Search

This paper revisits China's recent experiences of hosting three international mega-events: the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, the 2010 Shanghai World Expo and the 2010 Guangzhou Asian Games. While maintaining a critical political economic perspective, this paper builds upon the literature of viewing mega-events as societal spectacles and puts forward the proposition that these mega-events in China are promoted to facilitate capital accumulation and ensure socio-political stability for the nation's further accumulation. The rhetoric of a ‘Harmonious Society’ as well as patriotic slogans are used as key languages of spectacles in order to create a sense of unity through the consumption of spectacles, and pacify social and political discontents rising out of economic inequalities, religious and ethnic tensions, and urban–rural divide. The experiences of hosting mega-events, however, have shown that the creation of a ‘unified’, ‘harmonious’ society of spectacle is built on displacing problems rather than solving them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In spite of rhetorical flourishes concerning world harmony, from US vantages the 2008 Beijing Olympics represented an episode in the ‘clash of civilisations’ between an American-led ‘Occident’ and China's ‘Confucian’ civilisation. The US media and public tend to see the Olympics through Samuel Huntington's combative interpretation of world affairs rather than as a pacific transnational partnership. The Chinese tendency to count medals to guarantee China's triumph indicates that many Chinese shared in that habit. Americans often see globalisation as an opportunity for Americanisation. Seeking through sport the cultural transformation of China and the rest of the world represents an old habit in US culture. From American viewpoints, the inclusion of new action sports in the Olympics has multiplied opportunities for Americanising the globe. In the Olympic debut of BMX cycling, Americans perceived that in spite of Chinese successes in Beijing the Olympics ultimately spurred the extension of US hegemony. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article addresses three facets of modernity that are signified by slogans and spatial settings in Beijing, China. The research was conducted as a preliminary study of the communication process in the course of globalization and nationalism reflected in the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games. This article uses some photographs and observations to analyze symbolic meanings of slogans and spaces from Beijing in summer 2007, a year before the Games. Since slogans in China have a long tradition, the repeated usages of slogans and their relations to the spatial settings might signify strong messages to promote governmental orientations. This article explores slogans on Tiananmen Square in relation to the political space, a huge sign displaying the motto of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games in Wangfujing district in relation to the economic space, and slogans in an old and poor district under a redevelopment project. The article posits that these three slogans and spaces reflect three different facets of Chinese modernity: nationalism, globalization, and developmental ideology. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Modern Olympics have always been about national prestige. The 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing was a good illustration. The unprecedented support level to the Beijing Games from the government to the public reflects the sense of national identity which is motivated by the memories of past grandeur and humiliation and the keenness to build a new, vigorous, modern and strong nation in the world. Through examining Beijing's two Olympic bids, construction of infrastructural facilities, the choreography of the Games' Opening Ceremony and the widely publicized Olympic slogans, this paper explores the complicated relationship between national identity building, modernization drive and the Beijing Games. It claims that Olympic victory has been regarded as the public embodiment of national strength and symbolic of China's emerging status in the world.; the building of a new national identity has been closely linked with modernisation which is inseparable from the ongoing globalization, urbanization and migration in the country. In addition, the Games facilitated China's modernisation in industry, communication, transportation and management. The Games was not just the dream fulfilled, but a future vision. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 2008 Olympic Games is so significant in reconstructing Chinese nationalism as well as reshaping the state-society relationship because in the single year of 2008 most of the political mobilization and social movements were driven by the games; most of the focusing events (e.g. accidents and disasters) are redirected or reinterpreted due to the games; most of the contradictions and conflicts are concealed or exposed under the name of the games. Both the authorities and the public faced more opportunities, challenges and pressures from the domestic and international community because of the games. The reconstruction of Olympic-mobilized nationalism then lies in such dynamic official and popular responses and also reflects transforming state-society relationships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the 2008 Summer Olympic Games in Beijing, China and examines how hosting the event influenced Chinese education policy related to citizenship education. Particular focus is paid to ways in which Chinese nationalism and China's role as a global power were emphasized in citizenship education during this time. The relationship between citizenship, sport, and globalization are examined along with the rationale behind China's bid to host the games. Other topics include China's educational curriculum since the 1970s, educational research methodology, and international cooperation in education.

The article examines intertwined cosmopolitan and national narratives in the context of the Beijing 2008 Games. Through a discursive analysis of the opening and closing ceremonies it seeks to provide some insight into understandings of Chinese national identity as a 'displaced' agent in the 'birth' and 'evolution' of Western European civilisation, who returns to claim a central place in human history. The artistic production of such resentful discourses develops alongside its technological counterpart, providing insight into the ways national citizenships remain gendered and racialised. For activist networks and the critics of the Olympic project this 'mediated' cosmopolitanism harbours a performative contradiction, as it sanctions Chinese policies that erase certain social identities from the nation-state. The multicultural ambiance of the Olympic mega-event symbolically resolves the crisis generated by the calls for national development through careful urban planning that violates human rights. An interdisciplinary analysis of the two ceremonies and secondary material suggests that national self-narration takes place simultaneously in different expressive/visual modes, enabling the coexistence (and communication) of the 'symbolic' with the 'material' in what I will term an 'allegorical imperative'. This imperative, a miniature of the Olympic discourse on human dignity, is constitutive of the anthropopoetic project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on the case of Beijing Olympic torch relay, this study explores the complex relationships between the Olympics, media and politics by analyzing news reports, and also explains the perspectives and frames adopted by the media to present this topic from the viewpoint of Japanese society. By reviewing 134 articles published by three mainstream newspapers in Japan, four news frames and nine detailed topics are categorized, representing factual, emotional (Chinese nationalism and the reaction) and analytical aspects. The result suggests that although the number of news reports on each topic varies among the mainstream newspapers, they all share the same tone in each news frame. Moreover, along with the emphasis on detailed and factual information, the Japanese mainstream newspapers chose to report intensively on conflict and confrontation, Chinese patriotism and nationalism, and the bewilderment and dissatisfaction felt by Japanese residents in order to create a confrontational structure of 'Japanese vs. Chinese'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reflects on the mediated cultural politics of the Beijing Olympics through analysis of selected Australian print, online and television coverage. It demonstrates that media coverage of major sports events such as the Olympics is linked to the particular concerns of each country, while also displaying elements of internationalism and globalism. The 2008 games provided an opportunity to 'interrogate' the current condition and trajectory of China, creating a very mixed picture of a nation wishing to use the games to symbolize its increasingly prominent place in world economics, politics and sport, but inducing considerable resistance to its projected image among the Australian press, as well as some robust defences of its achievements. Ultimately, the Beijing Olympics revealed (despite the familiar catchcry that sport and politics should be separated) a battle of narratives that saw, for example, Chinese nationalism and global engagement pitted against international defensive positioning and global scepticism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper [1] reports on an ethnographic field research conducted in Beijing in 2007, with an attempt to examine the cognitive and affective orientation dimensions of a group of Hong Kong students toward the Beijing 2008 Olympics and their negotiation of national identity. In 1997, China resumed sovereignty over Hong Kong under the principle of 'One Country, Two Systems,' continuing a long history of Hong Kong people struggling with their national identity. Study tours to Mainland China had been arranged as an extension of national education, with the Beijing Olympics as the main theme. With field notes and focus groups, this study found that the tour provoked in the students an interesting mixture of pride and skepticism and also reinforced their 'insider/outsider' identity crisis. This article concludes that the debate over the use of Beijing Olympics as national education reflects an intrinsic paradox of the principle of 'One Country, Two Systems.' [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article provides some closing remarks on the articles contained in this issue, including one by Xuefei Ren on the 2008 Olympic Games and the city of Beijing, China where they were held, one by David Davies on the earthquake in the Wenchuan area of China, and one by Ha Guangtian and Kevin Caffrey on how the Olympic Games impacted the lives of everyday Chinese people.

The preparations for the 2008 Beijing Olympics can be analysed to reveal the changing nature of the state, society and market forces and their mutual interaction in the People's Republic of China (PRC). It is also useful in understanding the consensual aspect of the Chinese state. Examining how the Beijing Olympics is being organised as a spectacle is important in understanding how Chinese state power has developed and maintained its consensus vis-à-vis the society in the post-Mao period. This process of institutionalisation of state, society and market interactions in the field of sport could provide insights regarding parallel developments in other sectors as well in China today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how Beijing presented an Olympic bid that not only won the city the right to host the Olympic Games, but also served to increase the legitimacy of the IOC. Through discourse analysis, it is shown how Beijing was depicted as a natural choice for the next Olympic host city. Certain notions of time and space were fundamental in this presentation. The meanings of concepts related to time and space were determined by their oppositions — 'modernity' was defined in relation to 'underdevelopment', 'the new' was describes in relation to 'the old', and 'the West' was opposed to 'the Orient'. Beijing was constructed as an Olympic city within the context of two strongly modernist ideologies of the Chinese government and the Olympic Movement. 'Olympism' was portrayed as Ihe driving force behind modernity and associated with universalism, the new and the Western world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A little while ago I wrote by way of an acknowledgment in my Women, Sport and Society in Modern China: ‘Professor J.A. Mangan has proved to be a most exceptional supervisor. His intelligence, his attention to detail, his sympathy for my subject, his long hours of patient assistance, have ensured the completion of this thesis. When I chose to study at his international research centre, without fully appreciating the fact, I made the wisest of decisions. His sound advice, his careful thoroughness and his constant support too can never be forgotten.’ I remain deeply grateful for his unstinting support and again say simply ‘thank you’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]