Olympicising politics: China's medal ambitions are more than just a game

Last Modified: 08 Jul 2008
By: Lindsey Hilsum

International editor Lindsey Hilsum blogs on China's chequered relationship with the Olympics.

The biggest crime you can commit in China today is "politicising the Olympics." We foreign correspondents are criticised for this all the time.

As for those activists who suggest that human rights or freedom of speech have anything to do with it, the Chinese government says they are betraying "the Olympic spirit."

But a quick look at modern Chinese history shows just how political the Chinese Communist Party has always been in its attitude to the Games, and to sports in general.

China is well known for its prowess in ping pong, but that's not because the Chinese have a unique, innate ability to hit small white balls across a flat surface. It's because in 1953 the International Table Tennis Federation cut links with Taiwan in favour of the People's Republic.

Communist Party officials then scoured the countryside for suitable children to train up, and the Ping Pong Superpower was born

China is well known for its prowess in ping pong, but not because the Chinese have a unique, innate ability to hit small white balls across a flat surface.

China and Taiwan took turns in boycotting the Olympics until 1984, when a formula was agreed. Taiwan would compete as "Chinese Taipei", a name no one uses, but which enables China to pretend that the rest of the world sees the island as a renegade province of China, not a putative independent country.

After the Communist takeover in 1949, China didn't rejoin the International Olympic Committee until 1979, but the following year it boycotted the Moscow Olympics. The USA spearheaded the boycott, as a protest over the Soviet Union's invasion of Afghanistan.

The Chinese had fallen out with the Soviets several decades before, and wanted to consolidate their links with the USA (which had been nurtured, you may remember, through ping pong diplomacy).

Since then, China has competed with alacrity, the medal table charting its rise as an economic and diplomatic power. In 1988 in Seoul, China won just five gold medals. In Athens in 2004, it won 32, second only to the USA. Chinese officials are determined they should beat the Americans this time.

Outsiders may see no connection between the opium wars - which China lost - and the 2008 Olympics, which China is determined to win

In 1988, China won just five gold medals; in 2004, it won 32, second only to the USA.

But China's leaders see coming top of the medals table as a way of overcoming what they describe as "centuries of humiliation". Every Chinese gold is likely to be greeted not just with pride and enjoyment, but a frenzy of nationalist fervour.

With a month to go, Chinese TV is already wall-to-wall triumphalist sporting propaganda, all slow-motion Chariots of Fire-style lingering on handsome athletes, and cheering crowds, set to ringing music.

I keep thinking about a banner I saw in Hong Kong during the torch relay. It read: "Don't Olympicise Politics".

Reading suggestion: For an interesting review of new books on China and the Olympics, Andrew Nathan in New Republic