No Olympics is without its fair share of theatrics and drama, but the XXIX Olympiad in particular has all the signs of becoming one of the most highly staged, highly orchestrated, and calculated events the world has ever seen. Given the well-oiled propaganda machine of the People's Republic of China (PRC), image control will be sure to extend well beyond the sports arenas. But will the Olympics give the Chinese leadership the legitimacy they so desperately seek in the eyes of the people and the international community and consolidate their authority? Or will the limelight only serve to expose the PRC's severe environmental, economic, and political ills to the rest of the world?
The Beijing Organizing Committee for the Games (BOCOG) is determined to achieve what it calls a "high-level Olympics with distinguishing features."1 While it is not at all clear what that actually means, the "distinguishing features" apparently refers to making the event uniquely "Chinese."
Given that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has done much to erase China's cultural heritage for most of its 60-year rule, this is no easy task, and one that can easily slip into superficialities and kitsch. Indeed, the Beijing Olympics are rife with these efforts to link the event up with China's traditions. For example, in a reference to traditional Chinese cosmological beliefs, the opening ceremony is set to begin at 8 p.m. on the 8th day of the eighth month of the year, August, in 2008 with the lucky number "8" sounding in Chinese like the word for "a sudden influx of wealth."
The irony is that while the initial estimated cost for the Games was 30 billion yuan, the budget had soared to a whopping 400 billion yuan, 2 or almost $50 billion USD as of March 2008. With a price tag of this size, one must wonder what the CCP and 1.3 billion Chinese citizens actually expect to gain from such a production.
Longtime China watchers are giving mixed forecasts of the impact of the Games on China. In particular, Elizabeth Economy and Adam Segal, in their paper "China's Olympic Nightmare," do not have high hopes for the Olympics to drive constructive social or political change.3 Similarly, Allen Carlson in his paper "China's Conflicted Olympic Moment" expresses doubt that the Olympics will have a positive influence on Beijing's foreign and domestic policy given that the Party State is still struggling to sort out its national identity.4
David R. Black and Shona Bezanson, in their paper "The Olympic Games, human rights and democratization: lessons from Seoul and implications for Beijing," are, on the other hand, optimistic that the Olympics may serve as an opportunity to improve China's rights record and instigate fruitful political change, citing the 1988 Seoul Olympics as an example.
Few disagree that the top priority of the CCP at this time is to sustain its legitimacy and maintain its monopoly on power. Since Deng Xiaoping's economic reforms in the 1980's, the gap between CCP ideology and reality has only been widening. The CCP has evolved into a party of elite interest groups, confronting a crisis of legitimacy in the face of increasing social ills: corruption, lawlessness, economic disparity, unemployment, a floating population, lack of social welfare and healthcare, environmental disasters, and above all, a growing discontented population that is from almost all walks of life.
China's Public Security Ministry admitted that the number of "mass incidents," or riots, reached 87,000 in 2005 � a tenfold increase compared with 1993. It can be said that China has entered a phase of "neo-Communism"6 in which elements of state capitalism are intertwined with Communist control mechanisms. The Chinese leadership today lacks the political legitimacy of the early revolutionary figures such as Chairman Mao and the old guards.
Measured economic reform has been necessary to allow the CCP to maintain its grip on power; yet at the same time the lack of transparent governance and a crumbling moral social framework only serve to lessen the public's confidence in the performance and credibility of the party state. Meanwhile, the Summer Games remains an occasion of pride and high hope for many Chinese, and they have every reason to present to the world the very best of their 5,000-year civilization � it is, after all, the first ever Olympics in the Middle Kingdom. The CCP understands this dynamic all too well. The 2008 Olympics offers an ideal opportunity to distract the populace and unify the people through orchestrated nationalism.
Politicizing the Olympics by an authoritarian regime is not an invention of the CCP. It has occurred before � with the Moscow Olympics in 1980, but most notably in Berlin in 1936. The Third Reich shrewdly saw the Games as an opportunity to unify the country and boost the regime's legitimacy. It can be said that the Third Reich was successful in that goal.
The CCP would like to project a similar image of benign cosmopolitanism to the world through the Olympics, but its paranoia and inherent fear of social disorder could very likely prevent it from achieving the desired goal. Most notably, Beijing's Olympic torch relay or the "journey of harmony" around the world has become a public relations nightmare complete with photogenic protests featured on major media networks.
The run-up to the Olympics is occurring against the backdrop of the recent bloodshed in Tibet, the ongoing persecution of the peaceful Falun Gong meditation movement and underground churches, suppression of outspoken intellectuals and lawyers, and the forced eviction of some 1.5 million residents in Beijing to make room for the Olympic construction.7 China vowed to improve its rights record in its bid for the Games; but according to Minky Worden, media director of Human Rights Watch and editor of the book China's Great Leap: the Beijing Games and Olympian Human Rights Challenges, human rights in the lead up to the Games have not improved, but deteriorated.8
Further, Beijing's continuous backing of notorious regimes in countries such as Burma, Zimbabwe, and Sudan makes the international community question Beijing's role as a responsible stakeholder in international affairs. Indeed, China's role in Darfur's genocide has caused widespread objection, prompting celebrities like Steven Spielberg to pull out of the Beijing Olympics. Three so-called Olympic concepts devised by the CCP are: (1) Green Olympics, (2) High-tech Olympics, and (3) the People's Olympics.9
Unfortunately, all three of these slogans seem like some kind of twisted "Doublespeak" in light of the reality of the situation. The Beijing Olympics are looking far from "green" with China facing rapidly deteriorating environmental conditions: polluted water and air, desertification, and deforestation resulting in many natural disasters that are worse than the authorities would like to publicly admit. "Beijing occupies an unfortunate location in an inland basin that is frequently swept by sandstorms from the Gobi Desert. Mountains on three sides of the city trap the emissions of a booming capital of 17 million people. The average amount of airborne particulate matter, known as PM10 in environmental jargon, is six times the standard recommended by the World Health Organization."10 The air quality in Beijing is so bad that Australian Olympic officials decided to prohibit dozens of athletes from attending the opening ceremony.
AOC president John Coates announced last year that the country was also preparing a major immunization program to protect athletes from infectious diseases, including bird flu and respiratory problems associated with pollution. Around 1,000 prospective team members were offered vaccinations for hepatitis, typhoid, polio, tetanus, whooping cough and diphtheria, measles-mumps-rubella and influenza during a six-month immunization period."11 Haile Gebrselassie of Ethiopia, a world marathon record holder, will opt for the 10,000 meter race instead of the marathon due to Beijing's poor air quality.
In response, Beijing has said it will clear more than one million cars off the streets for two months starting from July 20, as International Olympic Committee (IOC) chief Jacques Rogge warned that endurance events, such as the marathon, could be postponed to protect athletes from the effects of pollution.12 The environmental concerns raised by other countries have already been a major embarrassment for the PRC. As for a "High-tech Olympics," whilst Beijing strives to modernize the Games with first-rate telecommunications hardware and infrastructure, it is also acutely aware of the potential threat of an uncensored press and much of the high-tech efforts are actually directed toward censorship.
The CCP's draconian grip on domestic and foreign media as well as the Internet is as impressive as ever, with an army of some 50,000 cyber cops and over $1 billion USD spent on the Golden Shield firewall system, which effectively bars the 230 million Chinese netizens from surfing "unhealthy" overseas Web sites. The significance of media and the Internet censorship lies not only in restriction of information but in controlling the minds of its people with filtered information. China agreed to accord full media freedom in August 2008, but foreign TV networks are still in the dark as to whether they will be allowed to broadcast from iconic sites such as Tiananmen Square even though they have spent huge sums purchasing the rights to the Games. NBC is known to have paid $3.5 billion USD for the exclusive U.S. rights to broadcast the Olympics from 2000 to 2008.13
More recently, foreign press reported, "police kicked foreign reporters out of a city where the collapse of several schools in China's earthquake drew charges of corruption from parents of dead children. The action, which came one month after the May 12 quake, followed a promise the day before by China that foreign reporters would be allowed unfettered access to report on the disaster aftermath."14 To this day, there is little, if any, public pressure from the IOC to have Beijing comply with its own promises.
The last thing the CCP wishes to see is a repeat of the 1989 Tiananmen mass protest incited by the high-profile visit of former USSR president Gorbachev. China's state-run media outlets have been instrumental in fanning often already overheated nationalistic sentiment in times of crisis. Examples include the earthquake in Sichuan province and the anti-CNN and BBC media campaign after the two networks covered pro-Tibet protests.
One unique "advantage" of a neo-Communist state is it has the ability to marshal its entire state resources to overpower the strongest individuals or multinational corporations. China can prove to be more competitive in the global market than some giant Western conglomerates through offering a higher bid than necessary. She is also able to bring some 300 foreign IT companies including Google, Cisco, Microsoft to their knees and force them to sign a "self-disciplinary pledge" to self-censor online content deemed "unhealthy" by Beijing.
To gain a foothold in the vast Chinese market or maintain a production base there, foreign multinationals are willing to collaborate with the CCP in suppression of dissenting voices in China. Yahoo has even provided personal emails of Shi Tao, a journalist, to the Beijing security apparatus, which led to his 10-year jail sentence. As for the "People's Olympics," according to a report by Taiwan's Central News Agency (CNA), "the Chinese Ministry of Public Security issued an order nationwide in April (2007) banning 11 categories and 43 types of people from participating in the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games� the 11 categories (43 kinds) of �opposing individuals' include Falun Gong practitioners, religious extremists, religious infiltrators, separatists, media staff who endanger the Olympics, appellants, and people who are dissatisfied with the Chinese Communist Party."15
For those 43 groups of Chinese banned from participating in the Olympics and the 1.5 million Beijing residents whose homes have been bulldozed, the Games are turning out to be a less than worthwhile experience. Only about 1,000 of the Beijing's famous old alleyways - known as "hutongs" � reportedly remain, down from some 3,000 in 195016 despite promises not to tear them down.
The people of China are also facing serious unemployment and disparity problems. It has been said that by 2020, the Chinese economy will need to be able to accommodate some 500 million laborers in the market,17 but there are signs it will be unable to do so. Already, each year at least 20 million people are unable to enter the workforce, and the income gap between the rural and the urban areas has been widening year by year. The same is true between the coastal provinces and inland regions.
This kind of disparity creates an unstable social force, which may erupt at any moment, especially when consumer inflation rates soar as they did earlier in 2008 when they hit an 11-year high, up 7.1%. Following the food price hike, gasoline cost will increase at least 18%. With a Gini-coefficiency of 0.46, social unrest is not impossible as economic tensions and fraudulent governance fuel grassroots dissatisfaction. Beijing intends to field some 100,000 "anti-terrorism" security personnel to guard the Olympics, according to the official Xinhua News Agency. The alleged terrorists include Tibetan and Xinjiang Muslim "separatists,"18 but mass protests by the disgruntled Han Chinese would actually pose a much greater threat to the CCP.
The Olympic Charter contains six Fundamental Principles of Olympism and the fifth principle stipulates: "Any form of discrimination with regard to a country or a person on grounds of race, religion, politics, gender or otherwise is incompatible with belonging to the Olympic Movement." The sixth principle states: "Belonging to the Olympic Movement requires compliance with the Olympic Charter and recognition by the IOC."19 But, thus far, the feeble IOC authorities appear to have a greater interest in helping Beijing deliver a trouble-free Olympic show than make it comply with the IOC rules.
The Olympics are, at the end of the day, supposed to be a glamorous international event. The whole world's attention will be focused on China this summer, and in order to keep up appearances, Chinese authorities have been known to make some concessions. Unlike in the Maoist era, China is part of an interdependent world and plays an important role in globalization. In a gesture of goodwill to the international community, Bibles have been permitted in the Olympic village though they will be capped at one copy per athlete. The Bible Society based in U.K. will reportedly bring to the athlete quarters in Beijing some 50,000 bilingual pamphlets with Christian scriptures.20
"With 21,600 journalists accredited for the 2008 Olympics and up to half that number expected to descend on and report from the city without International Olympic Committee credentials, the Beijing Games promise to be the most intensely scrutinized Olympics in history."21 Will the Olympics, as anticipated by some optimists, provide an opportunity for the world press to expose the skeletons in China's closet and bring about greater transparency and social change in China? It seems possible, although Beijing will be sure to set up every possible way to try to control and block journalists from straying from the focus of the Games. As for the eager foreign corporate sponsors of this 2008 Olympics, though, at least for now, there is little evidence to suggest they have used their influence to help bring about any positive social or political change in China.
World leaders have, as expected, taken different approaches to the Games, with some such as President Bush leaning to embrace this limelight in Beijing and some such as Chancellor Merkel refusing to share the same platform with the CCP leaders who routinely abuse the rights of their citizenry. While the world's largest airport is under construction in Beijing, a mournful mood from the Sichuan earthquake on May 12 has clouded the festive Olympic atmosphere, especially with widespread information that the government office properties fared well in surviving the tremor while most school buildings collapsed, causing the deaths of thousands of children. It is unlikely, however, for the CCP to sustain its current level of economic growth over a long period of time, short of a political liberalization. A party state will inevitably lead to abuses of power, corruption, and finally loss of legitimacy in the eyes of the populace.
After all, a transparent, prosperous, and pluralistic society governed by rule of law is in the long-term interests of the 1.3 billion Chinese citizens and of everyone else. Should the Olympic drama unfold as staged, the CCP may enjoy a fleeting moment of bliss; but after the curtain comes down and the makeup is removed, the CCP will have little choice but to face a reality that is far from fun and games.