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Will the Olympics Change China, or Will China Change
the Olympics? (2007) |
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Susan Brownell |
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One hundred years have passed since the question now famous in China was asked, “When will China be able to invite all the world to Peking [Beijing] for an International Olympic contest…?” (2) In 2008 the Olympic Games will be hosted by the least Westernized nation in the world to yet host them. It will be only the third time the Olympic Summer Games have been held outside the West and its former colonies, and it will be the greatest-ever meeting of East and West in peacetime. It will mark a pivotal moment when China begins to take its place as a major force in global politics, economics, and culture after nearly 170 years of subordination to the Western powers and Japan.
For Chinese people the Olympic slogan 'One World, One Dream' means that all the world’s peoples want a high standard of living and a secure life, and all the world’s nations want to modernize and achieve stable economic and political conditions.
But the rest of the world has regarded China’s return to its eighteenth-century world prominence in power and wealth with ambivalence. The past century has left a legacy that must be overcome. In terms of politics, Western governments still deeply mistrust China’s Communist Party, a distrust left over from the Cold War. In terms of scholarly understanding, many of the Western views of Chinese culture are still shaped by distorted ideas that were first consolidated in the 19th century in the discipline of Oriental Studies, and which then took a different shape in mid-20th century Modernization Theory and more recently in the concept of the Clash of Civilizations put forth by Samuel Huntington.(3)
In terms of popular opinion, the Beijing Olympics have been viewed as the harbinger of a new age of Eastern imperialism and the rise of the “China threat.” Editorials in Western newspapers during Beijing’s Olympic bid in 2001 revealed a high level of hostility: “China Doesn’t Deserve the Olympics,” “Unwelcome Bid from Beijing,” “Olympics Tied Up in Chinese Puzzle,” and others. The ever-popular stereotype of China’s sports boarding school system as organized child abuse produced labels such as “sports factories,” “Communist sports machine,”(4) and “assembly line of pain,” (5) and “Beware the march of China's
sinister super-race champions.”(6) In May 2007, actress Mia Farrow spearheaded an attack on China’s support of the government of Sudan in which she labeled the Beijing Olympics the “genocide games.”
People in the developed Western countries seem fixated on the question of whether the Olympic Games will change China. Will they improve China’s human rights record? Will they open up China more to the outside world? As defined by the International Olympic Committee (IOC), the Olympic Games are supposed to be an occasion for cultural exchange and the improvement of international understanding, a vehicle for a movement for world peace through sport – the “Olympic Movement.” The assumption in the West seems to be that any cultural exchange with China should be a one-way exchange in which China learns from the West, not a two-way dialogue. Chinese people hope that the West can learn something from China through the Olympic Games, but will it?
Today I would like to address three questions:
1) Can the Olympics really bring about social change?
2) Will the Olympics change China?
3) Will China change the Olympics? |
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(1) Most of the content from this talk is excerpted from my book Beijing’s Games: What the Olympics Mean to China (Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, forthcoming in 2008). See also the short overview, “The Beijing Effect”, Olympic Review: Official Publication of the Olympic Movement 60, July -September 2006, 52-55. Some new material is presented here, which is the result of my current research project, begun in September 2007, “The 2008 Beijing Olympic Games: ‘One World, One Dream’?” It is funded by a research award from the Fulbright Committee.
(2) The question is found in C.H. Robertson, “A Plan for Promoting Missionary Activity among Association Boys,” Annual Reports of the Foreign Secretaries of the International Committee, October 1, 1909 to September 30, 1910 (New York: International Committee, YMCA, 1910), 192; see also Andrew Morris, Marrow of the Nation: A History of Sport and Physical Culture in Republican China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 1-2.
(3) In my opinion and that of many other area specialists, Samuel Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations utilized outdated ideas of “civilization” that had been discarded by scholars who actually specialized in the Middle East and Asia, many of them stimulated by the work of Edward Said. Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Touchstone, 1997); Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1978). An influential Modernization Theorist whose views on East Asia were off -base was Talcott Parsons, himself influenced by the work of Max Weber, whose view of East Asia was also shaped to fit his theories. Max Weber, The Religion of China: Confucianism and Taoism (New York: Free Press 1951), translated and edited by Hans H. Gerth; Talcott Parsons, Societies : Evolutionary and Comparative Perspectives (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice -Hall, 1966).
(4) Brook Larmer, “The Creation of Yao Ming,” in Sports Illustrated (September 26, 2005), 66.
(5) Hannah Beech, “The Price of Gold,” in Time Asia Magazine (August 16, 2004): http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,678686-1,00.html (July 14, 2007).
(6) Donald Trelford, “Talking Sport: Beware the march of China's sinister super-race champions,” posted on Telegraph.co.uk, 12 September 2004: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/main.jhtml?xml=/sport/2004/09/13/sotalk13.xml (accessed 6 January, 2008).
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