Commentary by Song Luzheng
The Winter Games used to be less eye-catching than the Summer Games. Yet global attention has been focused on Beijing, which hosted the Summer Games in 2008, too. Why?
The answer is clear: Beijing is hosting the 2022 Winter Olympic Games overcoming all odds, including the COVID-19 pandemic and so-called calls of “diplomatic boycott”.
First, the Winter Games have drawn additional attention because China is the host country, whose status and influence in the world have increased by leaps and bounds over the past 14 years. For instance, China’s GDP was US$4.6 trillion in 2008, accounting for 7.2 percent of the global total.
Today, China’s GDP is more than $15.7 trillion, accounting for about 18 percent of the global total, and it has grown from the world’s third-largest economy in 2008 to the second-largest economy. And for more than a decade, China’s contribution to global economic growth has been around 30 percent.
China’s importance to the world economy can be gauged from the fact that the closure of Ningbo Port in August last year – due to a localized COVID-19 outbreak – led to a reduction in global trade by nearly 2 percentage points in that month.
Second, the strategic game between China and the United States has intensified. The China-US “strategic rivalry” is the world’s most important geopolitical and international development, which some have even described as a new “Cold War”. All these have been manifested in the run-up to the Beijing Winter Olympics.
The Olympic Games should never be politicized. But in reality, the US has added a strong political color to the Beijing Winter Games by calling for a so-called diplomatic boycott on baseless accusations of human rights violations in China’s Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region.
Due to the political rivalry between China and the US, with some other countries supporting the latter, global attention has been focused on the Beijing Winter Olympics. But as the host of the 2028 Summer Olympic Games, the US knows it would have shot itself in the foot by calling for a “full boycott” of the Beijing Winter Games.
The US also knows that by holding a successful Winter Games, China will realize its goals, which will be a win-win scenario for the country and the world. Yet the US has tried to derive political capital out of the Winter Olympics by making all sorts of efforts to sabotage the event.
Third, the emergence of new variants of the novel coronavirus, especially the highly infectious Omicron variant, has also diverted global attention on China, with people speculating whether China can contain the virus despite hosting thousands of foreign athletes, coaches and officials for the Winter Olympics. And its delicacy in striking a balance in hospitality and pandemic control has proved to be effective.
Since the outbreak of the pandemic, China has adhered to the principle of putting people first and taken targeted measures to improve their lives and livelihoods, and by doing so, it has achieved the highest growth among major economies in imports and exports, and attracted more foreign investments. China’s success on both the public health and economic front has put immense pressure on the US and the European Union to improve their healthcare systems and economies.
In fact, the response to the pandemic has become an institutional competition between the East and West, leading to a hard – and a soft-power race between the two sides. So whether China can contain the virus despite holding the Winter Games is a challenge that goes beyond Omicron and the sports gala – it is a question of whether China’s anti-pandemic measures can succeed and the West can reverse the trend of its decline.
The US would like nothing better than to see China failing to achieve its goals, because it would help ease the domestic pressure, prove that its response to the pandemic was right all along, and portray China as the science-defying Don Quixote. That’s why the challenge to contain the pandemic as the host of the Winter Games is much more compelling for China than it was to host a successful Summer Olympics in 2008.
And fourth, the incomparable splendor of the Beijing 2008 Summer Games captured the world’s imagination. And since the world has been grappling with the pandemic for more than two years, it badly needs a spectacular Olympics to regain its confidence and renew its pledge to effectively overcome the global public health crisis.
The world is looking at China to give it another surprise, by hosting a simple, safe and yet splendid Winter Olympics. Not to mention that it is a miracle that the Beijing Winter Olympics is being held on schedule despite the pandemic raging around the world. That in itself is a great contribution of the Beijing Winter Olympics to humankind.
The author is a Chinese political scientist in France and a researcher at the China Institute, Fudan University.
– Courtesy of China Daily
