How the Olympics Hurts China

I n September 2008, three months before police arrived around midnight to take him from his home, to which he would never return — he died in custody nine years later, after having won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010 — Liu Xiaobo wrote a brilliant essay on that year’s Summer Olympics in Beijing.

Were Liu alive today, there can be no doubt that he would denounce the genocide and culture-cide that are taking place in Xinjiang, the suffocating colonization that continues in Tibet and Southern Mongolia, the machine-like crushing of freedom in Hong Kong, and the CCP’s existential threat to Taiwan. But Liu’s splendid 2008 essay looked inward: It was about the costs of the Olympics to China’s Han majority.

The 2008 Olympics cost about $70 billion, more than seven times what the government was then spending annually for public health and medical care, and more than four times what it was spending on education. This was the people’s money, Liu observed; only a dictatorship could get away with spending it so frivolously.

Next, there were the spiritual costs. Is it good for a country to be intoxicated with chest-thumping “patriotism”? In China, the word had been molded to mean “love of Party” as much as “love of country,” but even setting aside that cynical pollution of meaning, Liu wondered: Do we Chinese want to be identified with adolescent bravado? Liu offered the story of Zhang Xiaoping, the Chinese light-heavyweight boxer who defeated Irishman Kenny Egan to win a gold medal. At the triumphant moment, the anchor on Central Television burst forth with, “Our Zhang Xiaoping has knocked his opponent silly! His blows show the glory of Chinese manhood! We can talk with our fists, and in any contest can fight with brawn as well as brains! A legend is born! China soars! The Chinese dragon takes flight!” Is this what we want to be as a country? Liu asked.

Liu goes on to show how elite Chinese athletes become commodities for glorification of the party-state. Hurdler Liu Xiang, for example, had tied a world record in the 110-meter event at the Athens Games in 2004. All across his homeland, this feat had brought him adulation as the “Soaring Man of China.” In 2008, alas, he came up injured, through no fault of his own, and had to withdraw. Within China, he quickly went from hero to anti-hero. A “tidal wave of gossip” ensued. Ordinary Chinese felt the athlete had let the country down and should apologize.

Liu went on to ask whether the public’s feelings in such cases were really so crazy. The party-state’s investment of public funds in Olympic athletes is enormous, after all. “No amount of either money or manpower is too great to spend,” he wrote. “The gold-medal athletes in the Olympics machine lived in a lonely world all their own, high in the clouds, lavishly supplied” — far above “the 1.3 billion people who supported them.” In one sense, the government was not entirely wrong to say the athletes were the good children of the motherland. “Of course Liu Xiang had to apologize if he didn’t deliver the goods.”

So at least those elite athletes living in the clouds must be happy, right? Maybe not. Liu Xiaobo does some research and uncovers the sacrifices that those icons of state glory are forced to make. From childhood, they enter government-run sports schools where they live in special dormitories, are completely cut off from the outside world, and submit to training almost military in nature. They are told that “to win Olympic glory for the motherland is a sacred mission entrusted to us by Party Central.” In training for the 2008 Games, Xian Dongmei, winner of the gold in judo, had to leave her 18-month-old daughter for a whole year. Cao Lei, winner of the gold in weightlifting, did not know until after the Games that her mother had died during the training period; the authorities had kept the news from her, afraid that the distraction might compromise her shot at gold. Chen Yibing, a gymnast, said in an interview: “You have no control over your own life. The coach is always right there with you. Someone is always watching you; even the physicians and the cooks in the cafeteria watch you. You’ve got no choice: you have to submit to the training. You can’t let others down.”

China’s Olympic divers, Liu found, are selected when they’re as young as five or six years of age. Chinese health-care professionals know that diving at this age can do permanent harm to one’s retinas. A doctor for the Olympic diving team told a journalist in 2007 that the retinas of 26 of the 184 members of the diving team were damaged. Gold-medalist Guo Jingjing, who had been recruited to dive at age six, had gone nearly blind.

Finally, Liu noted a huge gap in athletic equipment between “the Olympic elite and everybody else.” Sports in China “have come to be divided into these two broad categories, and the two groups are grossly unequal.” Deadpan, Liu calculated the number of square centimeters of playing field per capita available to Chinese schoolchildren, and how many tens of kilometers the average person had to travel in order to get to the nearest swimming pool — setting aside the difficult question of how to get permission to jump in.

At the opening ceremony of the 2008 Beijing games, a seven-year-old named Yang Peiyi sang “Ode to the Motherland,” but, because authorities judged her insufficiently photogenic, she was replaced on camera by nine-year-old Lin Miaoke, who lip-synced. Fireworks in the sky appeared as “footprints,” but, because these could not be captured on camera, their image had to be artificially added to the video feed. That was then. Now, all of the snow — and so much else — at the Olympics is artificial, and everybody knows it.