The Price of Gold
Richard at Peking Duck has posted about a couple of New York Times articles that explore what it means to be selected as a potential Olympian by China’s authoritarian regime. It was also on my mind to write about this after reading this morning’s related article from Timesonline. The article begins by focusing on the case of gold-medal hurdler Liu Xiang:
The Shanghai native is portrayed as a self-sacrificing role model. Local sports reporters who have inquired about his private life have been told that he has no time for girlfriends in his rigorous schedule.
“Interviews with Liu Xiang and his parents are tightly controlled,” said one Shanghai reporter. “We have heard that his family are not happy with the financial deal, although they do not want to say anything.”
Lou Chaoyi, an official at the Track and Field Association, said: “The state cultivated Liu Xiang and so Liu Xiang’s property rights belong to the state; therefore we firmly oppose the commercialisation of Liu Xiang.
That last sentence taps perfectly into the mindset of authoritarian rule: you belong to the State, therefore what belongs to you also belongs to the State. It’s this psychology of ownership and obedience that lies at the heart of a leadership too much in love with face saving and superlatives to give a damn about the welfare of the individual:
All over China, an estimated 200,000 children are enrolled in junior sports academies run by the state and modelled on the Soviet sporting system, which take them at an early age and mould them through six to seven years of strict discipline to the exclusion of all else. Inside their gymnasiums, small boys and girls can be seen exercising from first light to dusk.
This comes as no surprise, and I’ve read many accounts of potential future athletes taken from their parents in the name of national pride. Saying ‘no’ doesn’t really appear to be an option when the glory of the Motherland is at stake. It’s all very communist, in a 1950’s propaganda poster kind of way. So too are the denial of the right to do something else with your life, and the pushing of athletes beyond reasonable limits. Another article, this time from the Telegraph a couple of months ago, pretty much outlined the obsessive and extreme nature of Beijing’s pursuit of gold:
But for all its success, the school, and the system it represents, has been accused of pushing its young charges too hard, and even of abusing them. On a visit to Shichahai in 2005, Britain’s four-time Olympic rowing champion Sir Matthew Pinsent said he saw a seven-year-old girl crying while being made to do handstands, and a boy with marks on his back.
A question: how is this different from forced labour or a sweatshop? I’m struggling to see a distinction.
A further question relates to the fate of those that don’t make the grade. What becomes of the youngsters, pushed to physical breaking point through years of rigorous training without any semblance of a normal childhood, when it transpires that they are not Olympic material? Again, from the Timesonline:
For those who fail to make the grade, the pressures of life in China’s highly competitive society can be unforgiving.
The case of Zou Chunlan, a female weightlifting champion who did not win a place on the Olympic team, caused a national stir when it was highlighted by the People’s Daily.
Zou was left without any skills to make a living after years in the hothouse of the sports academies, and was reduced to scrubbing customers’ backs in a bathhouse in Changchun, a drab northern city.
This is the tip of an iceberg that is going to come, quite rightly, under closer scrutiny in the next few weeks. No doubt the voices of displeasure will come under pressure from the State machine to keep their mouths shut. It’s about time China came to the realisation that there’s more bad press in silencing the dissenting voice than allowing it to speak. If wishing made it so.
Behind all those golden smiles we’ll be seeing from Chinese athletes in Beijing this summer lays the untold suffering and pain of a million broken dreams. If China is still so keen to embrace elements of communism, I suggest that it makes compulsory the sharing of the spoils of victory among all those that were forced to sacrifice their rights to a normal childhood and an education.