Why the Olympics Don't Matter
I feel a little left out. Despite having spent a significant portion of my life studying China, and far too many hours of pretty much everyday reading about the place, I just can't muster much to say about the spectacle of the Beijing Olympics.
Why? At bottom, I just don't think that a couple weeks of sports will matter one way or the other. I don't think they're emblematic of much other than sports. They don't crystallize any trends, or buck any trends, or catalyze any trends, or do anything else that an event can do to a trend.
China's economic growth seems to be the result of a few big, underlying factors - productivity increases, increasing mobility of capital and labor, massive investments in human and physical capital, the country's absurd work ethic, mostly consistent economic policies, and a willingness to grow at all costs, the human and environmental costs be damned.
The country's politics have been amazingly stable over the last ten-odd years - remember, just five years ago observers were in awe that the place had its first peaceful transition of power in roughly a century. At the top, succession and policy processes seem to have become pretty well routinized. The debates are over pretty narrow technical matters, like the appropriate interest rate, rather than big-picture stuff, like the make-up or role of the Chinese Communist Party. The Party has liberalized in some ways - opening its decision-making processes, widening the scope of issues that outsiders can debate - and tightened its control in other areas, like its treatment of dissidents. Both processes are guided by long-standing internal logic that President Hu Jintao and others have explicitly stated on a number of occasions; neither the liberalization or tightening seems to change pace or direction in response to external pressure of any kind.
On foreign policy, Hu and the rest of the government have held to handful of principles: preserve and enlarge China's diplomatic options, do what it takes to preserve domestic Chinese growth, and box in Taiwan internationally. Their tactical skills seem to have improved, as has their flexibility in how they pursue these goals (for instance, Chinese personnel deploying with the UN in Sudan). High-level engagement from the US seems to have helped bring China along to seeing some more common interests; in its foreign policy rhetoric, China has pretty much adopted the "international stakeholder" concept and language urged on it by the US a few years back. But even that shift has come about at the same time that China's interests are expanding so rapidly that a more active, responsible foreign policy is very much in China's own interests anyway. (For more on this line, see the recent, very convincing book by Professor David M. Lampton, a former professor of mine.)
In short, everything important about China seems to have been the result of deep, long-term forces that have absolutely nothing to do with the Olympics. The government hasn't really changed a single national policy to prepare - even its pledge to allow foreign reporters free rein in the country disappeared when the realities of Tibetan riots and a calamitous earthquake interceded. Beijing has built some fancy new buildings and an airport, and a lot of factories and cars around Beijing have been taken out of a commission for a few weeks; that's it.
Over the next few weeks, there will probably be a flood of stories gushing about the impressive stuff China has built and another flood about all the problems it still faces. A couple protesters will make a fracas; some overly zealous Chinese security forces will hassle the wrong people and draw a fusillade of condemnation, but it will be mostly limited to the specific incidents and couched in general praise and admiration. Either the US or China will win the most medals, and TV commentators will pretend for a few days that a country's willingness to support athletes in sports that no one cares about for three out of four years somehow reflects grand geopolitical shifts.
My apologies, but I don't really see relative strength in equestrianism as having any meaning for the balance of power. I'll definitely watch, because I love sports and I like geopolitical spectacle, and no one will be talking about anything else for a while anyway. When the Games are gone, China will still have the world's most dynamic economy, a sclerotic political system, and a set of challenges unlike any other in the history of mankind. It will still be a fascinating place, and a country with more potential to affect the world's future more than any save the United States. But none of it will have anything to do with a couple thousand people from other countries running in circles and throwing things for a couple weeks one muggy August, no matter how many people watch them do it.
