Two Olympics, one city and a very different China in between

The 2008 Games were a coming-of-age party while this year’s event has highlighted divisions with the West
Authorities have also become increasingly intolerant to criticism at home

Shi Jiangtao

Published: 5:17pm, 15 Feb 2022

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When Beijing was awarded the 2022 Winter Olympics seven years ago, it was hailed as the crowning glory for the Chinese capital, making the city the first in the world to stage both the Summer and Winter Games.

In 2008, the Games was seen as a coming-of-age party for the aspiring world power under President Xi Jinping’s predecessor Hu Jintao. This time around the Beijing Olympics was meant to celebrate China’s superpower status and cement Xi’s political standing at home.

Beijing had obviously also hoped to use the event to rebrand its international image and stall the unfolding new cold war with the West, choosing “together for a shared future” as its official motto.

But with the Covid-19 pandemic and diplomatic boycotts led by the United States, some of the shine has come off the 2022 Games, exposing the gap between what Western countries want China to be and what the Asian powerhouse has become.

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Rewind a decade and there were a lot of discussion about how hosting the Olympics could transform China and bring it closer to the rest of the world. But it soon turned out that the opposite was true and now makes more sense to examine how China’s rise has changed the Games and even reshaped the world in many ways.

China’s enthusiasm for the Games, especially its bid for this year’s event, gave a much-needed boost to the International Olympic Committee and an “Olympic Movement” overshadowed by constant corruption controversies and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine after the 2014 Sochi Games.

While most countries had concluded there was little economic sense in spending billions of dollars on soon-obsolete sporting venues, China was an exception, viewing the costly event from a geopolitical point of view.

Its generous support for the IOC over the years has obviously paid off in recent months, with the organisation repeatedly coming to its defence against criticism of China’s human rights record in Xinjiang and Hong Kong.

Beijing has also proved yet again the superiority of its authoritarian model in hosting international extravaganzas, especially when expensive infrastructure projects are involved.

China, which is not known for its winter sports tradition, has managed to build and renovate dozens of venues in a mostly arid area and turn the sky blue just in time for the Olympics.

But it remains unclear how much China has actually spent hosting the mega sporting event. With an official price tag of US$3.9 billion, the Games are being touted as the least expensive in the last two decades.

However, this obviously does not include many key Olympic projects, such as the new bullet train between venues in Beijing and Zhangjiakou, and the environmental costs of making artificial snow or redrawing nature reserve boundaries to accommodate a ski resort. The US-based news site Insider puts the total expenditure at US$38.5 billion.

Despite rampant criticism of China’s state-supported sport system, Beijing appears to have doubled down on its single-minded pursuit of Olympic medals, including signing dozens of male and female hockey players from the US and Canada to play for the Chinese national teams.

There are some more subtle yet worrying changes, many of which the world appears to have accepted in its dealings with China.

While China has become increasingly assertive abroad, the government has tightened control over the media and internet and become much less tolerant of criticism.

China’s state-controlled media exudes the unusual confidence, bragging about the country’s national strength and Chinese athletes’ performance, and few have room to dig into the real cost of the Games or the event’s ecological impact.

At least in 2008 journalists and netizens were allowed to speak up and grill government officials on such critical issues.