As the Paris Olympics holds its star-studded opening ceremony, amid transportation disruptions caused by coordinated arson attacks on three French high-speed trains, Chinese social media interest in the Olympics remains notably muted. Despite wall-to-wall state media coverage in the run-up to the Games of China’s massive Olympic delegation—composed of 716 people, including 405 athletes and 311 coaches and staffers—the Chinese public has responded with a collective shrug. This apathy sits sharply at odds with official determination to show off national strength with a world-beating haul of gold medals.
A recent essay by current affairs and fact-checking WeChat account 老牌恶棍 (Lǎopái e’gùn, “Venerable villain”) seeks to unpack some of the reasons for the Chinese public’s lack of interest in the 2024 Olympic Games. The essay features a screenshot of a question posted on the Chinese news portal Toutiao, asking other users why they think people are so uninterested in the Games this time around. One user explained it thus:
It has jack-all to do with us. They took our money without asking, they’re enjoying themselves at our expense, and they expect us to applaud? [Chinese]
The screenshot showed that the question received 2384 responses in total. Many of the commenters felt that sending such a large delegation was financially wasteful: “Seven hundred people. How much does that cost? It’s a waste of taxpayers’ money.” “Excuse me, but how does footing the bill for their airfare, hotels, and travel benefit us taxpayers?” One person wrote, “What the hell does winning gold medals have to do with us ordinary people?” to which another responded: “All that money would be better spent improving people’s lives!” Another user made reference to the fact that many people in China have turned to homemade or locally made cooking oil following a recent food safety scandal over tanker-trucks being used to transport both fuel and cooking oil (without the tankers being washed or sterilized in between transports): “Hey, I’m busy making homemade cooking oil, don’t bother me!”
Venerable villain’s WeChat essay, “Gold Medals or Money? The Answer is Obvious,” observes that decades of socioeconomic development have changed the way the Chinese public views the Olympic Games, spending on sport, national pride, and government and state-media Olympic propaganda:
For us, the Olympics is more like the kind of physical fitness test you’d take in school, and a gold medal is just proof that you’ve passed the test. The only thing that matters is the result, and it has sod-all to do with sports.
Of course, this approach was well received in the past. As a developing country that had suffered through weakened and impoverished times, China urgently needed this platform to enhance its international image, increase its geopolitical influence, and bolster national confidence. The latter was particularly important, as the Chinese people well know.
But national pride is ultimately just a form of intellectual pleasure, the prerequisite for which is a certain level of material comfort. If you’re enduring blistering heat just to save a bit of money on your rent or electricity bill, or if you’re risking heat stroke because you labor outdoors, and then you read that some athletes are considering renting air conditioners because the 24-degree-Celsius [75-degree-Fahrenheit] indoor temperature is “too hot,” that’s going to provoke an emotional response, one that has nothing to do with “national pride.” (Not to mention the fact that many families can’t even afford air conditioning.)
[…] In an age when sports have become dispensable, when the Olympics and gold medals no longer play a role in bolstering national pride, when we’re trying to cope with the enormous pressures of daily life, the Olympics—which used to attract nationwide attention—have come to be seen as insignificant, and the expense of training and developing athletes has come to be seen as a waste of money.
In times like these, who in their right mind would be willing to tighten their belts just to subsidize some sham show of peace and prosperity?
The upshot is that the chilly response to the current Olympic Games is a minor harbinger of a shift in the Chinese public’s mindset. When asked to choose between more gold medals or more money in their own pockets, it is inevitable that people will opt for the latter. [Chinese]
