At first, even China did not believe that Beijing would win these Olympics, but was very pleased with them. Is there still enough joy when the Olympics seem to be mainly drilling the world’s gaze on human rights abuses?
Beijing
When Beijing applied for the 2022 Winter Olympics, not even Beijing thought they would get them. There were superior applicants in Europe. Beijing had only hosted the Summer Olympics in 2008, and a couple of other Olympics were coming to East Asia.
Beijing only applied to remember its name and win the Winter Games sometime later, says professor of sports sciences in a remote interview Heather Dichter from the British University of De Montfort.
“Sure, China was delighted to realize that it’s really possible to have these Olympics already.”
It so happened that well-known applicants withdrew from an expensive race. Descriptive was the pre-favorite story of Oslo: it was enough when the International Olympic Committee demanded a royal reception and limousines from Norway for its machinery, for example.
There is no information on how Beijing has pampered the gentlemen.
Thomas Bach, President of the International Olympic Committee, declared Beijing the host of this year’s Winter Games in Kuala Lumpur in May 2015.
When Beijing in 2015 won the Games for itself in a tight vote against Almaty in Kazakhstan, the world was very different.
Donald Trump was not yet the president of the United States, and the United States and China did not wage a trade war. No attempt was made to divide the world into two camps.
China had not started camping in Xinjiang or crushed the democratic forces in Hong Kong.
And no one had any knowledge of the impending coronary pandemic.
What kind of Olympics did China think it would host? And what does it get now?
Medical personnel were present when speed skaters practiced in Beijing on Friday.
Of course China was meant to market itself to the world through well-organized Olympics, stunning venues and beautiful scenery. Tourists had to flow into the country, and the Olympics had to promote tourism anyway.
There are no foreign tourists in the auditoriums of the Corona period, and only a few and selected people from Finland. They need to stay a good distance away from the athletes competing in the so-called bubble, and they must not shout encouragement.
“It’s a real blow to the Games,” Dichter says of the lack of audience.
He describes the mood as sad. The lack of tourists also shakes the legitimacy of the Games a bit, as there is no money coming to Beijing from tourists.
“The very fact that the Games can be held is a miracle and a great achievement. I think this is putting a lot of pressure on the Chinese Government and people. This is not an easy thing to do, ”says a well-known Chinese sports reporter and commentator Yan Qiang in a telephone interview.
It is true that organizing health-safe competitions is challenging. Many other countries would have given up, but China would not.
On the other hand, China may be relieved by the lack of a foreign audience, as it does not have to fear newcomers organizing embarrassing protests on its soil, Dichter says.
Indeed, from the perspective of the Chinese leadership, the main audience of the Olympics may now be at home. The Games tell a national story about how great China is.
Read more: China builds 174 kilometers of highway from Beijing to ski resorts for winter races – Road camera captures road users, surprise waves wide
Passengers were received on Thursday at the Zhangjiakou train station inside a corona bubble built for the Olympics.
Olympic rings were attached to the ice of the Olympic toboggan run on Friday.
Important the goal for China was to promote winter sports and winter tourism. In its home country, it planned to introduce more than 300 million Chinese to winter sports before the Olympics. As is often the case in China, this has officially happened.
“But only 11 percent of them had practiced winter sports three times or more in 12 months. As if that I went to learn to ski or skate on the day. It’s not a very sustainable participation, ”Dichter says.
Yan Qiang sees otherwise:
“Over the past ten years, I’ve noticed my friends taking up winter sports. For many of them, it is a completely new thing. People’s habits have changed and more and more people want sport to be part of their lives. ”
Huge investments in winter sports venues such as ski resorts have been meant to be turned into profitable investments through future tourist flows.
Dichter doubts whether China will succeed in attracting foreign tourists to its winter destinations in the future. Some other researchers believe that China’s prosperous tourists are well conquered by the ski slopes.
Read more: China began to grow its citizens into winter sports enthusiasts well in advance of the Olympics, and now broken legs and wrists have become a talked about topic – It’s only been a month since the Games, but it’s hardly noticeable from the streetscape of Beijing.
The Olympic flame arrived in China in October and was displayed at the Olympic Village in December.
Interesting the question is whether the Beijing Games are becoming a big image burden for China. With such brutality, the world media is downplaying the human rights situation in China.
It is told about the horrors of Xinjiang, the dissidents arrested during the Olympics, the citizens of China who were abducted from the world by the world.
Read more: China erected digital repression machine in Xinjiang, offering a gruesome view of what a “total police state” model could soon be like in many countries
Read more: China launches operation called Foxhand abroad, and now at least thousands of people have been forced to return to China
There is certainly room for all this writing, as the human rights situation in China has deteriorated further.
NGOs’ message about China’s violations easily gets a lot of weight in the media under the Olympics, said Chinese anthropology professor specializing in the Olympics Susan Brownell Missouri-St. From the University of Louis recently at a remote lecture.
His research reveals that this was already the case at the 2008 Beijing Summer Games. The rapidly growing and growing world of the NGO field in the world knew that under the Olympics, it was a good time to raise the profile of both my own and the cause.
Brownell has rare contacts with Chinese sports circles as he has previously studied and competed in China. He was also an insider at the Beijing Olympics arrangements in Beijing.
Experiences in China’s time have led Brownell to believe that human rights demonstrations under the Summer Olympics around the world were worsening China’s human rights record. The country’s leadership introduced tougher grips to protect itself.
“The problem was that the rage surrounding the Games helped the Chinese Communist Party. It may have better understood the confrontation between itself and the world around it. ”
According to his analysis, news coverage of the Summer Olympics probably somewhat weakened Westerners ’image of China.
Yet the human rights news had less of an impact on Brown than you might imagine: Under the Summer Games, human rights raged in public, but after the Games began, the focus was on sports. Later, the world commemorated the impressive opening ceremonies of Beijing and the good performance of the Games.
“I suspect China is counting on this to happen again.”
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