As far as a coterie of western scribes were concerned, there was just nothing right or good about the 2008 Beijing Olympics.
By Choo Wai Hong 27 September 2008
Reading and watching the media coverage of the 2008 Olympics from Europe, I found myself doing a double take. At the same time as I was enjoying the magnificent spectacle put on by Beijing, I was also witnessing a coterie of western journalists rubbishing everything about the games.
It had, in fact, started many months earlier. What began as a publicity drive in holding a round-the-world Olympic torch relay in April 2008 failed disastrously because the Chinese were totally unprepared to deal with the well-orchestrated pro-Tibetan campaign to protest against the Olympics in China. To be fair, the protesters did use physical force to disrupt torch bearers running through the streets of Paris, London and San Francisco, and when an over-exuberant protester tried to wrench the torch away from a hapless Chinese woman paralympian in a wheel chair, she became a national heroine overnight for holding on to the torch for dear life.
But the focal point of reports in the western press was something else. Over television images of disorderly interruptions to the torch relay, commentators trumpeted the right of protest in western democracies and decried the Chinese volunteer security guards as ‘Gestapo-like thugs’.
Later, when China tightened security within its borders after uncovering terrorist threats to disrupt the games, western press reports all but implied that the threats were more imagined than real, and interpreted the move by the authorities as yet another excuse to clamp down on its people. Like the cartoon appearing in the June 21 edition of The Economist, which showed a big burly guard wielding a police baton in one hand and a cage in the other, trapping a multitude of Chinese-looking protesters, disabled people, the aged, prostitutes, dogs and pandas.
Even the measures put in place by Beijing to cut down on pollution were ridiculed by western journalists as desperate and useless attempts to clear the city’s smoggy, un-blue skies. Stopping construction activity around the city was painted as banishing the migrant workers from Beijing, temporarily shutting down polluting factories was seen as depriving workers of their livelihood.
For the opening of the Olympic Games, the Financial Times boldly headlined: ‘Breathless in Beijing’. Whether in print in America or live on English television during the opening ceremony, commentators repeatedly pronounced the skies as polluted and muddy, and made dire predictions about the problems which endurance athletes would face.
Luckily for the Chinese, the measures worked, and all the athletes who had to endure the open air managed to breathe and break all manner of world records. In the words of the Romanian gold medallist in the women’s marathon when asked about Beijing’s smog: ‘I felt so good - it was just a beautiful day!’
Beijing surprised the world with a stupendous and grand, mother-of-all opening ceremonies at the Olympics at 8pm on 8/8/2008, involving a no-expense-spared spectacle of tens of thousands of drummers, dancers, singers and musicians led by a world-class Chinese director.
Chilling image
But many viewers and readers of the western media were fed an entirely different story line. Europeans woke up the morning after the opening to see in the New Europe newspaper a ‘chilling image’ of Chinese soldiers high-marching in perfect harmony to hoist the Chinese flag with the caption that the goose-stepping soldiers were ‘reminiscent of the Nazis at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin’. How this ludicrous connection is made is anyone’s guess.
The only item from the splendid opening ceremony which made it to the front page in the west was the picture of the prettier little girl, who turned out to be not the less pretty singer and therefore ‘exposed’ for a crime no greater than lip-synching. Even a thousand drummers drumming in perfect sync and thousands more dancers moving in perfect step were characterised as mass spectacles made possible only by the rigid rule of an authoritarian regime. The Guardian scoffed at the words of the song sung by little kids about planting trees and turning the land green as ‘the most tooth-rottingly sentimental passage . . . in the midst of one of the world’s most polluted cities’.
While Chinese athletes should be praised for their heroic efforts to reach the top of the medal table and beat former medal greats such as USA and Russia, the western press did not waste any time in excoriating these accomplishments. It is one thing for western journalists to only highlight their own country’s athletes, but quite another to castigate the efforts of the Chinese athletic stars.
China’s focused medal quest was characterised in an FT column as ‘subverting’ the Olympic tradition of ‘trying, not winning’ to a ‘repulsive’ extent. And ‘subversion’ was given new meaning by this columnist as ‘China targeting vulnerable, medal-heavy sports, such as rowing, in which the Chinese previously had no interest, and directing promising athletes towards them’. Others would simply call this clever strategy. In similar emotive vein, USA Today, in discussing China’s singular medal focus, made the point that children were talent-scouted and ‘forced’ into sports for which their body type or abilities were suitable.
There were also some bizarre aspects to the coverage. For instance, what editorial logic possessed the FT to run a picture of the last-placed Bulgarian gymnast in the men’s rings final and then acknowledge in a tiny caption that the gold and silver medals were won by two Chinese gymnasts?
It gets better. An IHT headline screamed ‘An unknown smashes 200 butterfly record and the questions begin’, and raised doubts about how an unknown Chinese woman swimmer could have achieved this feat, with another unknown Chinese swimmer winning the silver. Who better then to interview for the story than the mother of the Australian former world champion who came in third. ‘Until Beijing, I’d never heard of either of them (the gold and silver medallists) - just who are they?’ wailed the disappointed mum.
Name-calling
There was also much name-calling about the Beijing Olympics, which were dubbed the ‘political games’, the ‘genocide games’, or the ‘smog games’. The IHT, right after the opening of the games, reminded its readers to berate China about ‘human rights, the environment, Darfur, allegedly under-aged athletes and a checklist of other big and small rubbing points’. The Asian Wall Street Journal in its editorial opined that true global respect will only come when China shows itself to be a more responsible citizen abroad, and its government respects human freedoms at home. USA Today threw in ‘dictatorship, disregard of individual freedoms and human rights, labour unrest, pollution, rural poverty and proliferation of unsafe products’.
The best quote must go to a columnist for the London Sunday Times who, after throwing the kitchen sink at the games, concluded that the Beijing Olympics was an ‘unlovable event . . . held in a singularly inappropriate country beneath a choking purple petrochemical fog’.
To someone like me, sitting outside China and outside the west, the Beijing Olympics looked like a huge success, perhaps the best-ever. It’s a pity that so many journalists in the West failed to notice that because they suspended their sense of reason and objectivity.
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When Journalists Lose Objectivity ...
As far as a coterie of western scribes were concerned, there was just nothing right or good about the 2008 Beijing Olympics.
By Choo Wai Hong
27 September 2008
Reading and watching the media coverage of the 2008 Olympics from Europe, I found myself doing a double take. At the same time as I was enjoying the magnificent spectacle put on by Beijing, I was also witnessing a coterie of western journalists rubbishing everything about the games.
It had, in fact, started many months earlier. What began as a publicity drive in holding a round-the-world Olympic torch relay in April 2008 failed disastrously because the Chinese were totally unprepared to deal with the well-orchestrated pro-Tibetan campaign to protest against the Olympics in China. To be fair, the protesters did use physical force to disrupt torch bearers running through the streets of Paris, London and San Francisco, and when an over-exuberant protester tried to wrench the torch away from a hapless Chinese woman paralympian in a wheel chair, she became a national heroine overnight for holding on to the torch for dear life.
But the focal point of reports in the western press was something else. Over television images of disorderly interruptions to the torch relay, commentators trumpeted the right of protest in western democracies and decried the Chinese volunteer security guards as ‘Gestapo-like thugs’.
Later, when China tightened security within its borders after uncovering terrorist threats to disrupt the games, western press reports all but implied that the threats were more imagined than real, and interpreted the move by the authorities as yet another excuse to clamp down on its people. Like the cartoon appearing in the June 21 edition of The Economist, which showed a big burly guard wielding a police baton in one hand and a cage in the other, trapping a multitude of Chinese-looking protesters, disabled people, the aged, prostitutes, dogs and pandas.
Even the measures put in place by Beijing to cut down on pollution were ridiculed by western journalists as desperate and useless attempts to clear the city’s smoggy, un-blue skies. Stopping construction activity around the city was painted as banishing the migrant workers from Beijing, temporarily shutting down polluting factories was seen as depriving workers of their livelihood.
For the opening of the Olympic Games, the Financial Times boldly headlined: ‘Breathless in Beijing’. Whether in print in America or live on English television during the opening ceremony, commentators repeatedly pronounced the skies as polluted and muddy, and made dire predictions about the problems which endurance athletes would face.
Luckily for the Chinese, the measures worked, and all the athletes who had to endure the open air managed to breathe and break all manner of world records. In the words of the Romanian gold medallist in the women’s marathon when asked about Beijing’s smog: ‘I felt so good - it was just a beautiful day!’
Beijing surprised the world with a stupendous and grand, mother-of-all opening ceremonies at the Olympics at 8pm on 8/8/2008, involving a no-expense-spared spectacle of tens of thousands of drummers, dancers, singers and musicians led by a world-class Chinese director.
Chilling image
But many viewers and readers of the western media were fed an entirely different story line. Europeans woke up the morning after the opening to see in the New Europe newspaper a ‘chilling image’ of Chinese soldiers high-marching in perfect harmony to hoist the Chinese flag with the caption that the goose-stepping soldiers were ‘reminiscent of the Nazis at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin’. How this ludicrous connection is made is anyone’s guess.
The only item from the splendid opening ceremony which made it to the front page in the west was the picture of the prettier little girl, who turned out to be not the less pretty singer and therefore ‘exposed’ for a crime no greater than lip-synching. Even a thousand drummers drumming in perfect sync and thousands more dancers moving in perfect step were characterised as mass spectacles made possible only by the rigid rule of an authoritarian regime. The Guardian scoffed at the words of the song sung by little kids about planting trees and turning the land green as ‘the most tooth-rottingly sentimental passage . . . in the midst of one of the world’s most polluted cities’.
While Chinese athletes should be praised for their heroic efforts to reach the top of the medal table and beat former medal greats such as USA and Russia, the western press did not waste any time in excoriating these accomplishments. It is one thing for western journalists to only highlight their own country’s athletes, but quite another to castigate the efforts of the Chinese athletic stars.
China’s focused medal quest was characterised in an FT column as ‘subverting’ the Olympic tradition of ‘trying, not winning’ to a ‘repulsive’ extent. And ‘subversion’ was given new meaning by this columnist as ‘China targeting vulnerable, medal-heavy sports, such as rowing, in which the Chinese previously had no interest, and directing promising athletes towards them’. Others would simply call this clever strategy. In similar emotive vein, USA Today, in discussing China’s singular medal focus, made the point that children were talent-scouted and ‘forced’ into sports for which their body type or abilities were suitable.
There were also some bizarre aspects to the coverage. For instance, what editorial logic possessed the FT to run a picture of the last-placed Bulgarian gymnast in the men’s rings final and then acknowledge in a tiny caption that the gold and silver medals were won by two Chinese gymnasts?
It gets better. An IHT headline screamed ‘An unknown smashes 200 butterfly record and the questions begin’, and raised doubts about how an unknown Chinese woman swimmer could have achieved this feat, with another unknown Chinese swimmer winning the silver. Who better then to interview for the story than the mother of the Australian former world champion who came in third. ‘Until Beijing, I’d never heard of either of them (the gold and silver medallists) - just who are they?’ wailed the disappointed mum.
Name-calling
There was also much name-calling about the Beijing Olympics, which were dubbed the ‘political games’, the ‘genocide games’, or the ‘smog games’. The IHT, right after the opening of the games, reminded its readers to berate China about ‘human rights, the environment, Darfur, allegedly under-aged athletes and a checklist of other big and small rubbing points’. The Asian Wall Street Journal in its editorial opined that true global respect will only come when China shows itself to be a more responsible citizen abroad, and its government respects human freedoms at home. USA Today threw in ‘dictatorship, disregard of individual freedoms and human rights, labour unrest, pollution, rural poverty and proliferation of unsafe products’.
The best quote must go to a columnist for the London Sunday Times who, after throwing the kitchen sink at the games, concluded that the Beijing Olympics was an ‘unlovable event . . . held in a singularly inappropriate country beneath a choking purple petrochemical fog’.
To someone like me, sitting outside China and outside the west, the Beijing Olympics looked like a huge success, perhaps the best-ever. It’s a pity that so many journalists in the West failed to notice that because they suspended their sense of reason and objectivity.
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