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China
April 2008 
Access: PublicAsked about the significance of the 2008 Beijing Olympics for China, Xiong Xiaozheng, a professor at Beijing Sport University, waxes lyrical for more than 10 minutes without mentioning anything as mundane as swimming or track and field.
“The hosting of these Olympics will promote the development of China’s politics, economy and culture, and will provide an excellent opportunity for the world to gain an all-round and deep understanding of this country,” Prof Xiong says.
With just a year to go before the 8pm, August 8 2008 opening of China’s biggest ever international event, such heated expectations are common.
A sports jamboree already freighted with the ambitions of athletes and advertisers is being painted as something more: a transformative event in the life of the world’s most populous nation.
In some respects, transformation is obvious even now. Much of Beijing has been completely rebuilt since the successful bid in 2001.
Prof Xiong may be exaggerating when he says many foreigners still think Chinese wear Manchu robes and have their hair in dangling queues, but the ultra-modern new stadiums built for the games will certainly burnish Beijing’s image among the half-million overseas visitors expected and on the multitudes who watch on television.
New Hyundai sedans dominate the city’s previously somewhat rickety taxi fleet. Halls in the fabled Forbidden City are being rebuilt. Beijing citizens’ mobile phones buzz with government reminders to respect a one-day-a-month “queuing promotion day” or “Welcome the Olympics by Stressing Civilised Ways”.
Such messages, backed up by billboards and editorials, highlight the importance of the games as a propaganda opportunity for China’s leaders, whose abandonment of Marxism has made them keen to tap nationalism as an alternative source of political legitimacy.
Liu Qi, a member of the ruling Communist party’s politburo and chairman of the Beijing games organising committee (Bocog), recently told officials to “step up” propaganda work.
“Particularly, we should propagate the achievements made in building socialism with Chinese characteristics ... and the patriotic spirit and the Olympic spirit,” Mr Liu said.
Such publicity efforts are having an effect. Government censors ensure all local media coverage of Olympic preparations is positive – and plenty of ordinary Chinese are eager to embrace an event portrayed as symbolising national revival.
More than 560,000 have applied for 100,000 places as volunteers at the Olympics and the Paralympics a month later, state media say.
But for all such enthusiasm, the games may have less of a transformative effect than some outside observers have hoped. Supporters of Beijing’s bid suggested that playing host would push China to liberalise politically and better protect human rights.
Such an effect is hard to see. The administration of President Hu Jintao shows no sign of allowing challenges to the party’s monopoly on power and has tightened controls on domestic media. Beijing did win praise for suspending until after the games rules requiring foreign journalists to get prior permission for reporting trips. But a survey of journalists by the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of China found 68 per cent felt Beijing had yet to live up to its 2001 pledge that international media would have “complete freedom to report”.
Before China was awarded the games, Wang Wei, Bocog’s chief, said hosting the Olympics would “enhance” human rights. But campaigners say that promise, embraced by members of the International Olympic Committee, has not been kept.
“Instead of a pre-Olympic ‘Beijing spring’ of greater freedom and tolerance of dissent, we are seeing the gagging of dissidents, a crackdown on activists, and attempts to block independent media coverage,” Human Rights Watch said last week.
Some Beijing residents are disappointed about the effect on the capital’s cultural inheritance, despite the games’ supposed role as a showcase for Chinese civilisation. Games-related development has accelerated the destruction of Beijing’s most historic neighbourhoods, says Zhang Wei, a resident and preservationist.
A particular shock was the recent demolition of much of the historic Qianmen area, to be replaced with modern shop buildings in “traditional” style, Mr Zhang says.
“We were very happy when Beijing won the right to host the Olympics, and we hoped that it would help with preservation, but the opposite happened,” he says.
The Olympics are hardly solely to blame for the bulldozing of Beijing, however. Many other cities across China are demolishing their pasts almost as fast.
Indeed, the transformative power of the Olympics on China is dwarfed by the combined effect of successful economic reform, breakneck industrialisation and the abandonment of Maoist social controls. In large part, the world’s biggest sports festival, like everybody else, is just along for the ride.
