The television viewer will hardly notice it on Friday. The opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics in Beijing will be tightly orchestrated – the organization will leave nothing to chance. The Olympic script will be carried out down to the last detail. There will be snow, there will be battles, there will be winners and losers, there will be talk of the medal tally. For 3,000 athletes and millions of viewers, it will be about sports for the next 17 days.
Nevertheless, the 24th Winter Games in no way live up to the image that has been formed since the first edition in Chamonix, 98 years ago: a festival of fraternization between peoples from all over the world. The contrast between the practice and the official motto of ‘Beijing 2022’ – Together for a Shared Future – could hardly be bigger. Working together for a common future presupposes something different from the super vacuum that China has designed to exclude any interference.
The fact that athletes, counselors and journalists are kept in an Olympic super bubble is understandable in view of the pandemic. Tokyo, last summer, also had strict rules. But the Chinese vacuum goes much further; this has to do with possible criticism of the country’s unchanging bad reputation in the field of human rights in Hong Kong, Tibet and Xinjiang, among others. China wants to prevent the fairytale show from being disrupted at all costs.
The world will look at China for over two weeks, but will not see the country; the possibilities for free news gathering are too limited for that. Hundreds of journalists have flown in to cover the Games, but are being kept away from the real China – that from outside the ice rinks and snow slopes. That is no coincidence, a disturbing report by foreign correspondents in China recently revealed. They have noticed for some time that the authorities make ‘normal journalism’ virtually impossible.
It seems likely that superpower China now feels so strongly that it does what it wants – whatever the world thinks. Already at the Summer Games in Beijing (2008) opponents were unable to force a boycott because of ‘Tibet’. Now, fourteen years later, a number of Western countries led by the United States have declared diplomatic boycotts because of, among other things, Chinese crimes against humanity and genocide in Xinjiang, but it apparently makes little impression on Beijing.
It will not change the picture of the Games, especially during a raging pandemic. In fact, the resulting isolation – political, journalistic, sporting and pandemic – may make it easier for China to get the message it wants: a powerful country that was once again awarded the Games. In that vacuum, the Games themselves become a bubble, outside the reality of everyday life: completely detached from political relations, climate change or corona.
The athletes themselves will pursue their dreams on Chinese soil, as they always do. They have trained and waived for this for years. For them, in this era, in which a negative corona test is more important than a positive fitness test, it is already an Olympic achievement to appear unscathed at the start. For them alone it is hoped that at the next Olympic Games the whole world can once again enjoy the festival of fraternization.
A version of this article also appeared in NRC on the morning of February 3, 2022