By Leonard, Mark
'For years we couldn't wait for the Olympics to start. Now we can't wait for them to be over.' That is how a Chinese friend described the horrible limbo in Beijing as a control-freak state tries to anticipate and eliminate any possible challenges to its glorious coming-out party on the 8th of the 8th, 2008. It is clear to any visitor to the Chinese capital that while China hopes to clean up the medals tables, the sporting contest is at best a sideshow to the real Olympic competition -- the battle to define how China is seen by its citizens and the world outside. For the Chinese people the Olympics are the final proof that China has reclaimed its rightful place in the global premier league; putting behind it two centuries of humiliation at the hands of foreign invaders. For the world outside, the Games are meant to embody an official narrative of China as a 'harmonious society'. The organisers had promised the trinity of a 'green Olympics', a 'high- tech Olympics' and a 'people-centred Olympics', designed to show off China as a beacon of economic prowess and modernity that has traded pariah status for global respectability. But as China ricochets from one PR disaster to the next -- with stories about sweatshops combining with Tibet and Beijing's choking pollution -- the authorities are now trying to manage expectations downwards with a focus on the more modest goal of a 'safe Olympics', flooding the city and its environs with security forces primed to thwart potential terrorist attacks.
The Chinese Communist Party combines a laser-like focus on detail with awe-inspiring ambitions for the big picture. Where other Olympic cities like Athens or Sydney were kept desperately busy just completing building work on stadiums and transport links, Beijing's concern extends from controlling the weather to micromanaging the behaviour of its citizens. Last year, when the Chinese government hosted the tenth anniversary of the Shanghai Co-operation Organisation -- an alliance of autocrats which Beijing and Moscow have formed with five central Asian republics -- the authorities treated the occasion as a dry run for the Games. They seeded clouds to prevent rain; sent police along the major streets removing washing lines and unseemly clutter; and declared a public holiday to decrease congestion. The organisers of the Olympics are going even further -- wiping out entire neighbourhoods to accommodate Olympic buildings, closing factories to reduce pollution, running 'public education campaigns' against spitting, appointing 1,500 'civilised bus-riding supervisors' and holding 'queueing awareness days'. Visas for foreigners have been curtailed to stop human rights protesters from entering the country; Chinese activists imprisoned or kept under surveillance; security checkpoints set up on roads around Beijing; and foreign governments bullied to attend the opening ceremony (more on this later).
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.