The Megarhetorics of Global Development

Chapter 5. Staging the Beijing Olympics: Intersecting Human Rights and Economic Development Narratives

121 The Olympics have long been a host to international spectacle and national pageantry, and the opening and closing ceremonies of the 2008 Olympic Games were no different. Internationally renowned Chinese filmmaker Zhang Yimou, who grew up during the Cultural Revolution and whose films have been censored by the Chinese government, was the mastermind behind the opening and closing celebrations. The opening ceremony featured more than seven hundred Chinese performers, synchronized formations and drumming processions, militarist displays of goosestepping Chinese troopers carrying the Chinese flag and the Olympic flag, a fabulous light show, and former Olympian Li Ning suspended on wire, gliding with the Olympic torch along a massive scroll as it unfurled at the top of the stadium before lighting the cauldron.1 China understands the power of the spectacle, as evidenced by its grand displays and its willingness to spend twice as much on the Olympics as any other host nation. In comments following their successful bid for the 2008 games, China’s government officials declared: “The cultural industry is a key rising industry that should obviously become stronger and more competitive by taking advantage of the business opportunities spawned by the Olympics. It Intersecting Human Rights and Economic Development Narratives Tim Jensen and Wendy S. Hesford Staging the Beijing Olympics 5 By allowing Beijing to host the Games, you will help the development of human rights. —Liu Jingmin, vice president of Beijing Olympic Bid Committee 122  Tim Jensen and Wendy S. Hesford should become a force to be reckoned with on the international market” (BOCOG, “Beijing Olympic Action Plan” 58). Western discourses about the Beijing Olympics were similarly imbued with spectacular rhetoric, with continual references to the spotlight on China, its emergence onto the international stage, and its opportunity to showcase itself to the global community . China’s desire to cultivate an Olympic spectacle and the corporate endorsement of this spectacle corroborates our emphasis on the intersecting discourses of Chinese nationalism, Olympic humanism, and neoliberal internationalism. These convergences also set the stage for our study of the strategic deployment of human rights and economic development narratives in relation to the 2008 Olympics, narratives to which the Chinese government , the United States, and multinational corporations are beholden. Like Western democracies, the Chinese regime deploys the spectacle to advance both its nationalist political agenda and neoliberal capitalist imperatives . Our initial emphasis on the spectacle should not be viewed, however, as an endorsement of totalizing theories of the spectacle or the fetishization of the commodity put forward by Guy Debord and the Situationists. Counter to totalizing and determinisitic Marxist theories of the spectacle, we align ourselves with Arjun Appadurai’s argument that the relationship between the cultural and economic dimensions of global politics , in this case gold medal politics, is not a “one way street . . . set wholly by, or confined within, the vicissitudes of international flows of technology, labor, and finance” (41).2 Specifically, the megarhetoric of development is “punctuated, interrogated , and domesticated” by micronarratives (Appadurai 10), creating reticulate convergences and disjunctures of discourse that affect material practices across class and contexts. Thus we view the Olympic movement and the Olympic spectacle, more specifically, as a confluence of “scapes” (ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, financescapes, and ideoscapes).3 We call for an intertextual rhetorical analytic that foregrounds the convergence of transnational scapes and an intercontextual analysis that complicates dualistic configurations of the relationship between China and the West, and accounts for the limited capacities of governments, corporations, and human rights organizations to control the meanings of their representations . Sonja K. Foss and Barbara J. Walkosz’s study of the New York Times’s and the Wall Street Journal’s depictions of China leading up to the 2008 Olympic Games highlights the significance of discursive frames in staging outsiders’ perceptions of the host country and interactions with its people Staging the Beijing Olympics  123 (348).4 Foss and Walkosz elucidate the tensions “between the familiarity and comfort of the West and the uniqueness of Chinese culture”; between depictions of China as both a violator and an upholder of human rights; and of China as both a powerful and unreliable economic partner (348–49). Yet they fail to note how American elite media’s portrayal of these tensions creates a “space of definition” in media culture that domesticates neoliberal desires. For instance, American elite media configurations of China “becoming Western” not only propelled the convergence of economic and human rights development narratives...