Hosting the Olympics in post-quake China

South Wind View
July 30, 2008

The latest issue of South Wind View brings together the Wenchuan Earthquake and the Beijing Olympics, “not because they share any logical relationship, but because we discovered, after being unable to stop thinking about them, that there were definite connections between the two central events of the year.”

The newsweekly asks, “After Wenchuan, what of the Olympics?” On a national scale, the feature examines how the earthquake and the Games are transforming the cold-war model of Chinese nationalism and contributing to trust in the government. And locally, it looks at Sichuan enterprises and their role in the quake and the Games, public relations in Chengdu, and the slow march to economic recovery in affected areas.

But South Wind View stops short of placing the Olympic experience directly in the earthquake zone. For that, we turn to the China Beat blog, where Susan Brownell describes how the People’s Olympic Education Promotion Team reenacted the Olympic Torch Relay in Deyang, one of the cities hardest hit by the earthquake, to “bring the Olympic spirit into the schools in order to aid the recovery”:

We organized Olympic re-enactments at two schools per day for three consecutive days, a total of six schools and over 3,000 children. Our status in Deyang increased each day. Local education officials held a meeting midway through our second day to assess our achievements. The head of the Deyang Education Bureau, Mr. Mao, observed, “The Olympic spirit is the spirit of conquering the disaster. Could we recover so quickly without the spirit of ‘swifter, higher, stronger’? This is also our spirit….Our students’ psychological wounds are serious. We will organize our students to get into motion. We humans cannot stop, our spirit cannot stop.”

The emotional impact of the Wenchuan Earthquake is the topic of one of the essays in the South Wind View feature. Peking University sociologist Zheng Yefu suggests that while the quake may have dampened enthusiasm, at least to some degree, for an all-out Olympic carnival, too much importance was attached to the Games in the first place:

If the National Games were to take place after the Wenchuan Earthquake, they very well may have been canceled. But these are the Olympics. China has made a promise to the world, so it can only absorb it and carry on.

If China were a small country like Greece and suffered an earthquake, perhaps it would be unable to hold the Olympics, but China is equal in size to dozens of small countries put together. China suffers natural disasters every year; it’s just that this year’s was extra-large, and the victims suffered both material and psychological blows. Afterward, spiritual sustenance was no less important than material needs. Watching the Olympics on TV could help to divert them from their sorrows, and the bravery of certain athletes will certainly be an encouragement. We should not imagine that disaster victims have no need for appropriate entertainment.

However, the Wenchuan Earthquake will drain some of the color and vitality from the glittering Olympic Games – this a line I wrote during the earthquake aftermath for the article “Tragic death, brilliant life” (The Beijing News, 2008.05.24). But like the rule of kings Wen and Wu, tension alternates with relaxation. The human psyche cannot sustain long-term excitement. After an intense period, we can’t get excited again for a little while. Spirit is what’s important at the Olympics – the spirit, energy, and essence of the host country. That’s what I meant by that line. What makes the Olympics appeal to all of humanity? Because modern life is so ordinary. But our experiences prior to these Olympics have been exactly the opposite. The Olympics should be a carnival, but that is at odds with the deaths of tens of thousands. Such is fate. We must bravely accept it.

For a long time, we have placed far too much emphasis on trophies and have marginalized sports for ordinary people. The spread of sports has the potential transform the bodies and minds of our citizens, and they can mold the next generation. But we have not done enough. Winning fewer gold medals is really no big deal. Does America, a developed country, care? Does India, a developing country, care? We care far too much. But good fortune arises from the depths of bad, and things will turn around.

Someone who has been both poor and rich and who has occupied all social rungs generally finds it easy to remain calm, while someone who has always been mired in the dregs of society is liable to be aggrieved and paranoid. Setbacks after 1840 caused major injuries to the Chinese people that have not healed to this day. A few years ago, whenever there was a major international sporting event we’d say, “We used to be the Sick Man of Asia, but now….” But we haven’t been the Sick Man of Asia for a long time, and before the 18th Century we didn’t lag behind the rest of the world. Never forgetting frustrations and insults is a sickness. But paradoxically, curing this sickness requires another abnormal state: we need a moment of exuberance and pride. Once all that has passed, the shame will be wiped away and our uneven mental states will be much more in balance. I predict that the greatest effect the Olympics will have on our national feeling will not be an increase in our self-esteem, but rather a restitution and gradual normalization of our national psyche.

I am fortunate: as a teacher, I don’t have to work during the Olympics. Sports is one of those things where those who enjoy it are nothing like those who don’t, leading to things like “football widows.” It’s not really necessary to hold the World Cup in a city of “widows.” When a developed country bids for the Olympics, it faces questions from opposing factions made up of city residents. The scale of the Olympics so large that many other things will be brought to a halt during the Games. I hope that future Olympics can be held in multiple cities instead of just one, perhaps in several cities in one large country or in a number of smaller countries. Such a plan would bring fewer disturbances to city residents during the Games, and Olympic venues would not be left unused afterward. But this idea will not be handed down from on high, nor will it be promoted by politicians and businessmen; it ought to be driven by environmentalists together with city residents who dislike sports.

The Beijing Olympic Games will be a watershed moment for China’s athletic system. In the future, the national system that pursues competitive skills for an extremely small group of people will be overturned and replaced with physical fitness for all, for the reason mentioned above.

Americans don’t care about trophies. The US is a basketball kingdom, but no one cared much when it lost the Olympic gold. Why? One important reason is that they had already been proud. They had self-confidence and weren’t afraid of being looked down upon. Our national sports system was set up for face and self-esteem. This Olympiad, China’s gold medal count will be at least #2, and possibly #1. Even coming in second will give the top dog quite a scare. Face has definitely been won, brought to an unprecedented level, one that might not be sustainable. We will have vented, so there’s no need for that any longer, and our will to go all out in pursuit of prizes will be gone. After the Olympics, there will be a major transformation in China’s sports system. We must bid farewell to “angry youth” and become even-tempered adults.

In the August 14 issue of The New York Review of Books, Orville Schell presents a similar interpretation of the Beijing Olympics and how the Games relate to Chinese nationalism and China’s place in the world:

After a century and a half of famine, war, weakness, foreign occupation, and revolutionary extremism, a growing number of Chinese—overseas as well as inside China—had come to look to the Olympic Games as the long-heralded symbolic moment when their country might at last escape old stereotypes of being the hapless “poor man of Asia”; a preyed-upon “defenseless giant”; victim of a misguided Cultural Revolution; the benighted land where in 1989 the People’s Liberation Army fired on “the people.” In one grand, symbolic stroke, the Olympic aura promised to help cleanse China’s messy historical slate, overthrow its legacy of victimization and humiliation, and allow the country to spring forth on the world stage reborn —”rebranded” in contemporary parlance—as the great nation it once had been, and has yearned for so long to once more become.

The ultimate question, according to the editor’s introduction to the South Wind View feature: “After everything is over, how will people live their lives?”