Sometimes it takes a single dazzling athletic feat to ignite the Olympic spirit. China’s Winter Games may yet capture the imagination of the world’s spectators. The Tokyo Olympics, though unpopular in Japan due to fears of Covid’s spread, provided welcome diversion for many. Even so, they lacked the energy of previous Games, and so far Beijing’s event is still more muted. Winter sports such as curling lack the broad appeal of sprinting or swimming. China’s commitment to a zero-Covid strategy has kept its citizens well away from the Games, and the Games well away from its citizens. But above all, a pall has been cast by the oppression of Uyghurs in Xinjiang, with the US, the UK and others mounting a diplomatic boycott.
In 2008, the excitement of the moment largely drowned out domestic and overseas criticism of China’s human rights record. The charge sheet is longer and graver these days, and China harsher in responding. Beijing and the International Olympic Committee insist that the Games must not be politicised. Athletes have been warned against speaking out.
But hosting the Olympics is always a statement of national intent. In China, where the government breeds a nationalist ethos to cement its legitimacy, it is a particularly political act. If the 2008 Games were in part a statement to the world about the country’s re-emergence as a major global power, this year’s are primarily directed at a domestic audience. Chinese audiences appear enthused by at least some of the sport (especially following Tuesday’s triumph for Eileen Gu, the American-born skier now competing for China, who has become a lightning rod for Sino-American tensions) and Beijing can dismiss foreign criticism as an attempt to contain it; hawkishness in the US, latching on to the very real ethical objections, makes this dismissal easier. The Games project China as a nation that can efficiently present an impressive large-scale global event even in the midst of a pandemic. Torchbearers included a People’s Liberation Army officer wounded as he commanded a regiment in a border clash with India, and one of the athletes who lit the cauldron was a Uyghur skier, Dinigeer Yilamujiang. The party’s purpose is to “turn the sports arena into a stage for political legitimacy and a tool to whitewash all those atrocities [in Xinjiang]”, said Teng Biao, a human rights lawyer now living in exile in the US.
The IOC’s already tarnished reputation has been further damaged by its responses to the horrifying and well-documented abuses in Xinjiang and the case of Peng Shuai, the tennis star who disappeared after accusing a senior official of coercing her into sex and has since said (while accompanied by a Chinese Olympic official) that it had all been an “enormous misunderstanding”. For many, whatever the joy brought by a global sports competition, the apparatus around it looks increasingly hard to justify. Beyond China, campaigners point to the forced displacement of communities, as in Rio; the heavy public spending on venues that are then little used; the contrast between the financial struggles of many athletes, the lavish conditions enjoyed by the IOC and the hefty profits made by broadcasters and sponsors.
Whether or not the world warms to these Games, even the IOC may one day come to wonder if they were really worth it. And though Beijing wanted the Olympics, and still considers them useful, they do not look like the Olympics that it wanted.