The Olympics Have Gone Political!
Shock and awe! Call out the National Guard and move to DefCon 3!
Come on, what did they expect? Everyone knows that the biggest show on earth is also its biggest political platform. Think of the Mexico 1968 Black Power salute, the 1972 Munich atrocity, the 1976 apartheid boycotts at Montreal, the Cold War tit-for-tat spat in the 1980s and the 1996 Atlanta bombings - not to mention Hitler's notorious Berlin 1936. Am I saying anything new?
It should be of no surprise to the Chinese, therefore, that there is going to be a political element. Indeed, they are the ones who are politicizing Beijing 2008 the most.
By presenting it as the showcase event of the 'peaceful rise' of China and the return of the Chinese civilisation to the centre of world affairs, they themselves are couching it in the language of politics. By building several hugely expensive architectural masterpieces, they are deliberately sending a message about their renewed capabilities. And if China wins the biggest haul of gold medals, it will see it not merely as a sporting triumph but as a reification of national superiority.
So of course the games are political: the very last to see it as a mere athletic event are the Chinese themselves. Why pretend the two are separated?
Protests over Beijing games 'will grow' | World news | The Guardian
Qiao Mu, the director of international communication studies at Beijing Foreign Studies University, said the government could no longer ignore foreign opinion.
"China needs big events like the Olympics to prove itself as a powerful nation," he said. "In Mao's days, the government did not need to care about the foreign media because they were easily able to ban information easily and live in the fantasy they created for themselves. But now that we live in an age of globalised information, the government must pay more attention to outside opinion."
