This is close enough to the topic of this thread, so I’ll post it here. I can’t link it, so I’ll past it in:
[quote=“SCMP”]China’s pursuit of gold an endeavour that excludes the majority
JAKE VAN DER KAMP
I have many vices, I know that I do, but I am proud to tell you that patriotism is not among them, not for any country and I can claim some measure of affiliation to three.
I say this apropos of the headline in our Olympics supplement yesterday on China’s medal victories - “Red storm rising, new superpower emerges”. Yes indeed, hurdles today, world domination tomorrow.
I know you will protest that this was only about the Olympics and should be taken in a metaphorical sense but let us not fool ourselves. Beijing does not treat the Olympic Games as sport alone. It regards the final medal tally as a commentary on China’s standing as a superpower in every sense of the term and, by all accounts, drives its Olympic athletes mercilessly to get their golds.
You can see it in more than the Olympics. Has the United States put a man in space? Well, we will do it too, whatever the cost. We have the atom bomb, we are the world’s fastest-growing industrial power and we are even building a fanciful new national theatre in our capital because every country that esteems itself must have one. Whatever anyone else can do we can do too.
But did others ever deny it and, if they did, are their opinions really worth listening to? Is this in any case really the way to measure a society’s worth?
The strange thing about these national demonstrations of being as good as anyone else in high-profile shows and public monuments is that on one level, these things quickly turn into dangerous illusions of superiority and at a deeper level, they bespeak a lingering national inferiority complex.
I can understand it in China’s case. For centuries, Chinese people suffered racist insult and subjugation at the hands of technologically superior western civilisations. Their natural reaction was to overcome it by striving for that same technological superiority and not technological alone but intellectual and now athletic too.
Meanwhile, I also read in yesterday’s newspaper of a peasant in the northeastern provinces who committed suicide because he could not face the ignominy of having too little money to send his son to a college at which he had been accepted. How much stress must people at the bottom endure so that their compatriots at the top can congratulate themselves on acceptance to the international big league?
I think I can guess what the full cost of staging the 2008 Beijing Olympics might be for China by looking at the 1988 Seoul Olympics and their aftermath of political turmoil and economic damage, which still leaves the Korean stock market index at less than half of its level in US dollar terms at the peak of its Olympics bubble.
When everything is counted in, staging the Olympics is a horrendously expensive business and the burden will once again inevitably fall on China’s working poor as it did for that costly man-in-space initiative and does for every show that Beijing stages to prove that it has arrived. It all just puts off the day that the labourer in China can arrive at a comfortable existence.
I am also far from convinced that this focus on the Olympics will foster widespread participation in sport in the mainland. What it rather does is concentrate all the attention on an outstanding few, some of them near freaks, while consigning millions of others to watch the performances on television, their playing fields developed for other uses and all the money for encouraging sport directed into top-flight facilities for the few. It is a prescription for creating national flab, not national fitness.
And may I ask how much attention the national authorities would pay to such trivial pursuits as synchronised swimming if there were no Olympic gold at the end of the pool? None at all and good money saved would be my guess.
May I also ask how many fingers of one hand it will take to count the number of times the velodromes now under construction in Beijing will be used after 2008?
I think Deng Xiaoping had it right in extolling wealth as a proper objective for his people but the trouble is that he and his successors then placed too much emphasis on the trappings of wealth rather than the substance of it spread across as many people as possible.
To my mind, India, with not many fewer people than China, took the better approach to the Olympics, with only one silver medal as against China’s 32 golds, 17 silvers and 14 bronzes. I would not hold India up as a model of economic development but in this case it got its priorities right.
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