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Saturday 22 November 2008

Big Brother versus YouTube: let the Beijing Games commence

Mark Leonard, Britain’s pre-eminent analyst of modern China, says the Olympic genie is out of the bottle. The prospect of global scrutiny has actually increased repression as the authorities try to stamp out dissent. But digital technology is impossible to police

The awesome preparations show how ludicrous it is to suppose that sports and politics can be kept apart. The truth is that in China almost everything is political — it is less than a decade since the Communist Party allowed people to get married without asking the permission of their local party secretary — and anyone who studies the history will realise how central sports have been to the construction of the Chinese nation. For Sun Yat-sen — the founder of modern China — sports were seen as a literal solution to China’s plight as the ‘sick man of Asia’; Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalists talked of ‘training strong bodies for the nation’ in order to defeat Japan; Mao Tse-tung continued the tradition by putting a military man in charge of his first national sports commission in 1952; Chou En-lai used ping-pong diplomacy to engage Richard Nixon in the 1970s; and China’s original bid for the 2000 Olympics (which was blocked on human rights grounds) was designed to heal the damage from the Tiananmen massacre. During each of these episodes, politicians have micromanaged every aspect of China’s sporting progress (Chou En-lai even personally put together the national table-tennis team and coached it in diplomatic etiquette, urging its players to put ‘friendship first, competition second’).

But in spite of all the preparation, the Beijing authorities have sometimes been dazzled by the blinding lights of prime-time exposure. Although the authorities provoked the attention, they often did not know how to handle it. That is because for most of the last few decades, Beijing’s foreign policy was driven by a determined quest to keep a low profile. Deng Xiaoping, the architect of China’s opening and reform policy, declared that China must ‘hide its brightness’, avoid controversy and focus on growing its economy. He feared that China would be seen as a threat by the rest of the world and that other countries would gang up to prevent its rise. But with the Olympic Games, Chinese strategists have moved from seeking invisibility to actively trying to shape their country’s image through a mixture of charm and steel.

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