Penn professor Monroe Price says groups of all kinds hope to use the Beijing Olympics to get their
message out. Olympic organizers, meanwhile, will try to keep those groups at bay.
The tagline for the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games is, “One World, One Dream.” It’s a slogan that implies there is an overarching story of unified support for China and the Games.
But others are fighting to have their stories told.
Groups calling for a Free Tibet interrupted the countdown ceremony in August of 2007, and last month, the Chinese government clashed—sometimes violently—with protestors in the western part of the country and Tibet. In February of this year, Steven Spielberg resigned as an advisor to the opening and closing ceremonies because of China’s relationship with the country of Sudan, which has been attacking the region of Darfur. And concerns continue to mount about Beijing’s terrible air pollution and the toll it could take on athletes, especially those who compete in outdoor events that last more than an hour.
These are some of the contradictions inherent in the Beijing Games, argues Monroe Price, the director of the Project for Global Communication Studies and an adjunct professor at the Annenberg School as well as author of the new book, “Owning the Olympics.”
“Rather than one strong unified message,” Price writes, “the Beijing Olympics [have] become polyphonic, multi-voiced, many-themed.”
Compiling essays from Annenberg Ph.D. students, graduates and teachers, as well as scholars from around the world, the book reveals how multiple entities hope to control the narratives through which the Games and China will be understood. Price notes that big events such as the Olympic Games are unstable simply by virtue of their size, which makes them perfect targets for groups hoping to seize the world platform and disseminate their message to a wide audience.
“One set of parties creates a platform—designs, invests, builds—and then others try to piggyback, hijack or seize,” says Price. “Of course, the Olympic committee, the local organizing committee and the sponsors want to build the biggest and best platform that has ever been. And then this makes it vulnerable.”
China hoped by hosting the 2008 Games to recast its image as one of a peaceful and positive global power. As Monroe writes: “The Olympics were presented time after time as China’s ‘coming out party,’ its reinvention for world recognition as an economic, political and social power. ... It is also part of a short history of defining Asia to the world through the Olympics.”
He notes that two ideas are at issue: images of China and images of the Olympics. “Many will try to keep these separate and insulate the event against those who try to yoke them together,” he says. “Of course, since it’s so much the Beijing Olympics, the yoking is done all the way from officials down to protestors.”
One prime example of those who have tied in their social cause with the Games is the Save Darfur organization, which was started by Smith College English Professor Eric Reeves. This group coined the term, “Genocide Olympics,” which Monroe argues has gathered under a single banner much of the discontent, anxiety and suspicion about China and human rights.
As Reeves’ efforts to call China on the carpet gathered steam, celebrity activist Mia Farrow took up the cause, putting pressure (via an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal) on Steven Spielberg to divest himself from involvement in the Games. This simple op-ed, says Monroe, altered the dynamic of the Save Darfur campaign by introducing these issues of concern to a wider audience, leading to some loss of control for the movement’s organizer, Reeves. The Games provide a perfect opportunity for corporations and sponsors, states and global civil rights groups, to make their narrative about China known—a fact that the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and China are well aware. Price says the IOC wants the Games to be a symbol of human progress, but will also subvert those concerns if need be.
He explains: “Olympic ideals are sometimes more than aspirations, but in the pragmatics of the most expensive, overwhelming and significant Games of all time, ideals can sometimes look like a bit of a sideshow.”
Originally published on April 10, 2008
