E-Notes

The Beijing Olympics Narrative

by Monroe Price

August 2008

Monroe Price is Director of the Center for Global Communication Studies at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania. He is co-editor, with Daniel Dayan, of Owning the Olympics: Narratives of the New China (University of Michigan Press/DigitalCultureBooks, Feb. 2008). This essay is based on his comments at FPRI’s August 7 Telephone Briefing on the Beijing Olympics; Jacques deLisle and Amy Gadsden also made remarks in this briefing. Audio/videofiles of the briefing are available.

The Beijing extravaganza is the most elaborate theatrical production of this century (true, the century is still young) and already among the most dramatic Olympic Games ever. The question is, what’s the plot and who is involved in establishing and modifying it?

We’re not going to know the entire plot, certainly not until the Olympics is over—and probably not for a few years after that. Millions will seek to alter history through symbolic acts of protest, and there are millions of volunteers and citizen observers as well as a hundred thousand security officers to prevent this. There will be speeches that ring true, and speeches that ring hollow. Only in retrospect will we know which ones, including President Bush’s talk from Thailand on the eve of the Olympics, will fit into which category.

The Games are certainly about China trying to strengthen appreciation of its geopolitical role as it seeks to gain greater world respect for its achievements and objectives.

They are about whether and how leaders of the West and civil society groups operate in establishing their points of view and take shots at the emerging Goliath.

Obviously, the Games are about intensifying the process of participation and democratization in China. For China’s leaders and others, that could lead to the glory of gradual and orderly change, or the abyss of crisis, confusion and national weakness.

The Games have been about the capacity of China to control the weather, affect the regime in Khartoum, and alter its historic course of conduct in Tibet.

The Beijing Olympics has had its nationalistic consequences, burnishing pride in millions, maybe hundreds of millions, of Chinese throughout the world. That nationalism will have its consequences as well.

There may be astounding surprises—if, for example, the Dalai Lama and China use the Olympics to make a dramatic breakthrough on Tibet. There are already signs that China has used the Olympic moment to alter, possibly favorably, relations with Taiwan and Japan.

A major drama has been the skirmishing over the Internet: what constitutes “sufficient access” or “free and open access,” which sites continue to be banned and why. It is about the strange dance between the International Olympics Committee and the Beijing Organizing Committee as the idea of Olympism, as historically developed, meets the specific context of China.

This has been a theater of opening—part of a deliberate and massive opening of China to the world—coupled with thousands of Chinese students spending valuable time in the West. The U.S. government has seen the public diplomacy benefit to America of having foreign students at U.S. universities.

But it's interesting to see the strategy for the sending country, in this case China. There are now 45,000 Chinese students in the United States—with significant potential to become a voice, as we have seen in the torch debates and the counterpart protests elsewhere. How do the actions and counter protests by many Chinese students to Olympic protests in the United States and elsewhere figure in the public diplomacy strategy of China, especially with respect to the Olympics—if at all? We don’t yet know fully the impact of this permeability.

Have the Olympics affected the foreign policy of China toward Darfur? Although China initially resisted international efforts to link its policy on Sudan to the Olympics, its eventual response—both private and public—to the mounting criticism would suggest that the Olympics-related pressure had some effect. But the answer to even that precise question is murky.

The Olympics presented a drama about the weather. Would the air be clear enough for the demonstration of athletic prowess, or would it be dangerous to athletes? Somehow, this became a dramatic story testing China’s capacity as wizard or trustworthiness as predictor, or fortune as subject of natural movements.

Because of the centrality of China and narratives of China in the global and domestic imagination, the stakes in producing and controlling the stories produced through the Beijing Olympics are great. “Platforms” such as the Olympics present an ideal opportunity for external groups to expropriate an event to deliver messages and pathways to persuade—coupled with the intense need for those with “official” control over the narrative to maintain this control.

The phenomenon of platforms exists in a world in which much clamoring for attention—to sell goods or alter political attitudes—encounters few effective channels to reach the desired audience. As issues such as human rights, environmentalism, and even the impact of domestic political choices are increasingly seen with respect to their transnational implications, the interests and actions of civil society and other groups shift from a national to a global level. These groups, often blocked from entry (purposely or merely because of patterns of scarcity) into domestic media systems, seek new ways of reaching widely distributed elites—and masses. 

The most dramatic kind of “hijacking” the narrative involves literal or figurative control of a media event such as the Olympics—the most recognized Olympic example being the Palestinian gunmen in Munich.

But the concept of hijacking raises complex questions of power and how narratives are generated and diffused in society. Because of the ever-present danger of appropriation, a defining characteristic of significant platforms such as the Olympics is the effort to protect them from unwanted or unremunerated uses. This becomes more difficult with complex platforms like the Olympic Games, which are protected through physical modes of security, assertion of intellectual property and contractual rights, and intense management of narrative.

Ownership of the Olympic platform is multiple and ambiguous: the International Olympic Committee (IOC), the local Organizing Committee, corporate sponsors, non-governmental organizations, the athletes, country members—all have a stake in creating or using the platform.

The IOC affirms a role in forwarding Olympic goals that seeks to avoid the political. Soon after China was awarded the Games, IOC President Jacques Rogge said, “The IOC is not a political body—the IOC is a sports body. Having an influence on human rights issues is the task of political organizations and human rights organizations.” But a look at the history of the IOC provides glimpses of the IOC seeing the Olympics as a mode for moving a society “forward” along a number of dimensions, and the Olympics’ capacity to promote positive political, economic and social change is almost always an element of the bid award process. In 2002, Rogge told BBC-TV, “We are convinced the Olympic Games will improve human rights in China” (“IOC Warns China on Human Rights Pledge,” Australian, April 26, 2002).

At the same time, there is no doubt that the Games are an opportunity for China to tell its stories at home and abroad—to affirm its arrival on the global stage and show off the country’s modernization and economic success.

At an April forum on China at Columbia University, Xiao Qiang, director of the China Internet Project at the University of California Berkeley, described China as a “modernizing propaganda state.” Xiao coined the phrase “main melody” to capture the narrative desired by that changing and multidimensional propaganda machine.

But the Games are also an example of “asymmetric” information warfare, where small groups use their leverage to take issue with those with far more substantial and organized resources. Groups advocating change in all the areas I have mentioned seized the extraordinary benefit of huge investments in platforms established by the IOC and Beijing and took advantage of the fabulously structured forum to advance their political and commercial messages. 

And as the Games begin, another unanswered question is, what will happen if protests erupt? The BBC has claimed that it “cannot be expected to hide demonstrations if they happen at events where they have cameras.” They would be expected to cover the Olympics, “warts and all.” (Richard Spencer, “Beijing Olympics: BBC to Show Protests,” Telegraph, June 13, 2008). But it's doubtful that the Olympic broadcasting agency that will provide the only feed of the sporting events would show footage of protests if they occurred. “They fudge the question,” Dave Gordon, head of major sports events for the BBC, was reported to have said. “They won't commit to saying yes, they will cover it or no, they will not cover it.” Spencer reminds us that “China has a 50 percent share, along with the International Olympic Committee, in the official Games broadcaster, Beijing Olympic Broadcasting.”

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