The Year of the Tiger began with great concern over a surge in COVID-19 cases and escalating Ukraine-Russia tensions.
Despite the global public health and geopolitical crises, China launched an elaborate and choreographed ceremony to start the Winter Olympics, making Beijing the world’s first city to host the summer and winter Games.
A stark political message is embedded in the leadership summit between Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) and Russian President Vladimir Putin, which took place before the opening ceremony, solidifying deep bilateral ties against the US. How Xi and Putin set out to create a multipolar world with different centers of power remains unclear.
Sports and politics are inseparable in an age of hyper-nationalism, and this year’s Olympics is no exception.
China has been keen to exploit the international sports platform to marginalize Taiwan. When Beijing sought re-entry into the International Olympic Committee (IOC) in 1975, it immediately called for the expulsion of Taipei.
Many countries yielded to the Chinese demand. Canada refused to let Taiwanese athletes compete in the 1976 Montreal Summer Games unless the athletes competed as “Taiwan” instead of the Republic of China and did not use its national flag or anthem.
After joining the IOC in 1979, China launched an extensive campaign to isolate Taiwan in many international sports federations. Taiwan fought hard to prevent its expulsion from the then-International Badminton Federation and the then-International Amateur Athletic Federation.
China perceives any achievement in the global sports arena as a zero-sum game. There has been a policy shift from an earlier emphasis on international friendship through athletic competition to an obsession with winning more gold medals.
From the 1980s onwards, China’s Olympic strategy sought to build national pride and gain international prestige. Beijing sports authorities made the Chinese National Games a testing ground to identify and prepare professional athletes for the Olympics.
China has since embraced a neoliberal model that focuses on commercializing sporting events.
It is as important to promote elite and team sports as it is to pursue infrastructure development and domestic investment.
The 2008 Summer Olympics was not only a competitive occasion for the world’s elite athletes, but also a sports gala for ordinary people. Such thinking encouraged the increased participation of volunteers and spectators in a manner similar to the strategy of popular mobilization in the Maoist era.
Today, the changing balance of power manifests in the international sports landscape, with new players replacing old ones.
During the 1990s, the West referred to the 1988 Seoul Summer Olympics as a model of informal diplomacy, using the Olympic bid to urge autocratic regimes to implement structural reforms and improve human rights.
When China won the bid to host this year’s Winter Games, the world hoped that China would stop crackdowns on political dissent, suspend the “re-education” camps for Uighurs and other minorities in Xinjiang, and permit media freedom. This hope has yet to materialize.
China’s Olympic dream has come true, but the dream is rooted in a self-perceived history of national humiliation suffered at the hands of foreign imperialists in the past two centuries.
The Chinese Communist Party leadership is using the Winter Games to consolidate national unity, and to demonstrate the superiority of its top-down governance in political integration and mobilization.
David Shambaugh wrote last year in his book China’s Leaders: From Mao to Now: “Opening a system and a country shows confidence — closing up and cracking down reveals lack of it.”
In times of peace and stability, China’s vertical ruling structure guarantees an efficient control of bureaucratic decisionmaking and projects an image of commanding leadership under Xi’s single-person rule.
However, when everything starts to go wrong, this mode of autocratic governance cannot ensure the steady flow of reliable information and expertise.
Notwithstanding last week’s spectacular opening performances by athletes and artists, this institutional barrier makes it immensely difficult for China to act on the Olympic vision of international goodwill and partnership.
Joseph Tse-hei Lee is professor of history at Pace University in New York City.
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