Grayling Blog

Two years until the 2012 closing ceremony of the London Olympic and Paralympic games

Posted on 8.09.2010 by Bruce Shu

Inscrutable London

The Summer Olympic and Paralympic Games closed two years ago in Beijing. For China, the Olympic motto – Citius, Altius, Fortius – provided messages that extended far beyond the realm of sport.

If there’s one thing the Chinese do well, it’s saying things in different ways to different people, and the Olympics was just such a case in point.

For China’s citizens, the Games were about national pride in the country’s great strides, about showing China’s greatness to the rest of the world. Together with this year’s Shanghai World Expo, the Beijing Games put on display the ultramodern side of the country and underscored the economic might that has propelled China to a new status as the world’s second largest economy.

In the geopolitical sphere, Beijing’s ability to organise itself – on time and on budget – reminded the powerful and influential everywhere of the Chinese Communist Party and Government’s effectiveness.

Even for China’s harshest critics, the Olympics were a chance to show an increasing openness. Thousands of journalists and NGOs from around the world were promised free access during the Olympic period.

It’s arguable whether China was effective in delivering its messages. National pride was certainly high. The Games were, to a large extent, effectively organised. Journalists from around the world did attend. But if leaders in Beijing had expected a perfect PR exercise, they would have been disappointed. Pro-Tibet and human rights protestors marred processions of the Olympic flame and grabbed headlines in cities around the world. Luminaries including Prince Charles and Steven Spielberg snubbed the leadership by pointedly not showing up at the opening ceremony. Nicolas Sarkozy threatened not to. And then, of course, there was the air pollution, or threat of it anyway, that served as a stark and tangible reminder of the drawbacks of rapid economic development.

But my point is not how well China did. It’s that the country had a clear idea of what the Olympics meant and could mean to different groups of people. Perhaps this is where London could take a lesson. From where I sit, and I suspect for most of the world, it’s not yet clear what London 2012 means beyond sport, though in an ideal world that should really be enough. If Cool Britannia changed the world’s image of Britain in the 1990s, surely the Olympics is the platform to tell the world what the country stands for in the 21st century.