Owning the Olympics: Narratives of the New China

The Public Diplomacy of the Modern Olympic Games and China's Soft Power Strategy

Nicholas J. Cull

In 1965 a retired American diplomat turned college dean named Edmund Gullion unveiled a new piece of terminology to help his countrymen conceptualize the role of communications in foreign relations. That term was public diplomacy. He and his team fleshed out the concept in a brochure for their new Edward R. Murrow Center for Public Diplomacy at Tufts University's Fletcher School of Diplomacy as follows:

Public diplomacy … deals with the influence of public attitudes on the formation and execution of foreign policies. It encompasses dimensions of international relations beyond traditional diplomacy; the cultivation by governments of public opinion in other countries; the interaction of private groups and interests in one country with another; the reporting of foreign affairs and its impact on policy; communication between those whose job is communication, as diplomats and foreign correspondents; and the process of intercultural communications. (Publicdiplomacy.org n.d.).¹

It took more than forty years, the transformation of the world as a result of the end of the Cold War, the global communications revolution, and the crisis following September 11, 2001 for the term to gain real currency outside the United States. Today it is ubiquitous. Most states and many nonstate international actors either use the English term or have a close equivalent to signify the task of seeking to advance foreign policy by engaging foreign publics. The concept is frequently linked to a second American addition to the international lexicon—Soft Power—which is Joseph S. Nye's term (2004) for the contribution that attractive culture and values can make to an actor's ability to operate in the world. This chapter will look at the evolution of a key venue of contemporary public diplomacy—the modern Olympic Games—and the soft power policies deployed in recent years by the People's Republic of China, and consider how they have converged in relation to the Beijing Olympics of 2008.

While Ed Gullion's use of the term public diplomacy was new in 1965, the phenomenon he described was not. International actors have sought to engage foreign publics for as long as publics have had any impact on statecraft. A simple taxonomy of public diplomacy divides its practice into five distinct and well established activities: listening to foreign publics and refining policy accordingly; advocating to promote a particular policy before a foreign public; engaging in cultural diplomacy to export particular practices and build good feeling abroad; exchanging diplomacy and building networks to develop links and facilitate mutual knowledge; and finally, using international broadcasting to provide news to foreign publics who might otherwise be denied access to balanced information.

Sports can figure in all areas of public diplomacy. Sports events are branded by hosts to represent particular meanings, and the stars of these events are regularly used as advocates for particular messages. Sports can be a cultural export in their own right and the spectacle of hosting or winning at a major sporting event can raise or maintain the profile of an actor. Sports are an ideal subject of exchanges; the shared experience of viewing or participating in an event with foreign publics is a powerful tool for people-to-people relationship building in world affairs. The transmission of sports by international broadcasters is a time-honored way to attract audiences. Finally, the wise practitioner of public diplomacy listens to world opinion, notes the extent to which his target audience cares about sport, identifies the specific sports which capture the collective imagination, and develops his sporting diplomacy accordingly. As will be seen, all these dimensions of public diplomacy have played a part in the development of the modern Olympic Games, though not always in the way that the International Olympic Committee (IOC) or the host of any particular Games might wish. In fact, the entire modern Olympic project may be conceptualized as an exercise in public diplomacy.

The Olympics as Public Diplomacy for Peace

In the beginning, Pierre de Coubertin conceived his revival of the ancient Olympics as a form of diplomacy through culture with the hope that nations might compete in peace and thereby overcome their differences. His International Olympic Committee would be a foreign policy actor in its own right, advocating international brotherhood. The games would be above politics and ideology. Chapter five of the Olympic Charter holds that: “No kind of demonstration or political, religious or racial propaganda is permitted in the Olympic areas” (IOC 2007). Symbols, flags, and invented traditions accreted around Coubertin's original idea creating what might be a resource for any state wishing to demonstrate its attachment to universal values of sportsmanship and peace (Espy 1979).

As the Olympic Games evolved, a number of practices were added to try to underline the international peace building intent of the Games, including a new format for the closing ceremony—first seen in the Cold War Games in Melbourne in 1956—in which the athletes mingle freely together rather than parade in national groups (IOC n.d.). A second strategy was the creation of the Coubertin medal to recognize true sportsmanship and a value above the prize of simply being “faster, higher or stronger” than other competitors. The first winner was Eugenio Monti, an Italian bobsledder at the Innsbruck Winter Games of 1964, who selflessly loaned a bolt from his own sled to repair that of a British competitor, Tony Nash. Nash went on to win the gold (Washington Post 1964; IOC 2006).

The idea of restoring international brotherhood, the rubric of the ancient Olympic Truce, and new ideals of global citizenship were prominently featured in the host's rhetoric during the Athens Games of 2004—the first Games of the post-9/11 era (Roche 2006). But appeals to brotherhood and internationalism, while present at every Olympic Games and an essential part of the athletes' experience, are usually drowned out by more dominant stories, the foremost being the quest for national prestige.

The Olympics and the Public Diplomacy of Prestige

It is ironic that simply by emphasizing the coming together of nations Coubertin also ensured that national prestige would be at stake. The games he imagined as an antidote to war soon became its analogue, as the display of national physical prowess was used to increase the prestige of a country and gain influence in the world as a result. The first modern Games—the Athens Olympics of 1896—have in fact been blamed for provoking a war. Greek diplomat Demetrius Kaklamanos argued that the heady experience of his country's hosting the Games and especially the surge of nationalism sparked by Sprio Louys winning the marathon led directly to its launching of the ill-starred war with Turkey in 1897.²

In the aftermath of the Great War, nationalist and revolutionary societies like Mussolini's Italy and Lenin's Soviet Union emphasized sport and physical culture as symbols of the virility of their political system, and achievement in Olympic competition became a profound concern of governments.³ Similar attitudes could also be found in more democratic cultures. In the run-up to the Antwerp Games of 1920 the British Olympian and war hero A. N. S. Strode-Jackson declared:

If the war has taught us anything it has proved the value of propaganda: knowing this, we should remember, always, that there is no British propaganda so valuable as the perpetuation of the old idea that, on the field of sport, British prestige is supreme, and that none can outrank us in stamina and virility. (Jackson 1919)

As the emphasis on national prestige increased, so the Games suffered. The Paris Games of 1924 were marred by a series of incidents which suggested that the spirit of international sportsmanship was in jeopardy: anti-American booing and fist fights in the crowd at the Olympic rugby match; a French boxer, Roger Brousse, biting his British and Argentine opponents; and an extraordinary fracas between an Italian swordsman and a Hungarian judge, which culminated in a challenge to a duel. The London Times responded by proclaiming the doom of the entire Olympic movement. But for all the bad sportsmanship the movement survived (Times 1924a; 1924b; 1924c).

Notable examples of the Olympic competition becoming a stage to display the prestige of a nation include the various appearances of Hungarians at the Melbourne Games of 1956, which followed hard on the Soviet crushing of the Hungarian uprising. Each event became a celebration of national pride and defiance of the Soviet Union, culminating in the notorious “blood in the water” water polo match between Hungary and the USSR. To the enduring delight of the Hungarian people, their team not only beat the Russians but went on to win the Gold medal in that sport (New York Times 1956).

However, the prestige of victory in an Olympic event was soon held as nothing against the kudos of actually hosting the Games. The Olympics became a major mechanism to make or remake the reputation of a city, region or entire country. When in 1920 a small group of Southern Californian businessmen set out to Europe to bring the Olympics to Los Angeles (the Games finally came in 1932), they found it necessary to produce a globe and point out the location of their city.⁴ Their Olympic bid quite literally put their city on the map. The 1976 Summer Games in Montreal were planned to provide a boost for the province of Quebec through an exercise in regional public diplomacy. Whatever their contribution to the international standing of the city and its region, however, the costs outweighed the benefits. Montreal did not finish paying its Olympic debt until December 2006. Local branding has been especially apparent in bids to host the Winter Olympics, which in only one case—Oslo 1952—have been held in a national capital.⁵ The Summer Games are routinely used not merely to promote a particular city but to rebrand an entire nation.

The classic case of a national agenda emerging in an Olympic bid is that of the Berlin Olympics of 1936. IOC awarded Berlin the Games in 1931 as a gesture to mark Germany's return to the community of nations following the Great War, which had prevented the Games scheduled for Berlin in 1916. They came as an invaluable windfall for Adolf Hitler who, on coming to power in 1933, swiftly redirected plans for the Games to showcase his regime. While in modern lore the big story of the Games was the success of the African American athlete Jesse Owens and the attending disruption to Hitler's narrative of Aryan supremacy, Germany still won more medals than all other nations present combined (Mandell 1987). The prestige associated with the mounting of the Berlin Games gave sufficient boost to the regime's image at home and abroad that Hitler planned to establish Germany as a permanent site for the Games. This said, the Olympics—like the lavish musicals that played in Nazi movie theaters—may have advanced Hilter's purposes only by providing a welcome distraction. At a deeper level their fundamental message of sportsmanship and competition in peace played against his strategy of readying his nation for war and intimidating Germany's potential adversaries. Other totalitarian regimes have also queued up to host the games. In 1935 Japan won the right to host the 1940 event as part of the celebration of the 2600th anniversary of their royal house, and would have done so but for the outbreak of war in Asia. Mussolini's Italy made an unsuccessful bid to host the Games in Rome in 1944.⁶

Following World War II each of the Games seemed conceived to serve a transparent public diplomacy agenda. Both London in 1948 and Helsinki in 1952 presented their Games as gestures of national recovery. Recovery was relative in the case of London, as athletes were asked to bring their own food because of the persistence of wartime rationing (Danzig 1948). The 1956 Games in Melbourne were intended as a coming out party for Australia, and international press coverage about behind-schedule buildings in the run-up to the games gave ample evidence of that country's need to update its sheep-and-bush-hats image in the world. Fortunately, the Games hit their mark. Both the 1960 Rome and 1964 Tokyo Summer Games allowed nations of the wartime Axis to showcase their postwar societies. In Japan, the symbolism was underlined by the selection of Yoshinori Sakai, an athlete born in Hiroshima on the day the atomic bomb dropped, to light the torch at the opening ceremony (New York Times 1964). Mexico City planned its 1968 Games to showcase a newly modernized nation with an emphasis on exotic “Op Art” designs and monumental structures, while the Munich Olympics of 1972 were intended to introduce postwar, post-Nazi West Germany, with a sunshine logo and freundlichspiel (Happy Games) motto (Zolov 2004; New York Times 1972).

Moscow in 1980 and Los Angeles in 1984 asserted rather than re-branded their host nations, which added to the Cold War logic of each superpower boycotting the other's event (Hazan 1982). The Seoul Olympics of 1988 and the Barcelona Games of 1992 returned to the motive of rebranding a society in transition. In the case of Barcelona the transition was at a rather more advanced stage. The IOC awarded the Games to Barcelona in 1986, the same year that Spain joined the European Community. The Games provided an excellent pretext to invite the world to meet the new Spain. Atlanta's bid for the 1996 Games became a gesture to mark the achievement of the American South in transcending its history of racial bitterness. The legacy of Martin Luther King was cited everywhere in the publicity materials, which included abundant allusions to “the dream” of King's “I have a dream” speech (Reid 1990). In a similar vein the Sydney Games of 2000 provided a stage on which Australia could present a new multicultural image and, in its opening and closing ceremonies, pay tribute to the heritage of its indigenous people (Waitt 1999).

The prospect of being an Olympic host tempts every emerging power sooner or later, and it did not take long for China to catch the Olympic bug. At the start of their very first Games since the Cultural Revolution, the Los Angeles Games in 1984, the People's Republic of China called a press conference and announced its intent to host the Games in 2000, thereby beginning the chain of events that would lead to Beijing 2008 (Miller 1984). Yet there is much in the actual experience of hosting the Games that should worry China.

The Olympics and Competing Public Diplomacy Agendas

As the Olympics emerged as a spectacle to which a diplomatic objective could be tied, so opponents of that objective (and adherents of any objective seeking world-wide publicity) had a mechanism to advance their agendas also. As in the case of national prestige, the Berlin Olympics showed the way. Hitler's persecution of German Jews sparked a boycott movement which split the U.S. athletic establishment and prompted many Jewish athletes from around the world to stay away. The Nazi regime made some concessions to world opinion by removing many anti-Semitic posters and playing down the increasing military presence in German life, but the Games had drawn attention to negative aspects of life in the Third Reich.⁷

Politics swirled around the Games of the Cold War, and the Melbourne event was especially badly hit. China stayed away to protest the participation of Taiwan; Egypt, Lebanon and Iraq stayed away because of the Anglo-French invasion of Suez; while the Netherlands, Switzerland and Spain boycotted the Games to protest the Soviet invasion of Hungary.

From the early 1960s and for thirty years thereafter the issue of the participation of South Africa rubbed raw, prompting boycotts by many African nations. Boycotts were threatened to keep Rhodesia out of Munich and—unsuccessfully—to exclude New Zealand from Montreal (a punishment for a rugby tour of South Africa). The tit-for-tat boycotts of 1980 and 1984 represented the high-water mark of nonparticipation as a form of Olympic public diplomacy (Hoberman 1986).

On occasion domestic political agendas have seized the Olympic spotlight. The run-up to the Mexico Games saw an abortive attempt by African American athletes to organize a boycott of the U.S. team as a protest against American racism. The debate led directly to the famous incident in which American 200 meter runners Tommie Smith and John Carlos performed their black power protest on the winner's rostrum (Fradkin 1967; Allen 1967). Within the host nation, Mexican students sought to take advantage of the presence of the world's media to present their own message of opposition to their authoritarian government. Their protests in the months leading up to the Games culminated in the so-called Tlatelolco massacre of October 2, 1968, during which the Mexican army opened fire on student protestors and bystanders alike. Deaths numbered in the hundreds (Weiner 2004). Domestic pressure for reform also played a role in the Seoul Olympics, though in this case the government accelerated the reform process to head off a major incident around the Games. The country that hosted the Games in 1988 was very different from that which had planned the bid at the end of the 1970s (Manheim 1990).

Munich 1972 brought the most blatant and brutal attempt to piggyback an alternate agenda on the organizer's party when Palestinian terrorists kidnapped and murdered members of the Israeli Olympic team. The disaster was not wholly unconnected to Germany's hopes for the Games. Arguably, the lack of security at the Olympic village and bungled police response to the crisis were by-products of West Germany's eagerness to live down its authoritarian stereotype (One Day in September 1999).

The Cold War was fought out in rival propaganda and public diplomacy operations from Moscow and Washington. In the Soviet case these could be quite blatant: for example, their effort to appropriate the Games in Helsinki 1952 when a festival operated by the Communist front organization—the World League for Democratic Youth—sought to spread propaganda among Olympic crowds and athletes (Axelsson 1952). In 1984 the KGB ran a covert campaign to undermine the Los Angeles Games. KGB disinformation operations included circulating a story that security in Los Angeles would include surveillance by Israel's Mossad and the anonymous mailing to twenty African and Asian Olympic committees of faked Ku Klux Klan leaflets threatening nonwhite athletes who attended the games. One read: “African Monkeys! A grand welcome awaits you in Los Angeles! We have been training for the games by shooting at black moving targets.” Thanks to speedy countermeasures, none of the nations targeted by the Soviet campaign withdrew from the Games.⁸

For its part, the United States has always been ready to use the Olympic story to haul public diplomacy freight. In 1952 the State Department, eager to counter the United States' reputation for racism, ensured that black American athletes figured prominently in U.S. international publicity around the Games (National Archives ca. 1951). In a similar vein, during the Oslo Winter Olympics U.S. diplomats sought to embarrass the Communist world by emphasizing the presence of one official minder for each Eastern bloc athlete (National Archives 1952). The United States managed to piggyback on Tokyo in 1964 by using the opening ceremony to showcase its communications satellite, Syncom 3, and mounting the first trans-pacific telecast (Gould 1964). During the Munich Games the U.S. government's Voice of America reported Soviet achievements only by crediting the home republic of the particular athlete—billing sprinter Valeri Borzov as Ukrainian and gymnast Olga Korbut as Byelorussian—to show support for the claims of constituent nationalities and as a gesture of defiance against the claims of the Soviet state (National Archives 1972). In 1984 the United States sought to counter the impact of the boycott by boosting its efforts to help poorer nations compete in the Olympics. The CEO of Madison Square Garden, David “Sonny” Werblin, chaired a Private Sector Sports Committee for the United States Information Agency, which raised nearly $1 million in donations to bring African athletes to the Games (Ronald Reagan Presidential Library 1984). The most recent U.S. use of the Olympics in public diplomacy is its employment of Michelle Kwan as a special “public diplomacy envoy” (Armour 2005).

By the turn of the millennium it had become clear that even if an Olympic Games dodged attempts by others to piggyback, any number of associated events could disrupt the intended meaning of the Games. Scandals around doping, cheating, and lack of sportsmanship among participants or their respective national media all posed threats to the planned message of the official event. Revelations of malpractice within the process of selecting Olympic venues—specifically a bribery scandal associated with the successful bid by Salt Lake City to host the 2002 Winter Olympics—posed further problems (Olympic Review 1999; Roche 2002). The run-up to the Athens Olympics of 2004 was reported as a suspense story focused on whether the Greeks would be able to cope and deliver their buildings on time. Athens made its deadlines but the city's pollution problems became a significant negative story to undermine the Greek government's agenda of national self enhancement. On the eve of the Games the Worldwide Fund for Nature pointed to extra pollution arising from the Olympic construction effort (Environmental News Service 2004).

All of the foregoing should be enough to set Coubertin spinning in his grave and give pause to any potential host. That China would advance its bid regardless can be seen either as rank hubris or admirable self-confidence in its own ability to confront the Olympic challenges head-on and still deliver a Games that fulfills national and international goals. But the onrush of China's public diplomacy has been such that it is all but unimaginable that China could resist the chance to host so prestigious an event.

The Roots of Chinese Public Diplomacy

The Beijing Olympics is merely the latest phase in a sustained Chinese government campaign to woo the world and engage foreign publics, which writer Joshua Kurlantzick has dubbed China's Charm Offensive (Kurlantzick 2007). While this policy is new in its full-blown form, its roots lie deep in Chinese political culture. Many elements of public diplomacy have great antiquity in China. Confucius spoke of attracting through virtue: “It is for this reason that when distant subjects are unsubmissive one cultivates one's moral quality in order to attract them, and once they have come one makes them content” (Analects of Confucius). He argued that an image of virtue and morality was the foundation of a stable state. The emperors of old certainly understood the importance of maintaining their image at home and maintaining the “tributary” relationships with the satellite kingdoms around their borders (Qing 2001). At an interpersonal level, the Chinese concepts translated in the west as “face” (Lian, a concept of personal honor and moral worth, and Mianzi, a concept of social prestige), echo the enduring concern of nations for their prestige and the contemporary discovery of soft power (Ho 1976). These cultural concerns are fertile soil for a contemporary effort to improve the nation's international standing by projecting or maintaining a favorable image. The traditional term for such work is dui wai xuan chuan or wai xuan, meaning “external propaganda.” The term has none of the negatives attending to western usage of propaganda (Wang Y. forthcoming).

Historically China has learned the importance of public diplomacy and “external propaganda” the hard way. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century the country was targeted by masters of the art including the European empires, American churches, Bolshevik agitators, and the Japanese Empire. Would-be leaders in post-Imperial China soon recognized the value of modern communication methods to establish their legitimacy both at home and abroad. The nationalist regime of Chiang Kai-shek became adept at appealing to American public opinion during World War II, while the seasoned revolutionary Mao Zedong understood the value of international propaganda even during his time at bay in Yan'an province, using foreign journalists such as Edgar Snow to take the story of his Long March to the outside world (Hamilton 1988).

Mao's launch of the People's Republic of China in 1949 can be compared to a rebranding, with dramatic claims of a new era—most famously that “the Chinese People have stood up” (1949)—coupled with rigid control over access to information about life within China for domestic and foreign audiences alike. Favored journalists were allowed to view China—selectively—and the state published a number of journals such as Beijing Review to showcase its achievements. Major international campaigns of the Mao period included a perennial battle to undermine the reputation of Taiwan, and various activities designed to extend the revolution overseas, first around East Asia and then, in the 1970s, in Africa and Latin America. Radio Beijing was an archetypal propaganda station, haranguing the world about the Chairman's monopoly on virtue. The opening of China in the 1970s saw a transition from carefully stage managed events, such as Nixon's visit to China or the gift of a succession of pandas to assorted heads of government, to a more recognizable participation in regular public diplomacy. The diplomatic tussle between China and Taiwan around the Montreal Olympics gave witness to a Chinese desire to establish a presence on the international sporting stage (Wang H. 2003).

In the wake of Mao's death, Deng Xiaoping swiftly opened China's doors to international exchange and tourism. In September 1981 the Reagan administration signed a new cultural exchange agreement with China, and interaction gathered pace (Sterba 1981). In 1983 the Ministry of Foreign Affairs opened an Information Department appointing one Qian Qicheng as its first spokesman (Wang Y. forthcoming). The following year, as the Chinese state placed increased emphasis on its international reputation, the world learned of that nation's desire to host the Beijing Olympics for the first time.

In 1989 the house of cards that was China's international reputation came crashing down with the negative images that issued from the repression of the protests in Tiananmen Square. In the aftermath of the crisis Beijing engaged the international public relations firm Hill and Knowlton to begin the process of rebuilding China's reputation (d'Hooghe 2005, 92). The parallel process of consolidation followed at home included the reconfiguration of domestic and international information work under a single State Council Information Office (SCIO), founded in 1991. Its declared purpose was to “promote China as a stable country in the process of reform, a China that takes good care of its population, including minorities, and works hard to reduce poverty.” It was a foundation for future work (d'Hooghe 2005, 98–99).

Zhao Qizheng and Chinese Public Diplomacy Since 1998

As the 1990s progressed, Beijing placed renewed emphasis on its international image, a process which included the revival of the Olympic bid. SCIO flourished under the dynamic leadership of Minister Zhao Qizheng, who led the office from 1998 to 2005. A former vice mayor of Shanghai (and hence part of the “Shanghai-clique” around Jiang Zemin), Zhao was unafraid to confront his country's international critics head on or to concede national error (Eckholm 1998). His international appearances included addressing the National Press Club in Washington in September 2000. From an early stage Zhao sought to avoid using the term xuan chuan, which would be translated with negative spin in the west as “propaganda,” and described his work as “explaining” China [shuo ming] (Crowell and Hsieh 2000).⁹ Zhao's determination to present China to the world was supported at the highest level, and in February 1999 President Jiang Zemin called for China to “establish a publicity capacity to exert an influence on world opinion that is as strong as China's international standing” (Kurlantzick 2007, 39). This led directly to a number of parallel policies, coordinated through the duel structure of the Communist Party and SCIO.¹⁰

One key problem facing Zhao Qizheng and his colleagues was the need to find an overarching concept to define China's approach to the world and to puncture talk in certain Western quarters of the Chinese threat. He found his answer in the term peaceful rise (heping jueqi), a phrase coined by thinker Zheng Bijian in 2003 and swiftly embraced by the Beijing government. The term was not ideal for translation—as China-watcher Joshua Cooper Ramo has noted, its coining sparked a brief debate over whether the concept of jueqi was best rendered as “surge” or “emergence,” while the ideogram for the first part of the word suggested an earthquake—but peaceful rise stuck (Ramo 2007; Zheng 2005). By 2007 it had nevertheless been largely displaced by discourse focused not so much on China as on the international context it wished to promote: the concept of “building a harmonious world” (Li and Wang 2007).

The core of Chinese public diplomacy lies in deeds rather than words. China has developed a keen eye for prestige events and showpiece policy initiatives. One such event was the launch in October 2003 of China's first manned space flight. The achievement certainly played well at home—the primary audience—and in many locations overseas, although as Times of India noted, the launch used essentially forty-year-old technology. Its editorial dubbed the flight the “Great Creep Forward” (Banke 2003). More significantly China has launched major international aid and development initiatives, all couched in the rhetoric of “win-win” cooperation. China has already delivered much to Latin America, the Middle East, and most especially Africa, but claims to need nothing in return (Kurlantzick 2007, 44). It has been swift to build links with nations that are isolated from Western diplomacy. Its policy of “nonintervention” has enabled partnerships with Iran, Venezuela, and even Zimbabwe. And, in the last case, Chinese aid has included instruction in how effectively to jam opposition radio signals (BBC Monitoring 2006.) Despite the enmity these activities have sparked in the west, they have also played a role in advancing the country's international reputation, as have China's efforts to take a leadership role in the diplomacy around North Korean nuclear weapons (Shirk 2006).

Policies need to be publicized to have an impact, and Zhao Qizheng was swift to move to maximize their reach. Zhao, his colleagues and successors launched initiatives across the range of the five activities that characterize classic public diplomacy practice: listening, advocacy, cultural diplomacy, exchange, and international broadcasting. Zhao's whole approach and much of his rhetoric was couched as a response to what the world was saying about China. In June 2000 the minister solemnly warned a conference on Tibet that “the enemy is strong and we are weak.”¹¹ China used polls to track its relationships. Innovations included a poll in 2005 jointly designed and administered with Japanese counterparts to survey the state of mutual opinion, which revealed that much work needed to be done to build trust between the two populations (Xinhua 2005b). Global polls suggested positive trends for China, as with the BBC/PIPA poll of late 2004 and early 2005 across twenty-two nations, which found that almost all believed China to be playing a more positive role than the United States in world affairs (Kurlantzick 2007, 9). But Beijing is not complacent. Recent finetuning of China's public diplomacy included a meeting of the Party Propaganda Department in early 2007 that emphasized the need to avoid offending Islamic nations when celebrating the year of the pig and inflaming domestic anti-Japanese feeling when marking the 60th anniversary of the Marco Polo bridge incident and Japanese invasion of China (Rawnsley 2007).¹² Yet more significantly, in the spring of 2007 international anger around China's support for the regime in Khartoum in the face of the Darfur genocide brought modifications of Chinese foreign policy in this region (Boston Globe 2007).

Zhao Qizeng's institutional reforms included upgrading China's ability to address the foreign media. In December 2004 he astonished a gathering of journalists at Beijing's Kunlun hotel by presenting them with the names and phone numbers of the seventy-five spokespersons of every ministry and commission under the State Council. This, he promised, would be an annual event. Xinhua hailed a step toward transparent government (Xinhua 2004; BBC Monitoring 2005b). Other advocacy initiatives included the launch of an overseas edition of the People's Daily and a number of English language Web sites (China Daily 2004). In parallel, as Kurlantzick has noted, the Foreign Ministry increased its investment in regional expertise within its diplomatic corps, sending thousands of its best students overseas to study their target state and society firsthand. Given that the Chinese Foreign Service allows its officers to work entire careers in their specialist geographical area, the rising generation will be well placed to learn from experience and provide advocacy nuanced by local knowledge for years to come (Kurlantzick 2007, 65–66).

Qizheng's tenure at SCIO saw legion Chinese initiatives in the field of cultural diplomacy including major exhibitions, “China Weeks” and tours for artists. The centerpiece of these initiatives was the rapid expansion of the Confucius Institutes—culture and language teaching institutes located within world universities—in an effort to create a network of more than one hundred institutes within five years (Xinhua 2006b).¹³

China has also invested in its exchanges, concluding new bilateral agreements with partners around the world from Austria to Zimbabwe. Institutions that claim to manage people-to-people exchanges, such as the Chinese People's Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries, have flourished. China has also expanded its recruitment of international students, bringing 20 percent more with every passing year. The Ministry of Education expects rolls to top 120,000 by 2008 (Kurlantzick 2007, 118).

Exchanges have been used to promote international study of the Chinese language, lately targeting younger groups of students, providing a stream of foreign language teachers for overseas service and wooing foreign school principals through trips to China, as priorities shift from the university to the secondary and even the primary school sector. In June 2007 the Office of the Chinese Language Council declared that 30 million people around the world were now learning Chinese and predicted that this figure would hit 100 million by 2010 (Xinhua 2007c).¹⁴ In February 2007 the premier of the State Council, Wen Jiabao, paid tribute to the value of exchanges in presenting China's best face to the world, noting that they have “fostered an image of China as a country that is committed to reform and opening-up, a country of unity and dynamism, a country that upholds equality and values friendship, and a country that is sincere and responsible” (Wen 2007).

China's newest resource in its approach to the world is the first generation of truly international Chinese stars. Individuals who have represented China in the world include basketball player Yao Ming and actress Zhang Ziyi. Both have been associated with international children's charities, as goodwill ambassadors for the Special Olympics. China's reputation is doubly enhanced as a result (PR Newswire 2006; Xinhua 2006a). Both figured prominently in pre-Olympic publicity.

Chinese international broadcasting has also been upgraded in recent years. In September 2000 China Central Television launched its twenty-four hour English language service CCTV 9 (Xinhua 2000). It immediately began negotiations to place the service on carriers around the world and succeeded in brokering deals with carriers as diverse as Rupert Murdoch's Sky satellite in the United Kingdom and Fox services in the United States, Vanuatu in the mid-Pacific, and terrestrial channels in East Africa (Gittings and Borger 2001; Australian Financial Review 2003; Xinhua 2005a; Powell 2005). The content of CCTV 9 has reflected a need to present something closer to real journalism than the wooden litany of achievements and upcoming cultural events which once typified broadcasts. From 2003 onward a new openness has been evident, with CCTV 9 presenting stories about China's pollution problems and its energy crisis that would have been swept under the carpet in previous eras. In the spring of 2004 CCTV 9 announced a major relaunch to include the employment of foreign anchors and a consultant from the Murdoch stable, John Terenzio. The station's controller, Jiang Heping, told the South China Morning Post that “We are taking great efforts to minimize the tone of propaganda, to balance our reports and to be objective. But we definitely won't be reporting as much negative domestic news as the Western media” (BBC Monitoring 2005a). New CCTV services in Spanish and French followed. The network also organized a conference on the theme of selling China overseas, while China's media regulators have finally given permission for Chongqing Television to launch an international service (Rawnsley 2007).

Chinese public diplomacy seems poised to engage the same issues of the boundary between news and advocacy that have loomed so large in the history of western international broadcasting and similarly now has to consider how domestic negatives should be treated in public diplomacy. In February 2007 an article in the People's Daily, under the byline of Wen Jiabao, declared in its conclusion:

We should conduct public diplomacy in a more effective way. We should inform the outside world of the achievements we have made in reform, opening-up and modernization in a comprehensive, accurate and timely manner. At the same time, we should be frank about the problems we have. We should be good at using flexible and diversified ways in conducting public diplomacy programs. We should use persuasive ways to communicate with the international community to ensure that our message is effectively put across. We should work to enable the international community to develop an objective and balanced view on China's development and international role, so as to foster an environment of friendly public opinion for China.

It was a clarion call for a still more sophisticated approach to public diplomacy.

China's Image Problem

Despite such efforts, China's international image still faces severe problems. The reputation of China is hostage to the reputation of its exports. When, as in the spring of 2007, America's news carried stories of well-loved pets dying after eating poisonous Chinese dog food or toddlers' health endangered by playing with toy trains painted with lead-based paint by their Chinese manufacturer, China's image suffers. As the SARS crisis of 2003 showed, the government's first instinct may be denial, but only honesty and action can prevent a public relations catastrophe. Some image problems are yet more intractable. A visit from the terracotta warriors cannot blot out the cause of Tibet in the Western mind, or erase the memory of the repression of the Tiananmen protests, or counterbalance stories of censorship and religious persecution, or bury news stories leaking out of major undercurrents of unrest in China's cities. All Beijing can do is try frantically to distract attention from these issues by presenting alternative stories and rebuke the world's media for accentuating the negative. The 2008 Olympics are perhaps the ultimate distraction story.

One fascinating and underanalyzed aspect of Chinese public diplomacy is its relationship to the domestic audience. The relationship is reflected in the fact that the Chinese first used the term public diplomacy to refer to the process of explaining their foreign policy at home (the task of public affairs in American parlance). This has been clear in the case of other superpowers. In the heyday of Soviet Communism the Brezhnev regime ached to present its own people with the spectacle of the rest of the world admiring the Soviet way. The KGB soon became adept at staging pro-Soviet demonstrations around the world to maintain the illusion. In George W. Bush's America public diplomacy has plainly been skewed by the administration's desire to be seen to be winning hearts and minds rather than actually building real relationships for the long term. Outsiders can only speculate on the scale of the domestic imperative in the Chinese case and the domestic advantages that the regime must expect from hosting the Olympics. Certainly much of the organization of the Beijing Olympics can be seen as a process of managing domestic opinion in order to deliver the spectacle of the world coming admiringly to the Central Land. Success would give the regime enhanced credibility, and the image of China standing up promises to make the rhetoric of 1949 real. By the same token, a public relations disaster at the Olympics would be a massive humiliation. Interestingly, the organizers have sought to limit domestic expectations around the Games, publicly aiming for what the secretary general of the Organizing Committee, Wang Wei, called “a high level Olympic Games” rather than the traditional target of the “best games ever.” It is better to exceed expectations and delight the home audience than to disappoint (Wang 2007).¹⁵ This wider point again underlines China's vulnerability: the fate of China's international reputation has significant domestic consequences.

Part of China's soft power opportunity has been grounded in the hard power aspect of America's reputation. China is welcomed in some quarters of the globe simply because it is not the United States. As China's strength grows and it closes distance on the United States this advantage is diminished. The symptoms of this were apparent in the Pew Global Attitudes Survey released in July 2007 (Fram 2007; Pew Global Attitudes Project). Were China to surpass the United States it would swiftly find that global leadership brings an immediate crop of resentment. In the nearer term China's international image depends on its ability to deliver on its promises. The Soviet Union bought many friends in the middle years of the Cold War and lost them swiftly when its economy could no longer deliver, though if the Chinese economy were ever to collapse the disgruntlement of Malawi would be the least of Beijing's worries.

Even assuming sustained growth and a strong economy, it is unlikely that China will be able to deliver on the enormous promises that it has made as part of its soft power approach. Soft power, in Nye's conception, is based neither on brute force nor financial leverage. In terms of the metaphorical donkey, soft power is neither the carrot nor the stick but the reputation for being nice to donkeys. China seems to doubt—perhaps rightly—that its reputation or the ethical strength of its values will win the day with foreign publics. It has been much easier just to offer to build a sports stadium for a target state or a new office for its ruling party.

The public diplomacy around the Beijing Olympics suggests that China is all too aware of its image problems and is seeking moreover to fine-tune its Olympic experience to counter some of them and thereby reposition the Chinese brand.

Beijing Olympics as Public Diplomacy for China

The Chinese government has approached the organization of the Beijing Olympics with a conviction that the Games can be used to educate the world about modern China. The heart of the plan is a blending of ancient Chinese culture, which seems to strike a positive note around the world, with images of modern China and the ideals of the Olympic movement. China's revolutionary history, with its red flags, stars, and photos of “the Great Helmsman,” is nowhere to be seen. The priorities are plain in the official logo for the Games: an image that doubles as both a seal written in ancient script showing the jing (Chinese character meaning “capital”) from Beijing and the outline of an athlete breaking the victory tape (conversation with Wang Wei, May 15, 2007).

The ideas and agendas that the Chinese government wishes to associate with the Beijing Games are clear in the clutch of videos that it has produced to promote the event (Promotion Video for the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games). The official Olympic video curtain-raiser from 2005—One World, One Dream—has a more complex purpose and plainly aims to make visual the theme of “building a harmonious world” while making use of the famous faces and views of China. Over a soaring soundtrack it cuts from dawn over great monuments around the globe to images of Zhang Ziyi wafting through the dawn and eventually leading an international phalanx of children and athletes as they run with torches. Athletes from around the world perform amid China's great monuments: pole vaulting on the Great Wall and weight lifting in the Temple of Heaven. The climax is a montage of crowds, fireworks, and Olympic events. We see Yao Ming and, among other shots, an athlete in a wheelchair and a token elderly person. At the end Zhang Ziyi only remains, contemplating an ancient Chinese historical sight before melting into thin air, part of the dream of the spectacle that is to come. There are no flags and no politicians (Beijing Olympic Games: One World One Dream video).

The video that most obviously seeks to sweep away old images of China is that created by the China National Tourism Administration entitled Welcome to China—Beijing 2008. The film illustrates the sensory experience that is China with images that emphasize the vast scale of the Chinese landscape, the history of Chinese culture, and the diversity of China's population. Colorful costumes and smiling children abound, but the landscape is populated by single figures or small groups. Crowds are nowhere to be seen, and cities figure only at the end, apparently as a convenience awaiting the visiting Westerner. The message is that China is friendly and somehow empty. It clearly aims to be an antidote to pictures of streets teeming with blue-suited cyclists familiar from the 1970s. Needless to say, the video glosses over the centrifugal forces in contemporary China—regional minorities, including Tibetans, appear happily integrated into the harmonious whole, performing their culture on cue. One of the film's final images is of two young Tibetan monks jumping for joy in slow motion. It was as if Mexico City had promoted its Olympics with film of happy students or Berlin with pictures of dancing rabbis.

The Challenge: Competing Agendas at the Beijing Games

From the moment of the Chinese bid it was clear that the Beijing Olympics would be an occasion for competing agendas; a focus of criticism against the regime, and an opportunity for its opponents to emphasize the extent to which China had not changed and remained a repressive one-party state. The Games seem set to be used by Taiwan as an opportunity for its own message. President Chen Shui-bian has promised a referendum on independence to coincide with the run-up to the games, while Beijing and Taipei have exchanged angry words over the route to be taken by the Olympic torch, and associated implications regarding the status of Taiwan (Ford 2007). Beyond such national agendas, by the summer of 2007 there was already a formidable lineup of groups tying long-running protests against China to the Games, each with their own parody of the Olympic logo. Reporters Without Borders began their campaign in 2001 with a striking image of Olympic rings made out of handcuffs.¹⁶ The Free Tibet campaign has chosen Olympic rings formed by bullet holes (Free Tibet n.d.). Other artists have the rings serving as the wheels on a tank or made out of a pile of skulls or stitched in cloth and floating above a child laborer's head (No Beijing Olympics 2008 2007). Protests of some description seem set to form an antiphony throughout the Games and the organizers are braced for this.

A second potential challenge could come from the internal agendas around the Games. One paradox that every host with a sporting reputation to protect and a home crowd to impress must face is the problem of competing gracefully. The display of one's own national strength and skill craved by the home audience and the sporting bureaucracy is not necessarily compatible with hospitality or the interests of public diplomacy. At a time when the world is growing wary of Chinese strength, China's best interests would probably not be best served by a run of Chinese victories, but rather by sportsmanlike gestures and displays of comradeship between athletes.

Conclusion

With more than a century of experience, what can be assumed about the Beijing Games from the point of view of public diplomacy? First, that the Olympics is a high-risk mechanism, but probably one that any major power has to tackle at some point in its history. In the world of the Internet and global satellite news, the days of Potemkin villages and deceit are fast fading—like it or not China will be known as it is, not as it wishes to be. It can only hope that these two intersect somehow. Second, for all the meanings, images, and slogans contrived by the organizers of an event like the Olympics, the event can be used by an actor with its own public diplomacy agenda seeking to piggyback on the global news coverage. Third, much hangs on the unfolding of the competition, the experience of foreign athletes, spectators and their media, and their interaction with locals. The problems are redoubled when the Paralympics (scheduled for Beijing) are added to the mix. Chinese culture has many virtues, but sympathy toward the disabled is seldom considered one of them.¹⁷ Beijing must be able to host guests with special needs whose discomfort would play exceptionally badly in their home countries. The organizers can at least draw comfort from the success of the Special Olympics in Shanghai in the fall of 2007, which successfully insulated guests from the difficulties of life for the differently abled in modern China. Finally, Beijing must be braced for contradictory agendas as the enthusiasm of the home crowd threatens to subvert the need to be a good host.

The interests of Beijing will not be best served by amassing a pile of medals but rather by creating an environment in which sportsmanship can flourish and the athletes themselves provide the meaning of the Games. The best public diplomacy strategy for China, having set its frame for the Beijing Games, is to step back from the agenda of national promotion which so begs challenge, to focus on affirming the shared ideals of the Olympic movement, and to have enough confidence to allow the world to draw its own conclusions about the new China.

NOTES

I am grateful to Iskra Kirova and Carrie Walters for bibliographical research and sharing their own ideas around Olympic public diplomacy; to Barry A. Sanders for talking me through the maze of contemporary Olympic diplomacy; to Wang Yi We and Garry Rawnsley for their comments on my draft; and to Niels Kjær Therkelsen, my companion for boyhood Olympic TV viewing and impromptu political criticism.

1. On Gullion and the evolution of the term public diplomacy, see Cull 2006.

2. This argument was made in a letter to the London Times on Coubertin's death by the Greek ambassador M. D. Kaklamanos. See Caclamanos 1937. (The contemporary transliteration of this name is Kaklamanos. The Times used the older spelling Caclamanos.)

3. As an international pariah, the Soviet Union was initially excluded from the Olympics and so, from 1928, organized its own rival series of “Spartakiads” for workers from around the world.

4. Barry A. Sanders, chairman, Southern California Committee for the Olympic Games, to author, June 12, 2007.

5. The perennial loser in Olympic place-branding is Detroit, which bid unsuccessfully for every Games from 1952 to 1972.

6. When Japan resigned as host, Helsinki stepped in as an alternative to Tokyo, but the outbreak of European war killed that plan also. The 1944 Games were actually awarded to London in 1939. See Olympic Games Museum (n.d.)

7. This boycott is the focus of the Berlin Olympics exhibit mounted by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, which is preserved online at the Nazi Olympics Berlin Web site.

8. The U.S. attorney general, William French Smith, personally denounced the forgeries, while the United States Information Agency broadcast a special program over satellite in which the African American mayor of Los Angeles, Tom Bradley, and the Games' organizer, Peter Ueberroth, answered questions from African journalists about the Olympics. See Snyder 2005, 108–11 and Active Measures 1986, 22–24, 54–56.

9. In 2005, an anthology of Zhao Qizheng's speeches appeared with the title Xiang Shijie Shuoming Zhongguo (Explain China to the World). See also BBC Monitoring 2005b.

10. On May 15, 2007 the author and others at University of Southern California met Wang Guoqing, vice minister in China's SCIO, who spoke of his own position as the equivalent to Karen Hughes in the United States. His minister (Zhao Qizheng's successor) is Cai Wu.

11. The Tibet conference was reported by the World Tibet Network News.

12. Similarly, in February 2007, when soft power was the focus of the annual conferences of both the National People's Congress (China's parliament) and the National Committee of the Chinese People Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), participants acknowledged the scale of the challenge that still lay ahead. See Li, Cheng, and Wang 2007.

13. The institutes are reassuringly titled to emphasize the classical Chinese past, not its tumultuous present. In some poorer countries Chinese aid ensures that it is cheaper to be educated at a Chinese-funded school than within the national system (Kurlantzick 2007, 67–69).

14. See also Xinhua 2007a, 2007b.

15. The organizers seem also to be on guard against accusations of building for the world but ignoring the future of their own people, and hence the domestic audience has also been a key target for publicity around the long-term benefits for the Games. They are swift to point to the four major venues that will become part of universities around the capital and the thirty year contracts to maintain Olympic facilities for the public good.

16. As of July 29, 2007, the handcuffs were the opening image at the site http://www.rsf.org/. See also http://www.rsf.org/rubrique.php3?id_rubrique=174.

17. For recent comment on Chinese attitudes toward mental and physical handicap, see Hallett n.d. On preparations for the Olympics see Hallett 2006.

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