| A former U.S. track-and-field athlete herself, Susan Brownell is an authority on Chinese sports, having written several books on the country itself and conducted fieldwork on sports and body culture, and Olympic Studies. She was guest professor at the Beijing Sports University throughout 2007-08, and is currently Professor of Anthropology at the University of Missouri - St. Louis.
Beijing Review: How do you feel the Games went overall?
Susan Brownell: The basic organization and operations of the Games were probably the best ever. Larger numbers of people were processed faster than ever before-public transportation was moving well and the security checks seldom took more than half an hour. There were no major operation errors in the sports events, and the excellent facilities led to many world records and great performances. The media accommodations, I'm told, were the most comfortable ever, and the locations for the broadcasters gave them many fantastic backdrops, both inside and outside the Olympics. Foreign visitors were left with the overall impression that Chinese people are friendly and open: the volunteers were helpful although there were still complaints that many of them could hardly speak any English; the spectators were generally well behaved with only an occasional display of un-sportsmanlike Chinese nationalism.
Due to security concerns, many community cultural performances had been cancelled, Beijing's cultural plazas with big-screen TVs were not fully utilized, and the events that are normally free and open to the public-cycling, marathon and triathlon-were highly restricted and difficult to view. This reduced the atmosphere of celebration throughout the city. However, it was still possible to find pockets of celebration, such as in Ditan Park, where there were regular evening cultural shows. Chinese spectators tend to be more reserved than people from other countries, which led many foreign journalists to think that they were not joyful. However, many Chinese people felt that they had surpassed their usual boundaries and achieved new levels of "craziness" (kuangre).
The fact that the opening ceremonies were so strongly praised in the foreign media was extremely pleasing to Chinese people, though they were somewhat mystified because to Chinese eyes they seemed to recycle old practices (though perhaps on a bigger and more hi-tech scale) and so lacked a feeling of newness. The gold medal count surpassed their wildest expectations and certainly provoked many people to think that perhaps the rhetoric about China's taking its place as a world power might actually have some basis in reality. All of this helped to overshadow the national mourning over the withdrawal of Liu Xiang (the defending Olympic champion of men's 110 meters hurdles).
Can China sustain or better this medals haul in the 2012 Games?
Whether China sustains the medal haul will depend on whether other countries start devoting more government funding to elite sport, particularly in the sports that China currently dominates. It will also depend on whether the pursuit of medals remains the centerpiece of Chinese sport policy, or whether there's a shift toward a greater emphasis on popular and recreational sport. This is currently being debated.
How is China improving its performances in terms of the sports that are popular globally, but have little success here: football, baseball and basketball, for three examples.
Chinese men's basketball got its best result ever and we can probably expect continued improvement. This is because basketball is very popular in China (it can be played anywhere, even on a dirt court in a village center). Also, the NBA is now reaping the benefits of its quarter-century of brand-name building in China and is incredibly popular. Men's football seems to have gone from bad to worse and heads are going to roll in the football establishment. Women's football backslid, too. Baseball will not be an Olympic sport in London and we shouldn't expect too much improvement there, despite the efforts of Major League Baseball to promote the sport. The fields are too expensive to maintain, the game is not understood, and it would be too tough to surpass Japan-China would only want to make an intense effort if it could be assured of that.
How about track and field, again at the Olympics it looks as if China has failed to improve significantly in this area this year?
A lot of attention has been given to track and field for the last 25 years and the sport has never succeeded in producing more than one superstar every decade or so (Zhu Jianhua in high jump in the 1980s, Wang Junxia in 5,000 and 10,000 meters in the 1990s, Liu Xiang in the 2000s). This despite the fact that the Beijing Sport University has indoor facilities and is the regional training center for the IAAF (The International Association of Athletics Federations). Chinese track-and-field insiders say the problem is that the best talent is choosing to go into basketball, football, and other sports with a bigger and more immediate pay off, and that the current generation of coaches is lacking in talent and initiative. Track and field has perhaps the widest participation base of any sport in the world and the top levels are perhaps more competitive than any other sport except, maybe, football. I think another problem is that by comparison with track-and-field powers, China's grassroots system is not well developed and its recruitment net is not cast widely enough. I also suspect that another problem is nutrition, which might also affect soccer. Nutrition affects these sports that require pure athleticism more than other sports, and coaches are aware that rural children who did not have enough to eat when they were younger are not able to stand up to hard training later. We are finally entering a generation of kids who have had access to more food than they need, and as they grow up we might see some improvements.
Do foreign coaches help in these areas in the long term, or should China procure its own talents?
Today's top-level sports consist of a global network of coaches and athletes who are hardly constrained by national boundaries. If anything, China needs to enter more fully into this global network. It needs for more of its coaches who go abroad to keep ties back in China and to help develop athletes in China, and for more Chinese athletes to go abroad to train, but the current system discourages this. Bringing 24 foreign experts to the Beijing Sport University each year to lecture for one week, and bringing in 30+ foreign coaches in to work with national teams (often for short periods of time), is not enough.
How do the sports facilities and development at grassroots level differ in China from other countries, if at all?
The huge population, the density of urban populations, the lack of attention to recreational spaces in city planning, the focus on elite athletes in the sports system, the focus on entrance examinations in the educational system, and the Central Government's general lack of official attention to quality of life up until last year-all mean that sports facilities and development at the grassroots level are poor.
What impact and influence have the Olympics had on Beijing as a city, and China as a country?
The Olympics didn't change China, but they speeded up transformations already underway, and perhaps helped to make them irreversible. They made China realize that it did not understand the West that well, but they still do not fully understand why they don't understand it. In many ways the Olympics forced China to conform more closely to international standards which should in the end benefit China's domestic economy as well as its international relations (food quality control, intellectual property rights protection, conformity to written contracts, functional use of English, international working styles, corporate sponsorships, etc.) as well as its future trade relationships with the outside world. Also, the Olympics helped many Chinese people, or at least Beijingers, see their own country and its government as they actually are, their strengths and their weaknesses. |
