A lot of people who don’t live above a certain latitude probably don’t know that there are Winter Olympics going on right now in China. Honestly, I can’t even name any of the sports, other than skiing, skating and ice hockey. But as a foreign policy geek, I find the Olympics just as fascinating for the politics as for the sport.
Growing up, I always used to think that hosting the Olympics is a big deal for any country. You make the news all over the world for a month and tourists would presumably visit in droves. Jobs would be created in the infra and hospitality sectors; cab drivers would profit off of ferrying the many new tourists in their city.
But apparently, it isn’t quite so hunky-dory. Hosting the Olympics is a terribly costly affair, often amounting to billions of dollars (and millions more for annual maintenance). Specific new sporting infrastructure needs to be built, which most cities will never really use again.
According to some estimates, the only city to have reaped a profit off of hosting the Games is Los Angeles, which last played host in 1984. That was only because LA already had the infrastructure required. Every other host city has been paying off massive debts for years. Montreal, which hosted the 1976 Games, took THIRTY YEARS to pay off the debt that it had racked up.
It was no wonder then that when Rio hosted the Games in 2016, there were massive protests from the Brazilian public who were already suffering daily distress. In 2020-21, Tokyo’s woes were only compounded by the pandemic because it meant that few people could visit the Games from abroad (which meant that there was limited tourism revenue).
So when Beijing — host of the ongoing Winter Olympics — decided to bid and run this year’s Games, it baffled some people. For starters, when Beijing hosted the much bigger Summer Olympics in 2008, it only raised some $3.6 billion in revenue, against a cost of over $40 billion. Secondly (and perhaps more important), Beijing is not a snow-clad city. That means that the city had to invest even more to create artificial “winter landscapes” that did not (and could not) exist. The result was a snowy ski ramp, installed in the middle of a brown and barren city with reactors in the background.
The Games have already cost Beijing almost $9 billion (and rising). In China — the spiritual home of modern-day debt burdens — this should cause some concern. But President Xi is not worried. For Xi, the 2008 Games were an opportunity for China to tell the world that it had arrived. And this year’s Games are an opportunity to tell the world that China can build anything anywhere.
Autocrats seem to love hosting the Games. In 2014, Russia’s Putin had hosted the Winter Olympics in Sochi with similar fervour, before proceeding to take Crimea from Ukraine shortly afterwards.
Why are autocrats willing to foot such a massive bill and what do the Games do for them in return?
For starters, legitimacy. Autocrats have always treasured opportunities to show that their form of government is more effective and legitimate than liberal democracy. Since the start of the pandemic, Xi has stubbornly clung to a “zero Covid” policy that involved using the brute force of the state to lock down entire cities with millions of people for months on end. While the West floundered and choked under rising caseloads, Chinese state media routinely broadcast the superiority of its authoritarian model by peddling (albeit whitewashed) data.
The Olympics are, in many ways, an even better stage to show off the abilities of one’s autocratic state. Autocracy thrives on marshalling massive resources into grand (even — or especially — unprofitable) projects, often to capture the attention and awe of the world. Over the years, China has built the world’s highest railway, largest hydropower project and biggest water transfer system. A running theme is to keep besting its own records. And so, when most people around the world think of China, they think of an efficient state, carrying out grand projects which most democracies would inevitably bungle up.
But the flip side of having the Olympic spotlight on you is that the world is not only reading about what you’re doing right but also what you’re doing wrong. Yet, in the age of ultra-nationalism, where far too many people seem to care more about “national image” than national humanity, even that can work in the autocrat’s favour.
In the run-up to the Games, China’s well-oiled online censors scrubbed all negative posts about Xi, Beijing and China. One day, tennis star Peng Shuai accused a communist party leader of sexual assault. The next day, she practically disappeared. A few days later, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) — eager not to rub its Chinese sponsors the wrong way — claimed to have spoken to Peng and asserted that she was fine. More days later, Peng herself told the world that she had been “misunderstood”.
Common sense would say that the final outcome of the saga did not make sense. If Peng had really been “misunderstood”, there would have been no need for official censors to take down her post (and all mention of her on the internet) and keep her hostage for several days before releasing a clarification. Most people who are “misunderstood” on social media would retract their comments and publicly clarify their intent immediately.
Yet, to the nationalists, the episode showed China’s ability to pull off a high-profile global event successfully without letting a public relations disaster overshadow it (and if you now realise, nobody is really talking about Peng anymore, largely because no one was allowed to talk about her early on).
Interestingly, Peng’s episode (and the trend of the Olympics) show a subtly symbiotic relationship between the IOC and rich, autocratic regimes. The IOC needs hosts who are willing to splurge on ever more expensive Games — something that most voters around the world are now unwilling to tolerate. And in return for their support, the IOC legitimises their autocratic partners, providing them with a stage to showcase their prowess to the world and whitewashing their sins.
Will Riyadh soon play host?
I would not be surprised!