A repressive regime riven by corruption vies to host the Olympics. A sometime superpower with a politically checkered past—including chapters of mass murder—and a taste for the performative, it is looking to bolster its rank in the world order. Despite global disapprobation, it wins the bid and proceeds to spend an exorbitant sum—quite at odds with the living standards of its citizens—to prepare for the games. Anyone outside the country who protests its troubling domestic policies is accused of meddling; dissenters inside are simply imprisoned.
One may be forgiven for confusing the Russian Olympic spectacle with the Chinese one six years earlier. On his visit to Sochi last week, Xi Jinping, the Chinese President, called Russia a “good neighbor, good partner, and good friend.” He might also have called the country a good reflection of China in 2008, when Beijing hosted its inaugural Summer Games amid controversy about the government’s treatment of Tibet, among other allegations of human-rights abuse and environmental endangerment.
Despite the conspicuous absence of world leaders (Obama, Cameron, and Merkel), the Sochi opening ceremony lacked little in the way of pomp and circumstance. In lieu of two thousand synchronized drummers and a shockingly expensive firework display extolling the great inventions of ancient China, there was a glowing horse carriage, the Russian troika, being pulled across the twenty-seven-thousand-foot-long stadium to the tune of Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring,” and a spirited ballet of “War and Peace.” Take the promotionalism and pageantry of a high-school talent show, Russianize, multiply by a fifty-billion-dollar budget, and you have Sochi—with a very determined Principal Putin at the helm.
Do I sound smug? I must be one of the very Western journalists condemned by the Chinese state publication Global Times in an editorial called “Booing Sochi only shows West’s bigotry”:
Also threatening the world’s future, it seems, are those who, according to the People’s Daily, “have tried to politicize sports and have vowed to boycott the Sochi Winter Olympics, claiming that Putin chose to host them to flaunt his strongman image.” The paper, a mouthpiece of the Chinese Communist Party, goes on: “In this situation, the attendance of Chinese leaders has become even more precious. Sochi is now covered with snow and ice, but Sino-Russian ties remain warm.”
The invocation of Sino-Russian relations and the “strongman image” are worth noting. In 2008, a month before the Beijing Games, Russia sided with China in a surprise decision to veto the U.N. resolution, backed strongly by the United States, that sought to impose sanctions on Zimbabwe after Robert Mugabe effectively stole the country’s Presidential election. The move was born out of a very conscious and pragmatic alliance. A year earlier, in January of 2007, the two countries together vetoed a measure imposing sanctions on Burma, a Chinese client state when it comes to trade. China returned the favor by twice blocking a Europe-backed resolution on Syria, a country of more geopolitical significance to Russia, first in October, 2011, and then in February, 2012.
In an astute op-ed in the Times after the second veto, Minxin Pei, a professor at Claremont McKenna College who specializes in Chinese governance, wrote, “The two countries seem to have reached a strategic understanding: they will act to defy the West together, so that neither might look isolated.”
For China and Russia, the Games are not so much about defying the West as they are about marking its irrelevance. As the two rising giants of the East see it, the Olympics are an ideal opportunity for political gamesmanship (in recent days, the Chinese state media has not spared the occasion to sing of a “de-Americanized world”). When Beijing defends Putin’s flaunting of his “strongman image,” the Communist Party also defends itself and its ambitions.
The Beijing and Sochi Games have been good outlets for brand building. That both countries should choose the Olympic route, even at the cost of their environments and economy, may not be a surprise. But does the Communist Party suffer the same pang of recognition that Chinese netizens did upon seeing the protests, as well as the shoddy conditions of derelict hotel rooms in Sochi? (“Looks just like China!” many micro-bloggers remarked on Weibo, the Chinese equivalent of Twitter.)
China has sent sixty-six athletes to Sochi, twenty-eight fewer than it did to Vancouver, where the delegation won eleven medals—seven gold—in its most decorated Winter Games. That feat underscored the government’s heavy investment in an arena where resources were historically scarce (compare the financial cost of training a table-tennis champion versus a speed-skating one). China only began participating in the Winter Games in 1980—four years after the close of the paralyzing Cultural Revolution—and didn’t win a medal in a winter event until 1992. Skiing, which accounted for three of its eleven medals in 2010, is a sport that exists, for the average Chinese citizen, as little more than a novelty.
In undermining the liberty of its citizens, the Kremlin jeopardizes the very sort of legitimacy it is so desperate to gain. “Olympic Games are a sports festival embracing human diversity in great unity,” Thomas Bach, the International Olympic Committee president, said in a pointed speech denouncing discrimination at the start of the Sochi opening ceremony. Along with his forty thousand fellow-spectators, perhaps President Xi caught the implicit second half of that sentiment: absent the spirit with which the Games are meant to be played, it is nothing but an excuse for a very expensive party.
Photograph by David Goldman/Pool/Getty.
[#image: /photos/590950f8c14b3c606c103604]See more of The New Yorker’s coverage of the Sochi Games.
