'Closed loop' of Olympics extends to Chinese society, too

To control COVID, the Beijing Olympic Committee created a restrictive Olympic Village system called a "closed loop."

To control its citizens, the Chinese government has created a nationwide version of a closed loop. And from Hong Kong in the southeast to Tibet in the southwest to Xinjiang in the northwest and all points in-between — and beyond, considering the threat to Taiwan — it has tightened considerably since Beijing hosted the Summer Games in 2008.

Brave Chinese journalists who risk becoming just the latest locked up in a country that bleakly leads in jailing journalists are reporting on the repression. It's also been independently verified by the U.S. government in a stark State Department annual human-rights report that states in the first sentence that China is an "authoritarian government."

The report goes on to detail how the repressive regime is committing "crimes against humanity" and "genocide" against Uyghurs and other mostly Muslim minorities in its Xinjiang region. The entire report reads like a dystopian dispatch from an Orwellian nation that surveils and suppresses expressions of dissent.

Hardly the spirit of the recently revised Olympic motto, which last year added the Latin "Communiter" to its "Citius, Altius, Fortius" phrase, which in English now reads "Faster, Higher, Stronger — Together."

China has mostly focused on fortius, becoming stronger geopolitically and economically, but also more repressive since 2008.

"The 2008 Olympics marked China's emergence on the world stage," said Ryan Hass, senior fellow in Foreign Policy Studies at the Brookings Institution. Hass, a noted expert on China, added in an e-mail interview that "In the intervening years, China's economic output has more than tripled, its military spending has grown four times, and its governance system has become more ideologically rigid and repressive."

"China's leaders likely wish to present their country to the world as competent and efficient hosts of a world-class Olympic Games," Hass said. "I expect they will struggle to sustain that narrative outside of China as attention gets drawn to China's COVID controls, its treatment of minorities, its imposition of its will on Hong Kong, and its more muscular approach to the rest of the world."

Opprobrium to this approach has achieved a relative rarity in Washington: bipartisan consensus. And it's galvanized alliances abroad like AUKUS, the trilateral pact between Australia, the U.K. and U.S., and the so-called Quad strategic dialogue between the U.S., India, Australia and Japan. Beijing's bellicosity triggered this hard-power response, and China's hard-line handling of COVID and contrarian voices makes it unlikely that it will realize the usual soft-power benefit of hosting the Games.

"When faced with a trade-off between tightening control at home or burnishing a positive image abroad, China's leaders have prioritized control, whether on Hong Kong, Xinjiang, curbing dissent, or stifling civil society," Hass continued. "Partly as a result, China's international image, at least in the developed world, is worse now than at any point since the wake of the Tiananmen tragedy in 1989."

The reality behind this image led many to call for a boycott of the Games. While that hasn't happened, the U.S. and a few fellow Western democracies are engaging in a "diplomatic boycott." Sending an athletic delegation should keep the beleaguered Olympic movement — and the idea of using global sport for good — from collapsing.

"That, to me, is the larger principle of the Games, that the power of the Olympics, for people with all kinds of causes and concerns, is achieved not outside of sport, but through sport, through participation in the Olympic context," said Douglas Hartmann, a University of Minnesota sociology professor whose expertise includes the Olympics.

"The Olympics is predicated on a contradiction," Hartmann said. "It has these kinds of grand, progressive claims, but also wants to remain politically neutral. That's the real contradiction."

The IOC doesn't want to cede these ideals but, Hartmann said, "they're so tied up with money, and national power, and the need to host the games, and kind of perpetuate the engine of the industry, that they can't stay true to the kind of idealistic principles" they espouse. And so, Hartmann added, "they've kind of been forced to let the athletes be the proprietors of that."

The IOC should not be neutral about its own values, let alone those of nations hosting their Games. Accordingly, reforms were introduced after the backlash to Beijing. And while selecting a host city is complex and multifactorial, a democracy, Italy, will host the next Winter Olympics. And the next three Summer Games (Paris in 2024, Los Angeles in 2028, and Brisbane in 2032) are in nations that, however imperfect, are closer to the Olympic movement's stated values.

Athletes shouldn't be the sole proprietors of projecting these principles. Especially when they've been cautioned about the consequences they could face from the IOC and the Chinese government itself, which warned that athletes are subject to Chinese law — the very issue they may want to speak out about.

The reason Chinese authorities may fear athletes intrepidly injecting themselves into the debate is they realize how powerful they can be. "Politicians, at a global level, are very aware of the power of sport," Hartmann said. "They use it for many political purposes."

The intended target of such symbolism is international, to be sure. But particularly with China there are also domestic dynamics at play. Xi, already China's most powerful politician since Mao, is looking to break the two-term limit of recent leaders and secure a third term this spring. "China's leaders clearly care about the country's global image," Hass said. "They just care more about strengthening their grip on control at home."

Part of that domestic control may be restraining Russia's international ambitions. Russian President Vladimir Putin, an ever-closer compatriot to his fellow despot Xi, is highly unlikely to invade Ukraine during the Games. "I do not expect President Putin would upstage the Beijing Olympics without first consulting President Xi," Hass said.

The Olympic Rings probably won't open China's societal closed loop. But among the goals of the Olympic Movement, according to the IOC, is "to contribute to building a peaceful and better world." Regarding Russia, the Winter Olympics may actually deliver — at least for a fortnight or so — which may be the one redeeming value of them taking place in China.