AFP, Shanghai :
China warns almost daily against “politicising” this week’s Beijing Olympics, but for its rulers, hosting the Games has always been about far more than sport and the medal count.
Even under the shadow of a pandemic, Western accusations of genocide against Muslim minorities and diplomatic boycotts, staging the Olympics is about global prestige for China and its ruling Communist Party, analysts say.
Beijing 2022’s difficulties may even increase the country’s stock, experts say. Hosting what it calls “a safe and splendid” Games in a pandemic will boost China’s claims that its relative success controlling Covid illustrates the superiority of its top-down governing approach.
China’s frequent criticisms about Western nations politicising sport is “at the very least ironic, if not completely hypocritical”, said Steve Tsang, director of the China Institute at SOAS University of London.
“The fact they are using the Olympic Games as a major political event to project China’s international image — which is a separate political act — is completely ignored.”
China has not always insisted on separating sport and politics.
After the newly founded People’s Republic of China competed in the 1952 Helsinki Games, it then sat out the next quarter century, initially in protest against the presence of athletes from political rival Taiwan, although domestic upheaval under Mao Zedong was also a major factor.
China returned in 1980 at Lake Placid, but later that year it joined the dozens of countries who skipped the Moscow Summer Olympics following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
Since then, China’s Communist Party has latched onto the Olympics as leverage in its global power play.
Beijing bid for the 2000 Games but lost to Sydney after the United States and allies raised human rights and other concerns.
Undaunted, the Chinese capital fought back and successfully won the 2008 hosting rights.
With the world watching, it was China’s coming-out party — and it brought the house down, winning both the medal count and international acclaim.
