Beijing Olympics’ Many Controversies: For Worse and For Better
Many things have been said and written about the Beijing 2008 Olympics, and although laudation was the dominant tone of the coverage, critics and controversies have sometimes grabbed the limelight.
Nobody would deny that overall these Games have been a success, both for China and the Olympics, the former being seen as a world powerhouse in its own right and the latter as a worldwide mega event able to capture the attention of billions — including, so we were told, an usually incredulous American audience stranded at home because of the credit crunch crisis hitting the real economy.
Regarding the Olympics proper, the prevailing message, as we were reminded by Jacques Rogge, the President of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), during the opening ceremony on August 8th goes far beyond “performance alone”, the Olympics being a “peaceful gathering” of numerous human communities — 204 this time — in the spirit of “excellence, friendship and respect”. The leitmotiv of the Games is also that participation is more important than winning, and that money does not play a dominant role. All these values seem not only noble, albeit a bit idealistic, but also much needed, whatever the time and place. Yet, of course contradictions exist, and without venturing into the ever controversial actual cases or suspicions of doping and the extreme commercialization of sports, the nature of competition means that the attention is primarily focused on the winner: winner of the race, winner of the day, overall winner, record breaker, all-time best, etc.
There are indeed “too many ways to be No. 1”, to borrow the title of a Hong Kong movie: China is No. 1 by the total number of its gold medals — 51 altogether; the United States is No. 1 by an astounding 110 medals won during these Games, regardless of their metal; The Bahamas is No. 1 in terms of medals won per capita — one medal for 153,726 people; the Jamaican Usain Bolt is “the fastest man alive” by running the 100m in just 9.69s; and last but not least, the American swimmer Michael Phelps now holds the record of gold medals won in a single Olympics and the record of Olympic gold medals ever won by an athlete (beating the old record established by Leonidas of Rhodes in the 2nd Century BC). Silver and bronze medalists only make the headlines in their country of origin, and history only remembers the ones who stroke gold.
China and the Chinese government wanted to strike gold and organize the “best Games ever” (at least while the Games lasted): what does it take for a one Party-state to just do that? For us, yet again, the contradiction and the controversies are born from a divergence between the intent or the so-called original spirit and the reality, in short the discrepancy between the world as we would like it to be and the world as it is.
The nature of the controversies before the Games
While looking closely at the main controversies that have partly tainted the 2008 Games, one soon realizes that they all point in the same direction.
Most of the controversies that aroused during the months leading-up to the Games themselves were aimed at trying to expose the “ugly face” of the Chinese government, in total contradiction with the “peaceful rise of an harmonious nation” that Beijing had been trying hard to convey since 2002. On the international stage, the lack of commitment on China’s side regarding Darfur and its reluctance to press the Sudanese government to end war crimes in that area had been the main focal point and culminated with the withdrawal in February 2008 of American filmmaker Steven Spielberg as the artistic director of the opening and closing ceremonies of the Games precisely on the ground that China was not doing enough to end “human sufferings” there. Domestically, it was of course the record of China regarding human rights that was denounced as “having worsened” since 2001, the year it was awarded the organization of the Olympics for the 2008 edition. International organizations for the defense of human rights, such as Amnesty International or Reporters Sans Frontières (RSF), had called on and off for either an overall boycott of the Beijing Olympics or at least a partial boycott by head of states of the opening ceremonies.
The riots that took place in Tibet in March and the repression that followed, albeit not clearly and often properly documented because of the media blackout imposed by the authorities, led to a louder international uproar. Protests organized by Tibet sympathizers along the torch relay around the world, with disruptions culminating in London and Paris, came to symbolize, at least in medias outside of China, the illegitimacy of China in holding the Games precisely because its government had shown such
disrespect for human beings. As heads of state threatened to boycott the opening ceremonies, the bad coverage China was getting in medias all around the world was matched by an equally boisterous sense of insulted pride expressed by many Chinese citizens both from the inside and the outside. Whether these reactions were partly “engineered” by the propaganda machine of the party-state is irrelevant, but the cacophonic role played by the Internet gave an indication of what was to come: in an environment where there is no transparency and the usual checks and balances are impaired, rumors, half-cooked truths, denunciations and suspicions become the only basis for one to make her or his judgment.
All this was forgotten for a while because of the immense sympathy China attracted in the wake of the horrendous earthquake that hit Sichuan on May 12th, killing in total some 70,000 people. In such situations, humankind becomes one again, and only human life counts, all the rest being dismissed as insignificant, not to say petty. The Chinese government showed, at least for a week or so, a remarkable openness regarding the coverage of the whole disaster: uncensored accounts and images flourished everywhere, and even on state-run TV, the usual very carefully storyboarded news programs disappeared for a while. China also welcomed different forms of aid from the outside, limits being imposed only on the grounds of professionalism and safety. This indeed highly contrasted with the handling of the catastrophe caused by Cyclone Nargis in Burma just 10 days before: if the Burmese military junta called for help in the UN, basic assistance and emergency relief measures remained openly unwelcome in the early days of a disaster that ultimately resulted in 146,000 casualties.
Finally, renewed perceived threats of terrorist activities, especially coming from Xingjiang (Chinese Turkestan), during the month of July made the tightening up of security measures in Beijing almost natural, even more so after the attack of Chinese policemen in the city of Kashgar in Xinjiang on August 4th left sixteen of them dead. In comparison, the blocking of several international websites a few days before in the newsrooms where thousands of accredited foreign journalists were working seemed almost inconsequential and soon fiddled when the Chinese authorities reestablished the connections, including the one to a hotly debated very negative report of Amnesty International on human rights in China. Thousands of journalists seemed content to see their tiny pocket of freedom restored, just like businessmen residing in China are satisfied as long as THEY can watch CNN in their 5-star hotel room or posh villa in luxury condominiums. To be fair to most of the journalists, their accreditation, in any case, did not go beyond the coverage of the Games, and only the Games…
The nature of the controversies during the Games
When it comes to the controversies that have aroused during the Games, yet again, they all point in the same direction: the party-state in China would do whatever it deemed fit to make China look impressive and up to the rank of world number 1 in waiting. In short, only the end counted, whatever the means. In the words of architect Ai Weiwei, the father of the bird nest stadium in Beijing, these Games were to be a “public relations sham”, and of course some means seemed more palatable than others.
From our own point of view, some of these controversies are benign and more an indication of our inability to see the forest for the trees. The manipulation of the image of the Olympics falls in this category. Both the digital editing of the fireworks and the dubbing of little Lin Miaoke by Yang Peiyi on the ground that the latter was not good-looking enough during the opening ceremonies cannot and should not be given more significance than they already have. It for sure indicates that the organizers would take no chance at being seen less than perfect, but is that an indication of the nature of the dark side of the regime? These accommodations with reality for mega events happen everywhere, including in good old democracies. Oh they have to be exposed for sure, but to what end? Did anybody expect art in one of the most commodified sport gathering ever?
The cost of the whole event is more open to debate, but this is more a question of priority setting and an issue that has to be addressed by any government. Out of the US$43 billion spent on the Beijing Olympic Games since 2001, most of this staggering sum (although it represents a mere 15% of the US$280 billion of foreign reserves accumulated by China in the first half of 2008 alone) has been spent on much-needed infrastructure projects, including a new international airport terminal for the capital, new subway lines and of course new sport facilities. Suffice to say that before the
Bird Nest Stadium came into existence, the Workers’ Stadium was the landmark national stadium, and although it went under renovation, it had been constructed in 1959!
Of far greater importance were of course other incidents, but not always for the reason that one might suspect. The fierce clearing-up of millions of people, be them former residents or migrant workers, from the vicinities of the Olympic venues had taken place long before the event, but it resurfaced when it was reported that Beijing petitioners Wu Dianyuan and Wang Xiuying, two old-age women who had been petitioning the government since they were forcibly evicted from their homes in Beijing in 2001, had been ordered to serve a one-year term of Reeducation-Through-Labor after repeatedly applying for permits to hold demonstrations in one of the three Beijing “protest zones” during the Olympics. Xinhua had earlier reported that all demands to hold demonstrations in these zones had been turned down by the Public Security. And then, what could be said of the rough treatment reserved to the parents of children who died in the collapse of shoddy school buildings during the Sichuan earthquake to forbid them from more publicly voicing their legitimate grievances to a wider audience? Yet again, what needs to be contended is that censorship does exist in China and can be pretty brutal, not that the Chinese government would have supposedly “broken its word” by not awarding the media the complete freedom to report it had been promised back in 2001 by an ecstatic vice president of the Beijing Olympic Committee.
Finally, as aptly demonstrated by the opening ceremonies and the “one world, one dream” motto, these Games were thought of by the Chinese government as an inescapable showcase of prowess, past and present. Not one single glitch was to be tolerated, even if it meant that performers were to behave like automats only surpassed by North Korean soldiers — dixit Zhang Yimou himself — and that stadium benches would have to remain half empty during the 17 days of the Olympics. If the peaceful rise and harmonious development of China were the thread of the message, what was really on display was the unquestionable affirmation of power, inside and outside the stadiums. As Yu Jie, a 35-year old free thinker under surveillance since 2004 because of his many writings denouncing the lack of freedom of expression in his country, wrote in one of his online postings on August 1st: “Am I allowed not to like the Olympics?”
High expectations, great disappointments
Ultimately, one cannot stop but feeling that these Olympics were actually controversial because of their inability to match, on the political side, the expectations they had themselves given rise to. Wasn’t it self-defeating for Jacques Rogge to declare in 2002 that he was “convinced that the Olympic Games [would] improve human rights in China”? And then, we were naïve to believe it. We built up our own expectations that sport had anything to do with regime change, when China has precisely demonstrated over 30 years of “reform and opening-up policy” that a communist party-state can modernize the most populous country at the fastest pace in history without ceding an inch of its monopoly over political power.
What is more worrying in one sense is that seasoned and highly respectable Chinese political activists could even place a hope in the whole event, just like they had placed hope in a possibly contagious effect of the so-called “colour revolutions” that took place in Georgia and Ukraine in 2003/2004. Veteran dissident Chen Ziming stretched the idea to the limit when he declared at the end of July that he formed the hope that Beijing 2008 would resemble more Seoul 1988 than Berlin 1936. China has got nothing in common neither with Korea in the 1980s or with Germany in the 1930s. In December 1987, Roh Tae-woo had been democratically elected President of South Korea, and the Seoul Olympics came more as a climax of the change at work than one of its causes. And of course, despite the Arendtian assumption that all totalitarianisms are in essence the same, the last time Chinese society had to live under an inescapable veil of terror dates back to the early 1970s.
What went almost unnoticed though was the fear expressed by Chen Ziming in the next sentence that ultimately these Games would change nothing. And then the rattling of the Russian army’s steel-tipped boots encroaching deep into Georgian territory came to be heard… Who was the real bully now?
MA in Political Studies (Paris Institute of Political Studies), Eric Sautedé is a lecturer at the Inter-University Institute of Macau and a regular contributor to Macau Closer.
