- China left with little room to showcase its national image and burnish its reputation this time around
- Covid-19 pandemic and political controversies force organisers to settle for ‘simple, safe and splendid’
Fireworks of red and gold faded to give way to 2,008 performers beating the fou – an ancient percussion instrument – while chanting excerpts from Confucius’ Analects.
It was the night of August 8, 2008, the opening ceremony for China’s first Olympic Games. Beijing was not only eager to flaunt China’s rich history and culture but also its brand new stadiums, its ability to run an international event smoothly and its talented athletes who went on to win more gold medals than any other nation.
The New York Times reported at the time: “And if the astonishing opening ceremonies of the 2008 Olympic Games lavished grand tribute on Chinese civilisation and sought to stir an ancient nation’s pride, there was also a message for an uncertain outside world: Do not worry. We mean no harm.”
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Final preparations under way for artificial snow production at Beijing Winter Olympics
In 2008, China’s human rights record in Tibet became the focal point of condemnation, with the actress Mia Farrow labelling the Olympics that year the “genocide Games”. George W. Bush, a Republican, became the first sitting US president to attend an Olympics abroad, prompting The Times then to brand him complicit with “increased repression”.
It said: “Very few people today harbour illusions, unlike in 2008, that the privilege of hosting the event will moderate the country’s authoritarian policies. China then sought to meet the world’s terms. Now the world must accept China’s.”
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But scholars who study Chinese sports development have said China would struggle with repeating its feat in 2008 and boosting its soft power.
“Basically at that time, Beijing tried so hard to convey to the world that a new China has emerged: one which is powerful, which is rich, which is cosmopolitan,” Xu Guoqi, a history professor at the University of Hong Kong, said.
“Fast forward to this year’s Beijing Olympic Games, Beijing is not trying to please the whole world. If you come, you come. If you don’t, so be it,” Xu, who studies China’s Olympic ambitions, added.
“They want to use these Games to convey to the world [that] the world is supposed to embrace China, to accept China as an equal, as a powerful nation on Earth.”
Declining ties and dimming interest
China took a hard-line response, with its foreign ministry saying that boycotting nations could not sit out the Games if they were never invited.
Kingsley Edney, a lecturer in Chinese politics at the University of Leeds, said it was unlikely that the Winter Olympics would improve China’s image.
“It’s more of a risk,” he said. “I think it can go badly if there are some very negative stories that come out around the athletes on how they’re treated, the restrictions they face or anything related to Covid-19 in particular.”
Having watched some events in Beijing in 2008, Edney said the atmosphere for the upcoming Winter Games was different, and that Western countries engaged with China 14 years ago because they believed it would encourage China to liberalise.
“The Olympics was seen as a stepping stone to that happening,” he said, adding that China also saw the Games as a chance for the world to see the “real China” without the framing of Western media.
The relationship between Hong Kong and mainland China has also been affected since 2008.
Ivan Choy Chi-keung, a political scientist at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, said Hong Kong people viewed Beijing positively in 2008 because of its efforts to open up, how it handled the aftermath of the Sichuan earthquake and its friendlier treatment of Western media.
Thousands of Hongkongers also took to the streets to cheer on the Beijing 2008 torch-bearers, and many were also proud of China’s results at the Games.
“Public reception [towards the 2022 Games] is relatively subdued, which is different from the situation in 2008,” Choy said, noting that the obscurity of Winter Olympic events and a decline in trust have led to the lack of enthusiasm thus far.
Pandemic pandemonium
Even without the geopolitical hostilities, the Covid-19 pandemic and the highly contagious Omicron variant have clouded any Olympic excitement.
Only invited spectators will be allowed to attend events after organisers announced they would no longer sell tickets publicly because of recent outbreaks.
Less than a month before the Games were set to open on February 4, Beijing recorded its first case of the Omicron variant on January 15. Since then, it reported 87 local symptomatic cases, but most of them involved the Delta variant. The city of Tianjin, around 120km (75 miles) from the capital, was still battling an outbreak.
Edney of the University of Leeds said the pandemic had turned hosting the Games into a liability instead of a “tremendous opportunity” to tell China’s story, as it had done in 2008.
“I do think that this is probably more a question of getting it over and done with … rather than turning it into a big political platform for reshaping China’s image,” he said.
Xu, the Olympic historian, agreed that containing Covid-19 was crucial for China’s image and it was already an achievement to host the Games on time, unlike the 2020 Tokyo Summer Games, which were delayed by a year.
“The Chinese could tell the whole world, ‘Look, we can not only host the Games on time with state-of-the-art facilities, [but] also our government has done very well in many ways, including controlling the coronavirus’,” Xu said.
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The Winter Olympics is also a timely opportunity for Beijing to show that it has made China “moderately prosperous”, which was the much-publicised poverty-alleviation goal the Communist Party set itself to achieve by its centenary, Xu said.
State broadcaster CCTV has touted the Games as Xi’s brainchild, saying bidding for and hosting the Games was a “major strategic move by the party’s Central Committee with comrade Xi Jinping at its core”.
Susan Brownell, an anthropologist at the University of Missouri, St Louis said: “In the end, there’s still almost no global vehicle like the Olympic Games for putting forward an image of a country.”
The political and pandemic controversies would fade into the background after the Games begin because the public would focus on the performances of the athletes, just as they did in 2008, according to Brownell, who has studied Chinese sports development since the 1980s.
Even the coronavirus-stricken Tokyo Olympics was able to push aside the negative press surrounding its strict health protocols once athletes began to compete, she said. “If you think about Tokyo, the world records set [and] amazing performances under such conditions. So I think we can expect that again.”
But the Olympics does not necessarily bring reputational dividends to a government with a controversial standing in many quarters. More people viewed China negatively in 2009 than the year before, according to the BBC World Service, which polled more than 13,000 citizens of 21 countries between November 2008 and February 2009.
China in February will host the Winter Games when its international reputation in the developed world is hovering around its historic low. A median of 69 per cent of the 16,254 adults from 17 advanced economies surveyed by the US-based Pew Research Centre in spring 2021 said they have an unfavourable opinion of China.
According to Peng’s quickly deleted Weibo post, the senior official at the centre of the sexual assault allegation is former vice-premier Zhang Gaoli. Neither Zhang nor the Chinese government have commented on the allegation.
“The audiences are not stupid these days, especially in the 21st century. So hosting the Olympic Games doesn’t necessarily improve a nation’s national image,” Brownell said.
But Olympics historian Xu said: “Beijing still has a strong motivation to use these Games to generate soft power, to generate legitimacy, to generate respect, or to generate friendship with the rest of the world, if they can do it.”
Beijing’s mindset, however, has dramatically shifted since 2008 from seeking acceptance by the international community as an equal and respected member to becoming more assertive and self-confident.
To replicate the glory China enjoyed in the 2008 Games was “mission impossible”, Xu said. “The world has changed. China has changed.”
