China is getting everything it wanted out of these Games. A doping scandal helped | Opinion
BEIJING – These Olympic Games began with the most subtle of warnings about the country they were being held in, so innocuous it would have been easy to miss. It occurred in an otherwise uneventful press conference for the American freestyle skiing team with a bunch of guys who are barely old enough to drink.
It was a curious place for a reporter from People’s Daily, the most important newspaper in China, to be asking about China’s environmental track record.
Essentially a media arm of the Chinese Communist Party, the People’s Daily wanted to know what the U.S. freestyle team thought of the preparations for the Games, which carbon-reduction measures most impressed them, what they thought of the concept of “a shared future for mankind launched by president Xi Jinping” and how China and the United States could further cooperate in developing winter sports.
Our young American athletes were just being polite as they answered the questions as earnestly as they could. But they were almost certainly walking into a propaganda trap.
“It’s a great example to the rest of the world of the effort China’s making to have a clean impact,” said Nick Goepper, apparently unaware that China is the largest emitter of greenhouse gases and that experts continually rate China among the worst climate offenders in the world.
“This is my first time in China and it’s incredible,” he continued. “It’s like nothing I’ve ever seen before.”
And finally, when asked about China’s monumental efforts to hold the Olympics in the midst of a pandemic, he offered up this headline: “I feel like this is the safest place in the world right now with the pandemic.”
A common propaganda tactic
On and on it went like this, the Chinese reporter asking bizarre questions, American athletes offering up glowing soundbites about the hosts of these Olympics that you could imagine being blasted out to the Chinese people as a counterweight to the slew of stories that would surely come from the international media about alleged genocide against ethnic minorities in the Xinjiang Uyghur region and the crackdown on freedom in Hong Kong.
“It’s a common propaganda tactic for the Communist Party and state media to get foreigners to repeat talking points and then transmit them back to the domestic audience in China to reinforce their domestic propaganda and sometimes to foreign audiences, too,” said Sarah Cook, the research director for China, Hong Kong and Taiwan at Freedom House.
As the Games went on, it became less subtle and more out in the open, to the point where you could build a parlor game around which frivolous topic Chinese reporters might bring up at the daily IOC press conference. Whenever the international media would press spokesman Mark Adams on the inflammatory topic of the day, the Chinese press was right there to ask about the availability of the panda bear mascot in stores or the lantern festival that follows the Lunar New Year.
But here’s the thing. In the end, China didn’t even need to lure the world into peddling its propaganda. In the end, the Chinese Communist Party is getting everything it wanted out of these Games.
No athletes speaking out about human rights abuses. Very few COVID-19 cases, to the point where zero cases were recorded for several days inside the so-called “closed loop” that separated the Olympics from the real Beijing. Big teenage stars like freeskier Eileen Gu and snowboarder Su Siming delivered gold medals. And then, perhaps the best possible gift to China: A figure skating scandal that captured the world’s attention and took issues like Peng Shuai or the Uyghurs completely off the table as a frame for these Games. Heck, China even got real snow at an Olympics that had been mocked for needing to manufacture it.
To say Xi Jinping won his big bet on holding the Winter Olympics in China would be a massive understatement. At least for the audience that matters – the one domestically – it can only be viewed as a tremendous success.
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Of course, most of the world could see through the veneer. The government’s claim that these Olympics will leave a legacy of 300 million Chinese participating in winter sports seems both implausible and difficult to verify. American television ratings on NBC were consistently awful, far below the numbers generated just four years ago in Pyeongchang.
Yes, COVID-19 cases were rare in the bubble. But for those of us that lived through it, the measures taken to both build it and lock it down for more than two weeks were borderline dystopian. For those unlucky enough to test positive, the conditions in isolation seemed highly unpleasant.
And the Chinese government picking a little-known cross-country skier of Uyghur ethnicity as one of the flag-bearers for the opening ceremony, then trotting Peng out to events and a tightly-controlled interview with a French publication was so heavy-handed that you almost have to admire the audacity of it all.
'Irresponsible' to give the Games to a country that violates human rights
Sure, human rights and alleged genocide certainly came up as part of these Games. Western journalists wrote about it and asked about it, though the IOC came prepared to both deflect and defend the hosts. There was even one press conference that kind of went off the rails when Yan Jiarong, a spokesperson for the Beijing Organizing Committee, broke the “no politics” barrier in response to a question about the team from Chinese Taipei, which is how Taiwan is referred to at the Olympics because China does not recognize the island as an independent nation.
“I have to take a solemn position,” Yan said. “What I want to say is there is only one China in the world. Taiwan is an in-dividable part of China and this is a well-recognized international principle and well recognized in the international community.”
But that was a blip. In the overall assessment, Chinese officials did not spend a lot of time trying to spin or explain away their record on these issues because they didn’t really have to. Athletes were warned beforehand that they might be punished if they launched any political protests, and Human Rights Watch advised them to wait until they got home to speak out.
They complied.
Nils van der Poel, the speedskater who won two gold medals, waited until he returned to Swedish soil to say that it was “extremely irresponsible to give it to a country that violates human rights as blatantly as the Chinese regime is doing.”
About the closest any athlete got to criticizing China while they were here came on Saturday, when British-American freestyle skier Gus Kenworthy, who is gay, said the Olympics should have minimum standards to meet in its treatment of LGBTQ people in order to host the Games. Even then, he acknowledged he’s been trying to “tread lightly” while he remains in the country.
“It was never that I didn’t think China could put on a good Games,” he said. “I absolutely knew that they could, and they have. But I think when there are human rights atrocities happening in the country and a poor stance on LGBTQ rights, then those things need to be taken in consideration by the IOC.”
But in the end, everything China didn’t want to talk about at these Olympics became background noise when 15-year old Russian figure skater Kamila Valieva tested positive for a banned heart medication.
The way the saga unfurled across the two weeks of the Olympics was the ideal distraction. First, there were red flags over the medal ceremony for the team competition being delayed. Then, rumors and innuendo over the reason. Finally, the revelation about the positive test, the intrigue about whether she’d be allowed to skate in the women’s individual competition and the decision from the Court of Arbitration for Sport allowing her to compete.
The Valieva story brought so many relevant storylines into the conversation: Russia’s history of doping, the IOC’s feckless punishment structure, the abusive behavior of adults in a troubled sport and a child who could not compete at her best with the eyes of the world upon her.
If the Beijing Olympics are remembered for anything years from now, it will be that. And in the end, it was China that skated.