Ridicule does not kill, disinformation either. Meeting in a virtual summit last December, Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin lamented that the United States was “politicizing” the Beijing Winter Games by calling for their diplomatic boycott in the name of defending human rights. However, it is an understatement to say that the Chinese president, who has a beam in his eye, also politicized the affair by wanting to use the Games as a platform of Chinese power: first by politicizing the COVID pandemic -19, then by the ostentatious fraternization with his Russian counterpart engaged in a military showdown with Washington around Ukraine.
Olympism is not about political instrumentalization. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan led to a massive boycott of the Moscow Summer Games in 1980 by more than 50 countries led by Washington, a boycott followed four years later by that of the USSR of the Los Angeles Games. The textbook case of propaganda through sport is of course the Berlin Games of 1936, held under the Nazi dictatorship of Adolf Hitler, in which the United States, after hesitation, nevertheless participated.
It’s hard not to think, all things being equal, that the Beijing Games are perhaps the most politicized since 1936, given what international relations are today; and also seen the fierce repression of democratic voices to which both Xi and Putin are engaged at home. That the diplomatic boycott ultimately received little support says a lot about China’s power of intimidation and its readiness to use it — about its ability on an international scale to buy the silence and complicity of governments and companies. At the same time it speaks volumes about the weakening of the United States and the vacuity of its defense of human rights.
Moreover, these Games are those of the display of a clear Sino-Russian convergence. In this case, Taiwan is to Xi what Ukraine is to Putin — read intolerable democratic counter-models to their authoritarian logic. Mr. Putin’s meeting with Mr. Xi on Friday before the opening ceremony will illustrate the objective alliance that has increasingly united the two regimes since the annexation of Crimea by Russia in 2014 – a rapprochement for which Washington is not a little responsible.
If, historically, relations between the two countries have been marked by mistrust, the dynamics today are very different, and not only because the balance of power between them has completely reversed compared to the time of the USSR. Suffice it to say that China has been the main importer of Russian crude oil and natural gas since 2020. Although the latter is obviously keeping its back, particularly in its relations with the European Union, the fact remains that it shares with Russia an undeniable community of geopolitical spirit, when it comes to working for the construction of an international system which is not the one created around the United States in the aftermath of the Second World War. The “Silk Roads” and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization are among its tools. This is how the “new cold war” is taking shape.
These Games are also those of the interminable battle against the pandemic and the East-West rivalries around the strategies to curb it. However, China suddenly finds itself on slippery ground with the appearance of the Omicron variant – which it can always ignore, through lies and misinformation, insofar as it will have succeeded, despite the coronavirus, organizing competitions and running the Olympic business machine.
For having cut itself off from the world and for having applied a strict “zero COVID” strategy (test, trace, isolate), China boasted as early as September 2020 of having defeated the pandemic. But for having refused to “live with the virus”, she suddenly finds herself trapped today by Omicron, which is all the more problematic since Chinese vaccines are not very effective against the new variant. The Games were going to be an opportunity to highlight the superiority of its model, including health. Here the model seizes up.
Overnight, in the past two months, entire cities have been quarantined — like Xi’an, 13 million people. With the result that the Games will take place behind closed doors, without spectators or almost, in a walled city of Beijing and with athletes imprisoned in their “bubble”. Already, the images of these employees wrapped in full suits border on the absurdity of the situation. Unusual staging of the “Olympic spirit” that these Beijing Games, upside the political projection of sovereign success that Xi Jinping imagined.Have