stadiums guaranteed when the gates open will be even more so. Whatever our feelings about the party that rules them, few of us will begrudge the Chinese people a moment of triumph. But their passion is also tense; on lesser sporting occasions – such as Japan’s victory in the final of football’s Asia Cup in 2004 – it has turned actively hostile to perceived enemies from abroad.
After the Games are all over, this feeling may need a new outlet – and we are entitled to ask of that, too, what next? Where will it be directed by the all-powerful political force at the top? If patriotic fervour continues to be directed at rebuilding a still fractured society, there is little to fear, except our own ability to compete. But nerves still hang heavy in the air
