Duncan Hewitt in Shanghai reports on a new trend in Chinese media, which has begun revealing personal stories and quirks of Olympic athletes:
We all know Chinese authorities are just a tiny bit concerned about how their country is perceived, both by foreigners and their own citizens, as a result of these Olympics. “We are an image-conscious nation – we do house-cleaning when guests visit,” announced the official China Daily in an angry editorial denouncing foreign criticism of the Games last week. This ‘image-consciousness’ has been a sub-theme of everything from ultra-tight security to politburo-level intervention in the choice of the little girl who sang at the opening ceremony. And state media are of course doing their bit to paint their portrait of a harmonious, confident, and increasingly important nation: “Beijing brings happiness to the world,” and “Beijing has made the Olympics more genuinely global in nature” are just two of the burbling front-page headlines run by the always on-message tabloid The Global Times over the past fortnight.
China’s official broadcaster, CCTV, has done its best to reinforce the harmonious mood as well -- by ignoring all protests, broadcasting endless repetitions of the gruesomely banal video for the Olympic song ‘Beijing Welcomes You’, and running news stories about folk dance troupes from China and around the world performing in Tiananmen Square, “showing the friendship between China and foreigners”. There are other unique gems, such as the show I saw featuring a woman in army uniform surrounded by dancers in ancient Chinese costume, singing a song in English that praised the Olympics to an audience of uniformed police officers. (Words hardly do it justice, but the phrase ‘Confucio-militarist kitsch’ does spring to mind…)
Add to this the fact that China’s sports system is well-known for being one of the least reformed parts of the bureaucracy, and it’s perhaps inevitable that some foreign media coverage has portrayed China’s ever-more successful athletes as faceless cogs in a giant propaganda machine. “The state broadcaster is interested in Olympics but not Olympians. Not for CCTV the looks at individual athletes' back-stories which are commonplace to those who watch sport in the west … The Chinese are not presented with the athlete's journey to gold. It is as if the only narrative that matters is that of China's. Hence endless focus on the medal table,” wrote one visiting journalist.
Now it’s clear that the nation’s sporting success fits into an important narrative for the government (when you hear commentators using the phrase “a historic breakthrough for China” to describe success in beach volleyball you know that something’s going on.) At the same time, what’s actually been striking in Chinese media coverage of the nation’s athletes at this Olympics has been the amount of focus given to individuals. The idea of stony-faced medal-winners parroting official slogans and dedicating their success to the motherland may (perhaps) have been true a few Olympics ago. But this time things have been very different and a lot more complex.
Yes, we did have the female windsurfing champion who couldn’t stop thanking her ‘leaders,’ but she also thanked her family and friends. And in general there’s been a lot of coverage of athletes expressing their own feelings and showing a lot of emotion, from the weight-lifter who greeted his gold medal by saying he couldn’t wait to get back to his family now that he didn’t have to train anymore, to the badminton duo shown weeping in an Olympic car park after failing to repeat their gold medal success at Athens.
It partly reflects a generational change – as their trendy hairstyles and willingness to ‘open up’ in front of the media reminds us, many of these athletes are in their teens or early twenties. And a media which now increasingly reflects the interests of younger viewers – and younger journalists – is keen to lap up the human-interest stories (provided these don’t break any propaganda taboos of course). And so we got the air-rifle marksman who broke down on camera, apparently inconsolable about how he’d let himself down by ‘only’ winning a silver medal. There was the medal-winner who appealed via the media for her long-lost father to get in touch with her.
There was the enfant terrible of Chinese badminton, Lin Dan, with his popstar looks and sports star girlfriend, defying the odds and the critics who’d written him off, to win a gold medal - and then pumping the air, hurling his shoes into the crowd and leaping into the arms of spectators in the front row, much to the irritation of the security man trying to usher him off the court. “I won this to show people what kind of a person I really am,” he said on TV afterwards, before bursting into tears.
And of course there was Guo Jingjing, the diving champion with the ‘film-star looks’ (as the Chinese press like to put it) , whose private life is of so much interest to the media that one questioner at her news conference asked whether her gold medals were a revenge against media intrusion into her life; Guo simply ruffled her long hair, looked away from the camera and appeared rather disinterested.
It may often be pretty sentimental stuff, but it’s certainly all about personalities - which are now the stuff of the media (particularly print and local TV) in China nearly as much as they are in many countries. Liu Xiang, whose Olympic dream ended so forlornly in Beijing, played a large part in stirring this frenzy when he exploded onto the scene in Athens four years ago.
Hence at this Olympics we’ve had even the staid central sports broadcaster CCTV5 trying to get in on the personality act, with a nightly chat show where medal winners and their coaches come on and talk, at sometimes embarrassing length, about themselves, their careers, and their feelings, before placing their handprints on gold stars on a ‘wall of fame.’ American gymnast Shawn Johnson got on the show too, with her Chinese coach. Host Cui Yongyuan, one of China’s best known celebrities, did his best to keep it informal – trying to persuade medal winners to propose to their fiancées live on air, dancing with embarrassed female gymnasts and asking their male colleagues to teach everyone the names of complicated gymnastic moves, so viewers could impress their friends in the bar. Cui also had a long discussion with a Chinese swimming coach who spent years in Australia learning a different approach to training, then set up his own club in China as an alternative to the official sports ‘machine’.
And there was space for the losers too. Talking to one female gymnast -- who was near to tears as she described how upset she was after falling and losing out on a medal, and how she felt sorry for all the people who’d supported her -- Cui suggested that as China’s sporting prowess has matured, “our fans have grown up too. We know now that sport is about success and failure and how to deal with them.” It was a timely reminder that, for all the propaganda, a more human, thoughtful and down-to-earth side of China and Chinese has also been on view at this Olympics. (It’s been on view too in the calm, non-jingoist and very well-informed commentary regarding many sporting events on some of China’s more ‘modern’, less centrally controlled TV stations, such as Shanghai’s sports channel) In a society where the official line and an often more complicated social reality often coexist, it’s quite possible that – as paradoxical as it may sound -- both these aspects will turn out to have been boosted by these Games.
