Lasting lessons from China’s “joyless” Olympics

With the 2022 Winter Olympics now over, The New York Times rightly called the Beijing Games “a joyless spectacle” amid an ongoing pandemic birthed in China and the exploitation of the games by the Chinese regime for propaganda. The unfolding crisis over Ukraine also cast its dark shadow, with the despots from China and Russia showing their friendship at the Games, reassuring each other of mutual support. Officials from the United States boycotted the Olympics.

As one Asia expert told the Times, “Such an august occasion, designed to promote openness, good sportsmanship, and transnational solidarity, ended up being a heavily policed, brittle, Potemkin-like simulacrum of the Olympic ideal.” Exactly.

Mercifully, the next Winter Olympics will be in a more joyful and freedom-loving host country: Italy. The next three Summer Olympics also will be hosted by democracies: France, the United States, and Australia. Hopefully, the travesty of communist China hosting this year’s Winter Games did remind the free world of the country’s unfitness to host gatherings intended to exemplify international fraternity.

At the start of the Beijing Games, Chinese autocratic leader Xi Jinping met with visiting Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, declaring “no limits” to their tyrannical bromance. They also together warned, “Russia and China stand against attempts by external forces to undermine security and stability in their common adjacent regions.” Their words obviously were aimed at the United States and its allies, even as they try to contain Chinese influence and counter Russian threats against Ukraine, among others of its neighbors.

Putin, appearing at the Games’ opening ceremony, hailed Russia’s athletes who marched under the flag of the Olympics rather than Russia’s and could not hear their own Russian anthem, thanks to an official “ban” on the Russian team due to state-sponsored doping. Russians also were subjected to daily drug tests. Presumably, Putin was not at all embarrassed. Perhaps is he just beyond embarrassment.

Maybe the 2022 Winter Olympics will best be recalled not for athletic excellence but for highlighting shameless authoritarian repression and aggression by the world’s two most threatening dictatorships. Of course, Xi also attended the closing ceremony, drawing the required “roar” from the obedient Chinese crowd, according to the Times. No doubt Xi and his compliant apparatchiks regarded their extravaganza as a great triumph on the world stage, oblivious to how it showcased China’s choreographed police state, when not ignored altogether. Television viewership in the United States was the lowest ever, down 42 percent from the 2018 Winter Games in South Korea. The drop, in part, likely reflects the growing diffusion of American TV audiences. But likely, at least some Americans avoided a spectacle that was doomed to exploitation by China’s cynical rulers.

A moral low point was reached with China’s selection of a 20-year-old ethnic Uyghur as one of two athletes to light the Olympic cauldron during the opening ceremony. China has placed hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs in reeducation camps, coyly called “vocational schools,” as it suppresses the Muslim minority into cultural conformity with Beijing and the Communist Party.

Showcasing the young Uyghur woman, who was not made available for reporters and could have only participated in the Olympics through obedience to the regime, was China’s typically ham-fisted attempt at pretending that all is serene in the Middle Kingdom. “This is a powerful counterblow to smears from the United States and anti-China Western forces,” trumpeted one compliant Chinese commentator. No genocide here! As one U.S. human rights activist explained, “Having a Uyghur light the torch is a middle finger to the rest of the world, as if saying: ‘Hey, I don’t care what you say about me. I do whatever I want.’” A Uyghur athlete took part in the torch relay before the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing. He is now serving a six-year prison sentence as a supposed security threat.

It would be easier to ignore such unpleasantries about the often quite brutal Chinese hosts and instead focus on the athletic accomplishments and the fireworks-studded theatrics of the Olympics closing ceremony. The superficial rhetoric from Chinese and Olympics officials stressed the supposedly non-political event as the celebration of international collaboration across perceived national and political differences. Only blindfolds and earplugs can make this fantasy possible.

But the Winter Olympics in increasingly totalitarian China were indeed a joyless spectacle evincing the sinister falsehoods of a cruel dictatorship and the ruthless rule of China’s Community Party. Of course, there were no public prayers or references to deity during Beijing’s performance. But God surely heard many quiet prayers, and His justice will not sleep forever. In the meantime, China continues to show its ruthlessness, even on the global stage of the Olympic Games.