1936 - 2008? The
FAZ journalist
Evi Simeoni introduced recently in parts
very provocative conversation with the IOC President
Jacques Rogge , one hand on the recent doping scandals in German cycling and also the host of the Olympic Games 2008, here is an excerpt:
FAZ: Fears are also high that China Olympic Games will primarily use for self-expression. Will we experience the greatest propaganda games since Berlin 1936?
Rogge: Listen! What has he done Germany during the soccer World Cup last year? Your country has made great efforts to present itself as the new Germany - as a prosperous, vibrant, hospitable and generous country. There was even a plan of government. It was presented on the occasion of the major sporting event, a fantastic Germany. They had the Berlin events, all the people all around the stadium, a public relations campaign sponsored by public money was. China does something like that too. Australia made it. . .
It must also play a role in what becomes a public relations campaign made. In the case of China for an undemocratic country that does not respect human rights.
China during the Olympics will make no political propaganda. China will showcase its culture, which is fantastic, his country, its geography, it will show what China represents. The good thing is to move that the presence of 25,000 journalists who will report on the Games and the country, the social views are. It is the media and freedom of information given during the Games. . .
Yes but only if you write about sports. . .
No, about other things, and many of you will do that. This would not have been possible without the Games. I'm not afraid that might happen again, what happened in 1936 in Berlin.
If the neckline. The
XI. Summer Olympics 1936 : The
Berlin Games, awarded in 1931 to the German Republic were for Nazi Germany a unique opportunity profiling. A contributing factor is that the regime wanted to take abroad, the fear of a resurgent Germany. Germany was successful as a peaceful, modern and economically are presented. Should of course also the pride in the new Germany will be shown - we wanted to take to overcome economic and social crisis of the 20s the world public, to see and show other countries a technically and culturally re-leading and also tightly run country as a prime example.
The influential particularly in the U.S. criticism of the Nazi state and its exclusion policy in 1935 had almost led to a U.S. boycott, the National Socialist policy was considered to be incompatible with the Olympic Charter. The German government had given in 1933 a declaration in which they pledged to hold open games, but many paid no true faith. The boycott proponents failed, the games took place and were a tremendous PR victory. The highly successful
Leni Riefenstahl film Olympia -depth after the Games this "performance".
The Olympic cities (Garmisch-Partenkirchen for the Winter Olympics, then Kiel and Berlin for the summer games) and its residents were prepared for propaganda for the Games. For example, Berlin was an unwelcome turn expelled inhabitants (the Sinti and Roma were displaced from the urban area), on the other hand, homosexual meeting places (the city was in the 20erJahren famous for its gay scene; main English example is
Isherwood Berlin-novels) re-opened and the persecution and exclusion of the Jewish population was brought to a standstill superficial. A few weeks before the Games to sharpen the German population, courteous and respectful to foreigners. - If the review.
If you want to see the parallels, it can certainly be found in abundance (see, for subjects such as 'conduct of the hosts' Yardley's article on the measures in Beijing that I've posted in April). I would like to remember, however, the following: There should be but a critical (global) public be possible not the actual elements of propaganda of the Chinese Government on the Go to glue, but with open eyes the country and the people below, the target in the coming year the games. For example, Reporters sans Frontières
now starting a campaign to raise awareness about the human rights situation in the People's Republic
attention. Moreover
are propaganda effects (as Mr Rogge somewhat polemical, but rightly noted) at sporting events of this size are commonplace. Here I just want to say, have observed with what astonishment and disbelief in what surprised me from a distance the euphoria of the Germans at the World Cup in 2006, not to speak of the campaign before
You are Germany! , that attempt in German intellectual middle class, the concept of homeland pride back to make presentable.
My skepticism regarding the games, lies in another area - I think the Chinese people a false perception of intellectual content are subject to the Western idea of sport. As in many other areas, the imitation of Western ideas and concepts is done only superficially, the basics are overlooked. This leads to an erosion of Western ideas (the same is true of other Western thinking concepts such as human rights, democracy, rule of law, fair economic competition and free trade, intellectual property). This emptiness goes hand in hand with the Business interests of Western corporations and profit-oriented organizations (such as the IOC) in tandem with many Western governments.
Peter Hessler, Beijing reporter for the New York
has, in his recent book, Oracle Bones
in the section where he (as Beijing was awarded the bid for the games) on the February 2001 report of this phenomenon in detail illuminated and with as much detail, I am taking back his ideas here:
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. [...]
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. [...] 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 [...]
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 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 Olympics 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, hardcore competition , and performance-enhancing drugs. In the Atlanta Games of 1996, China ranked fourth overall. They moved up to the third in Sydney, and by Athens they would be second, only behind the United States. [...]
Sport was grim. It often showed on the faces of the 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 competitiveness 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-competitetive qualities should have been seen as a healthy alternative to the excess of Western sport, were instead described as embryonic stages in the Chinese march toward Olympic glory. [...]
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. [...]
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; [...] "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.'"
Aus: Peter Hessler, Oracle Bones. A journey between China's past and present, New York 2006 (HarperCollins), p. 263-67.
Xu's views have now (the conversation is already six years old) by the hugely popular NBA basketball player Yao Ming and hurdler Liu Xiang received the food. Yao and Liu are media and advertising stars such as Western athletes too, but they must submit to the dictates of the powerful, sometimes even in Beijing.
Whether the games will be a success? Whether this course, they will contribute to international understanding and induce the changes that are expected in the progressive West (eg, organizations such as the
RSF), because I certainly have my doubts.
UPDATE 07/19/2007: In the
time can read a very critical short article from the Beijing Sports Writer
Wang Xiaoshan about the games next summer
, here's a quick excerpt:
are in fact the government every effort to Olympia to the to make best games in history. Who then will travel to Beijing in August 2008, will get a wonderful impression. But I say today: everything you watch will be a deception. The traffic will flow, because half of the cars driving ban has. The air will be fresh and clean, as all factories are temporarily closed. On the road there will be no beggars, because they sit behind bars. The sky will be blue, because rain clouds are shot with artificial methods before reaching the city. Only the smile of the masses will not be an illusion, because the Beijing are always so hospitable. They would even thank the kidnappers after a kidnapping if he is doing them no harm. Also brings Beijing Olympics the most tangible benefits. The entire state budget flows into the capital. So the roads are wider, more beautiful buildings and numerous jobs. The incomes are rising.
UPDATE 07/27/2007:
Jeffrey N. Water flow , Professor of Chinese History in Irvine, writes in today's edition of the IHT
a short article about his expectations for the Games in Beijing. Here is a brief excerpt from his
readable text :
Whatever happens, we will be surprised. The regime will strive to control matters, but the unexpected will occur. I say this not just because of China's prediction-defying track record, but so happen because many Olympics are remembered for things that were not supposed to. Yes, Hitler got more legitimacy than he deserved from the 1936 Games, but the stunning performance by a black American athlete, Jesse Owens, was not part of his Aryan-supremacy plan.
And who expected Munich 1972 to be remembered for a massacre? The Mexico City Games of 1968 are remembered for the Black Power salute of two African-American runners who were determined to draw attention to racism in the country for which they had just won medals.
It would be foolish to speculate about what sort of unplanned yet highly memorable event might happen during the Beijing Games. But you don't need a crystal ball to know the sort that China's leaders worry about most: a symbolic act of protest by a Chinese athlete or even a scene-stealing gesture of defiance by a spectator while the world's gaze is fixed on Beijing.
