Opinion | The ‘sick man of Asia’ headline is indefensible. But China’s expulsion of reporters is the wrong answer
- The Cold War created a void filled by propaganda and cultural misunderstanding for an entire generation in the US and China. The best way to prevent misunderstanding today is to improve education on both sides rather than kick out reporters
I first heard the epithet in an entirely different time, and an entirely different context. I was a junior school student in Beijing in the 1930s, when China was entering the Olympic Games for the first time. The first Chinese Olympian, Liu Changchun, competed in Los Angeles in 1932, but his exhaustion from the long journey affected his performance and kept him off the podium. Nonetheless, we were proud he had represented China.
My teachers encouraged my peers and me to play sports and commit ourselves to physical fitness, so China could take part in the Olympics and would no longer be seen as the “sick man of east Asia”. Inspired, I committed to learning soccer, ice skating, running and swimming. The particular history of the epithet seems to have been forgotten, but some 80 years later, the phrase itself has not.
