“This is a foreign journalist who is writing about the Olympics,” he announced. “We’re trying to find out where they’re going to hold the events in 2008.”
One cop had been writing the ticket, but now his pen froze in the air. The ticketee looked up expectantly. He was a small man in a dirty nylon jacket; the cop was bulky and his ID badge was number 007786. The sun was a dirty red wafer hanging low in the sky. It felt like a scene from a painting in which every element had been arranged in such a way as to draw attention to a single detail—one brushstroke that carried a world of meaning. I took out my notebook. The cop smiled.
“Please wait a minute,” he said. He spoke into his walkie-talkie, then turned back to me.
“Which country are you from, please?”
He barked again into the walkie-talkie: “We have an American reporter who is writing about the Olympic bid, and he needs to visit an Olympic site here in Datun!”
A pause; the man looked up: “They’re calling my supervisor.”
Everybody waited. The ticketee suggested that we head a few blocks to the west, where a field had been cleared for the Olympics. The cop told him to shut up. The walkie-talkie crackled.
“Go west and look for a field with banners around it,” the cop said to Driver Yang, and then he turned to me. “You’ll see that it’s a very good location to build the stadiums. They’re going to put soccer, badminton, and tennis there.”
He saluted us both, first me and then Driver Yang. The ticketee wished us good luck, and this time the cop didn’t tell him to shut up. We went west.
IN ANCIENT TIMES, some members of the Chinese nobility played cuju, a game that is remotely similar to soccer. There are Ming dynasty scrolls that feature women playing chuiwan—sticks, balls, holes. Chinese historians describe it as their own version of golf. There are other artifacts, other games. A Qing painting of Emperor Kangxi’s inspection tour to the south shows, in an obscure corner of the scroll, three boys playing some form of handball. The Forbidden City Museum has a painting of a Tang emperor, Minghuang, involved in a polo-like game with the palace maidens.
But these were diversions—games, really. The true heart of the ancient Chinese athletic tradition consisted of wushu, “martial arts.” In the nineteenth century, some elements of wushu contributed to the development of the meditative breathing exercises that became known as qigong. The activities of wushu and qigong are as much spiritual and aesthetic as they are physical; their goal is artistic expression and self-improvement, rather than winning. Traditional Chinese athletics had elements that Westerners might describe as philosophical or even religious. (Qigong, of course, eventually gave rise to Falun Gong.) Competition wasn’t the primary goal of traditional athletics, and the ancient Chinese never built coliseums.
The modern term for “sports”—tiyu—didn’t appear until the nineteenth century. Like other words that were introduced during this period, tiyu came from Japanese. The Japanese had originally imported Chinese characters in ancient times to write their own language, but Western contact moved faster in Japan, developing new vocabularies. As China attempted to catch up, they adopted the terms that the Japanese had innovated: minzhu, or “democracy”; minzu, or “ethnic group.” Sometimes, a familiar phrase reappeared with a different meaning. Kaogu originally meant “investigation of the ancient”; in the twentieth century, it returned from Japan with a new definition: “archaeology.” The characters themselves weren’t new, but they described new ways of looking at familiar things. Artifacts had always been collected, but they hadn’t been excavated and studied in a scientific manner. The Chinese had always had different ethnic groups; they just hadn’t described them as such. Athletics hadn’t been categorized and arranged into tournaments.
The language changed because the world was changing. After the Opium War, missionaries and other foreigners introduced Western ideas of athletic competition, often at Christian schools. In the early twentieth century, China began to take an interest in the Olympic Movement, and a single Chinese sprinter competed in the 1932 Games. Four years later, at the Berlin Olympics, China sponsored a delegation of sixty-nine athletes, among them a mixed-gender wushu exhibition troupe that performed before Hitler.
By then, the Chinese were committed to the Olympics, and they had come to see sports as a way in which the country could avenge the injustices of the past century. The goal was to beat the foreigner at his own game. After the Communists came to power, they established sports-training schools that were modeled after the Soviet system. The People’s Republic competed in the 1952 Summer Games, but they boycotted the next Olympics because the I.O.C. recognized athletes from Taiwan.
It wasn’t until 1979 that the mainland finally agreed to return to the Olympic Movement. The I.O.C. continued to allow athletes from Taiwan to compete, but the Taiwanese flag was banned. In 1984, in Los Angeles, a mainland Chinese team competed for the first time in nearly four decades. They finished sixth in the overall medal standings. But that year’s Soviet-bloc boycott had weakened the field, and the Chinese were badly outclassed in such marquee events as swimming and track-and-field.
Over the next decade, China rapidly improved its medal count, largely through success in events where the competition was less intense. Chinese women athletes excelled, and the nation became particularly good at sports that involved routine-based activities, such as diving, gymnastics, and figure skating. In such sports, bureaucracy pays: athletes can be created through careful organization and training rather than a combination of strength, hard-core competition, and performance-enhancing drugs. In the Atlanta Games of 1996, China ranked fourth overall. They moved up to third in Sydney, and by Athens they would be second, behind only the United States.
Despite the growing success, the key emotion behind Chinese athletics was still shame. On the surface, there was plenty of pride, but it was as shallow as pink paint on an old building. In 1993, when the I.O.C. awarded the 2000 Games to Sydney instead of Beijing, China Daily responded with an editorial linking the decision to the West’s history of “brutal colonialist aggression and exploitation.” During the month of Beijing’s bid to host the 2008 Games, I visited the China Sports Museum, where historians explained that modern athletics had begun in the year 1840, when the arrival of the full British fleet marked the turning point of the Opium War. The Chinese Olympic Committee had prepared a book that described this great sports moment, in English:
The Opium War turned China from a feudal into a semi-feudal and semicolonial society, in which sport came under the unavoidable influence of violent social upheavals and followed a tortuous path linked closely to the precarious national destiny.
Sport was grim. It often showed on the faces of Chinese athletes: many of them looked tight, nervous. In highly competitive sports like soccer and basketball, they had a tendency to choke in crucial situations. It was rare to watch a Chinese athlete perform with true joy, which wasn’t surprising; most had been trained in assembly-line sports schools since childhood. Their fans didn’t help much, either. The average Chinese athletics observer didn’t care much about understanding a sport or respecting individual effort; the victory was all that mattered. Fans were brutal toward losers, and they had a history of bad sportsmanship and even violence when foreign teams won matches on Chinese soil.
In a sense, the nation’s wholesale transition—from their own athletic traditions to those of the West—had left China with the worst of both worlds. They had adopted the competiveness and nationalism, which were the bluntest and most obvious characteristics of Western athletics, but they had missed out on all the subtleties. In my own experience, these were the only things that actually had any true value. As a child, my participation in athletics had revolved around my father, not a sports school, and his most important lessons were often counter-intuitive: that it was better to lose with class than win at all costs, and that the final goal wasn’t victory but self-improvement. For many people in the West, athletics are simply part of a
well-rounded education and a healthy life.
Of course, that doesn’t make for good television or public sporting events, which celebrate competition. It wasn’t surprising that this aspect of Western sport was most accessible to the Chinese, who came to view their own traditions as if through a foreigner’s eyes. Athletics such as wushu, whose spiritual, non-competitive qualities should have been seen as a healthy alternative to the excesses of Western sport, were instead described as embryonic stages in the Chinese march toward Olympic glory. The logo for the Beijing Olympic bid featured five interlocked rings twisted into the shape of a person practicing Tai Chi, an exercise that is profoundly non-competitive. Tai Chi is a hell of a lot closer to Falun Gong than it is to the Olympics.
Many Chinese sensed that something was wrong with national athletics, although they struggled to identify the problem. The failures nagged at them, and sometimes people fixated on philosophical or psychological explanations. During my Olympics research, I met a number of Chinese who were intrigued by a sort of net theory: the notion that the Chinese perform well at Ping-Pong, badminton, and volleyball because there is no contact between opponents.
“The Chinese aren’t as good at direct competition,” He Huixian, the vice-president of the Chinese Olympic Committee, told me. “We’re better at sports where there’s a net between the players.” She described the Chinese as xiaoqiao—dexterous and coordinated rather than strong. But she added that mentality was just as important. “Confucianism makes people more conservative,” she said. “Look at America—children are taught to be independent and creative. In China, it’s all about discipline. There isn’t enough creativity, and if you don’t have creativity, then you can’t adapt and change. You just follow the same old patterns and you don’t get any better. That’s true for sport as well as other things.”
The Chinese also believed that the Olympics highlighted the differences between rich and poor countries. In Beijing, I met with Xu Jicheng, a former basketball player who had become a television announcer. Xu had accompanied the Chinese delegation to every Summer Games since 1988. “Developed countries see the Olympics as a kind of business,” he said. “It’s like they’re saying, ‘I have a big house, with all sorts of wonderful furniture, and I want to have a party and invite people to come.’ And they sell tickets. But it’s different for a developing country. The Olympics won’t just change the economy and appearance of Beijing—the most important thing is that it will change our values and concepts.”
I asked Xu if he had any reservations about China’s adopting a Western view of sport. He brushed the question aside, explaining that the issue was political rather than cultural. “I went to Seoul in 1988,” he said. “Korean people told me that if it weren’t for the Olympics, nobody would know what Korea is. Before the Olympics, foreigners only knew about the Korean War.”
In Xu’s opinion, China needed to emulate the Western model of sport as a business. He said that Chinese athletics were essentially twenty years behind Chinese economics. Because sport was so closely tied to nationalism, it hadn’t yet been converted to the market, like a lagging state-owned enterprise. But the process had started; recently, Hilton cigarettes had funded the national basketball program, and Coca-Cola sponsored Chinese soccer. “After fifty years, we’ll be just like the Western countries,” Xu predicted. “The Olympics will be a kind of business to us. We’ll be saying, ‘We have a big house, and we want to invite you so we can show it off.’”
AT 5:30 P.M., Driver Yang finally found an Olympics site. We got out of the cab and walked over to an empty field. It was the size of four city blocks, smack in the middle of northern Beijing; any buildings that had formerly stood there had been cleared away. In Chai nar, that was a familiar sensation—the feeling that something had just been demolished. Pink flags on poles marked the field’s perimeter.
“That’s where they’ll have soccer and tennis,” Driver Yang said. He grinned and swung an imaginary racquet through the air.
“And badminton, right?” I said.
“Right.”
We stood there staring at the empty field.
“Well,” I said. “I probably should go back and get dinner.”
On the Fourth Ring Road, we got stuck in traffic. The meter had been running for three hours, and by now the numbers might as well have been calculating the sense of anticlimax. Driver Yang was feeling the pressure once more. Finally, he asked what I was doing for dinner.
“I don’t have any plans,” I said.
“Do you eat Chinese food or Western food?”
“Chinese is fine.”
He said it wouldn’t take us long to get to his home in Tongzhou, on the eastern outskirts of Beijing. We went east on the Fourth Ring Road, and Driver Yang started talking about sports again. He told me that Mike Tyson was his favorite American athlete, because the boxer has Chairman Mao’s face tattooed on his arm.
“Why do the Chinese people like Tai Sen?” Driver Yang asked rhetorically. “Because he likes China. If he likes China, China likes him. And he understands China.”
“Does Tyson really understand China?” I asked.
Driver Yang said, “If he doesn’t understand China, why would he put a tattoo like that on his arm?”
That was an excellent question and I had no response. Driver Yang smiled. “Tai Sen read four of Chairman Mao’s books while he was in prison,” he said. “I saw it on television.”
He explained his personal theory about why athletes from the United States are dominant. “Americans are big,” he said. “They eat very well from the time they’re born, and also America is more scientific. If you take a country like China, a developing country, we can’t compete with a country like America. Your health is important. Look at Tai Sen. If he wasn’t so strong, how could he win?”
Driver Yang also admired Michael Chang, the tennis player. “He grew up in America, but his blood is Chinese,” he said. “Obviously it doesn’t hurt him. That shows that there’s a problem with the system here.”
It was seven o’clock by the time we reached Tongzhou. Driver Yang said that he was in the mood for Mongolian hot pot. Neon signs along the highway proclaimed BEIJING 2008, and WELCOME TO THE NEW CENTURY’S TONGZHOU. In the center of town they had a McDonald’s and a big department store called Wu Mart.
ON THE FINAL day of the I.O.C. inspection, I joined the press pool that accompanied the commission. Five of us represented the foreign media: three television reporters, one photographer, and me. The reports that I filed would be distributed to the other journalists in Beijing, to use in stories about the inspection.
In order to join the press pool, I had to agree to a number of simple rules that had been established by the I.O.C. The first rule was that I could not ask questions. I was allowed to follow the commission members around, and I could quote them on anything they said during the inspection. If an I.O.C. representative happened to speak to me, I was permitted to respond. But under no circumstances could I take the initiative and address an inspector directly. If caught asking questions, I would be promptly expelled from the press pool. The I.O.C. also informed us that at some meetings we would only be allowed to observe the opening proceedings.
The rules were effective, at least in terms of creating a sense of drama. Wherever the inspectors went, journalists tagged along, notebooks and cameras ready. We moved in silence, as if struck dumb by the momentous occasion. After the morning session, I filed my first dispatch:
This is the pool report for this morning’s meeting between the Chinese and the I.O.C. inspection commission, at the Beijing Hotel…. Members of the press were escorted to the back of the room, where we were kept behind a red velvet rope. Women in qipao dresses greeted the delegations at the door. The members of the delegations trickled in one by one. They appeared to be relaxed and greeted each other warmly. The I.O.C. members gave each other air kisses and the Chinese did not. The qipaos were of red silk.
One of the press handlers explained that this
morning’s press opportunity would be extremely limited. “When we’re here, they won’t say anything,” she said. “When we leave, they’ll speak.”
I wrote it down. She told me not to use her name.
The only excitement was when one of the I.O.C. commission members, Robert McCullough, walked to the other side of the table and asked Chinese gymnast Liu Xuan to autograph his International Herald Tribune promotional insert…. The last page features a photograph of Liu Xuan in full dismount and this is what she signed. A photographer from China Sports Daily was in the press pool and he pointed out excitedly that he had taken the picture. He was not asked to sign it and he remained behind the velvet rope like everybody else.
Today the topic was Beijing’s hotels and medical services, and the first speaker was Doctor Zhu Zonghan, Director of the Beijing Sanitation Bureau. He has a degree from Harvard and the moment he began to speak the press was escorted out.
Outside the hotel, bicyclists were riding down Chang’an Avenue as part of the “Ten Thousand Bicyclists Support Beijing’s Olympic Bid Activity.” The bicyclists wore red and white and black athletic outfits and they rode in formation, carrying flags that said, in English, “Applying for Olympic Games is My Hope.”
It was a fine day with clear blue skies and the wind came hard from the north.
THE INTERNATIONAL OLYMPIC Committee is a curious organization. It elects its own members, and for most of its history, the organization has not been particularly concerned with diversity. During the time of the Beijing inspection, the I.O.C. consisted of 123 voting members, of whom nearly half were European. The People’s Republic of China had three members. That was the same number as the combined royal families of Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, and Monaco, each of which had one I.O.C. member. Of the 123 total members, only 13 were women. Two of them were princesses and one was a Spanish infanta.
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