The London Olympics revealed some of the insecurity plaguing a confident, rising China
China bitterly recalls the months ahead of the Beijing Olympics in August 2008. That March the Tibetan capital, Lhasa, erupted in anti-Chinese rioting. Some foreign coverage of the unrest played down the violence committed by ethnic Tibetans, but reported the story of continued Chinese repression. Then the global Olympic-torch relay was disrupted in Paris and elsewhere by protests against the Chinese government, with Tibet the most prominent issue. Many Chinese saw this as a concerted campaign to spoil China’s hosting of the games, a moment of great national pride. A website set up then to police the foreign media’s reporting on China, anti-CNN.com, has changed its name to April Media and keeps up the battle. It employs some 30 people in Beijing and, says its young founder, Rao Jin, attracts 1m clicks a day.
The London Olympics were grist to its mill and to that of many ordinary citizens. Caixin quoted one popular online comment that tried to get its own back for some of the 2008 coverage by likening London 2012 to Berlin 1936, the Nazi games, and arguing that this year’s event was about “the soft encirclement of China”. Huang Yubin, head coach of the Chinese men’s gymnastics team, was blunter. “This is pillage, this is robbery,” he declared. His ire was provoked by the failure of China’s Chen Yibing to win a gold medal for his seemingly flawless performance on the rings. He was beaten by a Brazilian who everybody in China saw stumble slightly on dismounting. Chinese journalists say the Communist Party’s propaganda department issued guidance on this—don’t complain, rise above it—but not everyone was restrained. Even Cai Zhenhua, a former table-tennis star who is now a deputy sport minister, implied Chinese athletes suffered discrimination. The People’s Daily complained of “deliberate acts to make things difficult” for Chinese athletes.
The actual instances of such perceived bias were few. A hammer-thrower was stripped of her bronze medal after a mix-up over measurement. Two cyclists forfeited a gold medal for a technical infringement and two badminton players were shown the door for not trying (as were six players from other countries). Chinese journalists were outraged that a notice, in Chinese, in the Olympic press centre seemed to single them out with a request that they “respect the personal space” of the centre’s staff. None of it smacked of an anti-China conspiracy. As the Bible puts it in that same verse from Ecclesiastes: “Time and chance happeneth to them all.” Or, in Runyon’s computation of the odds governing human endeavour, “all life is six to five against.”
Most Chinese venom was reserved for the foreign treatment of a Chinese athlete who did win: Ye Shiwen, a 16-year-old swimmer. A phenomenal winning lap led some commentators to suggest she might have used performance-enhancing drugs. Many Chinese were furious. Xinhua, the official news agency, quoted a sports official voicing a common view: “they cannot accept China’s rise. That’s why they criticise Chinese athletes.” There may have been a grain of truth in the complaint that Miss Ye fell under suspicion because she is Chinese. But that was not proof of racism, or political bias. It was a legacy of the apparently systematic use of drugs by Chinese swimmers in the 1990s. That may have made it desperately unfair to Miss Ye. But to China?
The sense of victimhood is not confined to the Olympics. Nor is it wholly unjustified. Sport, after all, is almost everywhere a vehicle for nationalism. And other countries are indeed unnerved by China’s rise. America insists it does not want to “contain” China. But, with the “rebalancing” of its military deployment towards Asia, it surely has Chinese ambitions in mind. So, in the world of sport, many of America’s Olympians naturally saw the Chinese as their main competitors, and they and their compatriots were delighted to be back on top of the gold-medal table, after ceding the spot to China in Beijing in 2008. Some in America too may have seen this as a symbol of a broader global competition.
Many Chinese people understandably want both the respect due to an emerging superpower and the consideration and admiration due to a poor nation that has come a very long way in a very short time—and one that has done so, in sport as in so much else, largely by agreeing to follow the West’s rules. It is only a generation since sporting rivalries in China were smothered beneath a cloak of “friendship first; competition second”. Further back in history, Confucius would have been appalled by the very idea of the Olympic games, never mind the sour grapes. The noble-minded, he argued, never contend.
It’s the taking part
Some Chinese commentary on the games did aspire to more lofty Confucian detachment. Peevish nationalism was only one strain in discourse that included pride in China’s best performance at an Olympics overseas, criticism of the obsession with winning, and the view that to be a great power is not just to win medals, but not to care about what other countries say. Beijing News urged readers to “forsake the victim complex”, and adopt a mentality more suited to a world power. Similarly, China Youth News said it was “very tiring” to watch the games with a victim’s mentality. How true. They are, after all, only games.
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