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Greatest Games Ever or Potemkin Village?
By Victor Cha
PacNet Newsletter #44, Pacific
Forum, CSIS, Sep. 2008
Yes. With
the conclusion of the Beijing Olympics, one cannot but marvel at how well the
Chinese pulled off the 17 days of events. In the run-up to the Games,
skepticism proliferated about how the Olympics would be a disaster for China.
The journal Foreign Affairs devoted a set of articles enumerating how the
Olympics were blowing up in China’s
face. When the torch processions through London,
Paris, San Francisco,
and Seoul
were disrupted by demonstrators, even the Chinese started to look
nervous. In retaliation, Chinese citizens were in the streets
demonstrating against CNN and foreign retail outlets in China, decrying attempts to keep China down
during their moment in the sun. Did the Chinese snatch victory from the
jaws of defeat? What accounts for the unfounded pre-Olympic predictions
of disaster? And what are we to expect for the future?
China needed to hit four marks
for the Games to be a success. First, they needed to perform; their
athletes needed to win a lot of medals and compete seriously with the United States
for top medal count. Otherwise, it would have been an Olympics without
the beef – i.e., much fanfare and symbolism of a great China, but
without the performance. Second, they needed to host the Games well, in
terms of logistics and servicing athletes. Third, they needed clean
air. And fourth, they needed to marginalize political protests as best
they could.
From the
perspective of the Games’ organizers, China didn’t do too poorly.
While the Chinese teams did not win the overall medal count, coming in second
to the United States,
they did dominate the gold medal count. As hosts, they operated with
frightening efficiency in making the Games user-friendly. Few
complaints were heard from athletes about facilities or late
transportation. While the air in Beijing
has never been clean, this ended up being one of the biggest non-stories of
the Games. Not surprising, though, since the bar had been set so low in
advance of the Olympics, if there was anything resembling non-suffocating
air, the Chinese would have been relieved. Despite worries, none of the
outdoor endurance events were postponed. And much of the pre-game
hysteria about pollution proved unjustified, as was also the case in Mexico City (1968), Los Angeles
(1984), Seoul (1988), and Barcelona (1992).
Regarding the
protests, the political activists who sought to use the Games to highlight China’s
deficient human rights practices found sport to be their biggest
adversary. Despite all of the pre-game attention to the protests, once
the Games began, the world became captivated by the sports. Few if any
athletes used the stage to make political statements. Stories about
detainments of applicants for the designated “demonstration areas” were
buried under news about Michael Phelps, Usain Bolt,
and other athletes. NBC was unusually uncritical in its coverage of the
Games, going no deeper in its non-sports pieces than “travelogue-lite” segments. This might have been a business
decision since the network had the monopoly on sport coverage for the U.S. audience
while every other news outlet could have reported on politics. But, the
coverage contrasted with past Games, where there were as many critical pieces
about politics and society as there were “fluff pieces” about the host
city. In any event, the Chinese organizers must have felt their Games
were placed well in the U.S.
news cycle – with so much attention on the crisis in Georgia as
well as the upcoming Democratic and Republican conventions, there was little
room to report on anything but the sport stories.
The question
that emerges, then, is whether these Games were too perfect. Rather
than being the “genocide Olympics” as pre-game protestors complained about
the validating of a human rights-treading regime’s place in the world,
perhaps these were the “Potemkin Olympics.”
The picture perfect staging of a 17-day performance, down to the graphics
enhancement of fireworks over the Bird’s Nest, or the dubbing of children’s
singing voices, left everyone mesmerized and marveling at the
spectacle.
But beneath
this, some would argue, was an emptiness, an organic
quality of the Olympic spirit that was missing. The Olympic Green was
beautiful according to many accounts, but it was also quiet and barren as access
was restricted. Arenas were half-empty, but then filled with “phony
fans” (security-screened people were bused in) to ensure good camera shots of
spectator enthusiasm. The village-like global party atmosphere that was
so evident in Atlanta appeared strangely
absent in Beijing.
As I discuss in
a forthcoming book, the biggest political story about the Olympics has yet to
be written. This is the extent to which Chinese authorities will meet
the world expectations it has set for itself with these Games. The
Olympics was China’s
announcement to the world that it is a global power. But with this
prestige comes global responsibilities in foreign policy and in domestic
human rights. The expectations of the international
community as well as the Chinese people is for Chinese authorities to
do better. Let’s see if they can hit that mark – which would
bring the country far more international acceptance than any Olympics ever
could.
Victor Cha (chav@georgetown.edu)
is director of Asian Studies at Georgetown
University and senior
fellow at the Pacific Council for International Policy. He is the
author of “Beyond the Final Score: The Politics of Sport in Asia” (Columbia, 2008).
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