Oracle Bones (44 page)

One adjective had been tweaked in translation. Literally, the Chinese signs said:
NEW BEIJING, NEW OLYMPICS
. When I interviewed Beijing’s vice-mayor, Liu Jingmin, he explained that the Chinese “new” has a broader meaning that doesn’t translate well. “We decided to translate it into English as ‘great’ instead because the Olympics has a classical meaning,” he told me. “It didn’t seem right to say ‘new.’” But I talked with another Chinese sports official whose explanation was more frank, although he asked not to be quoted by name. “If they said ‘New Olympics’ in English, it would seem as if China wanted to change the Games,” he said. “The I.O.C. wouldn’t like that. They’d think, here’s this Communist country that’s trying to take over the Olympics.”

For anybody living in Beijing, the reverse seemed true: the Olympics, or at least the idea of the Olympics, was taking over the city. Tens of thousands of workers, students, and volunteers had been mobilized to clean up streets, and the government had embarked on an ambitious urban beautification program. It involved a lot of paint. They painted the highway guardrails white, and they dyed the grass in Tiananmen Square green. They splashed Old World colors onto Brave New World housing projects. Shortly before the commission arrived, many of the city’s proletarian apartment blocks seemed to march through a hot Italian palette: bitter greens, brilliant ochres, smooth pale blues. On Workers’ Stadium Road, a cluster of old Soviet-gray buildings emerged in burnt sienna. Down the street, the façade of a squat six-story apartment building was doused in sunny Venetian pink. Its other three sides were still gray, but you couldn’t see them from the road. The Chinese government, which had a penchant for statistics, announced that they had touched up 142 bridges, 5,560 buildings, and 11,505 walls, for a total surface area of 26 million square meters. They had painted something bigger than New Jersey.

Beijing was one of the most polluted capitals in the world, but even the air could be cleaned, at least for the short term. A friend of mine worked in an office building whose management distributed a cheerful notice:

Since the Olympic Committee’s delegation will visit Beijing next week, some buildings around the Third Ring Road have been ordered to stop heating in order to reduce the smoke and dust. Therefore, please wear heavier clothes when you are in your office next week!

DURING THE FIRST
hour, Driver Yang stopped to talk with two other drivers, half a dozen bystanders, and two cops, and he used his cell phone to call information and get the number for the Beijing Olympic Bid Committee. The line was busy, so he telephoned the taxi communication station and asked the operators if they knew anything about potential Olympic sites. Nobody could name a specific location for any of the proposed sites north of town. Driver Yang told me not to worry; we’d get there fine. He looked worried as hell and by the time we got to the Sandy River, twenty miles north of Beijing, he asked if we could stop for a cigarette. The two cops had just told us that we needed to turn around and head to a suburb called Datun.

“You can smoke in the car if you want,” I said.

“Smoking makes the car smell bad,” he said. It was the first time I had ever heard a Chinese cabbie say that. We pulled over near a coal refinery and Driver Yang pissed in the dust while smoking a Derby cigarette. He seemed a little calmer after that. Down the road, a faded propaganda sign said:
IMPROVING THE HIGHWAY’S ADMINISTRATION IS EVERYBODY’S RESPONSIBILITY
. There weren’t any Olympic banners out here and pieces of trash blew across the road. Walking back to the cab, Driver Yang put his arm on my shoulder.

“We’re friends, right?” he said.

“Sure,” I said.

On the way to Datun, he took off his driving gloves, and we chatted. Thirty years ago, Driver Yang had served in the People’s Liberation Army in Inner Mongolia. He had two children, a son and a daughter; he told me proudly that both were enrolled in college. In Datun, we passed a McDonald’s, a Popeye’s, and a Kenny Rogers Roasters. At the intersection of Anli and Huizhong roads, two cops were ticketing another cabbie. The man had picked up a fare in a no-stop zone; it was a bad week to break rules. Driver Yang pulled over and started talking fast, before the cops could yell at him.

“This is a foreign journalist who is writing about the Olympics,” he announced. “We’re trying to find out where they’re going to hold the events in 2008.”

One cop had been writing the ticket, but now his pen froze in the air. The ticketee looked up expectantly. He was a small man in a dirty nylon jacket;
the cop was bulky and his ID badge was number 007786. The sun was a dirty red wafer hanging low in the sky. It felt like a scene from a painting in which every element had been arranged in such a way as to draw attention to a single detail—one brushstroke that carried a world of meaning. I took out my notebook. The cop smiled.

“Please wait a minute,” he said. He spoke into his walkie-talkie, then turned back to me.

“Which country are you from, please?”

He barked again into the walkie-talkie: “We have an American reporter who is writing about the Olympic bid, and he needs to visit an Olympic site here in Datun!”

A pause; the man looked up: “They’re calling my supervisor.”

Everybody waited. The ticketee suggested that we head a few blocks to the west, where a field had been cleared for the Olympics. The cop told him to shut up. The walkie-talkie crackled.

“Go west and look for a field with banners around it,” the cop said to Driver Yang, and then he turned to me. “You’ll see that it’s a very good location to build the stadiums. They’re going to put soccer, badminton, and tennis there.”

He saluted us both, first me and then Driver Yang. The ticketee wished us good luck, and this time the cop didn’t tell him to shut up. We went west.

IN ANCIENT TIMES,
some members of the Chinese nobility played
cuju
, a game that is remotely similar to soccer. There are Ming dynasty scrolls that feature women playing
chuiwan
—sticks, balls, holes. Chinese historians describe it as their own version of golf. There are other artifacts, other games. A Qing painting of Emperor Kangxi’s inspection tour to the south shows, in an obscure corner of the scroll, three boys playing some form of handball. The Forbidden City Museum has a painting of a Tang emperor, Minghuang, involved in a polo-like game with the palace maidens.

But these were diversions—games, really. The true heart of the ancient Chinese athletic tradition consisted of
wushu
, “martial arts.” In the nineteenth century, some elements of
wushu
contributed to the development of the meditative breathing exercises that became known as
qigong
. The activities of
wushu
and
qigong
are as much spiritual and aesthetic as they are physical; their goal is artistic expression and self-improvement, rather than winning. Traditional Chinese athletics had elements that Westerners might describe as philosophical or even religious. (
Qigong
, of course, eventually gave rise to Falun Gong.) Competition wasn’t the primary goal of traditional athletics, and the ancient Chinese never built coliseums.

The modern term for “sports”—
tiyu—
didn’t appear until the nineteenth century. Like other words that were introduced during this period,
tiyu
came from Japanese. The Japanese had originally imported Chinese characters in ancient times to write their own language, but Western contact moved faster in Japan, developing new vocabularies. As China attempted to catch up, they adopted the terms that the Japanese had innovated:
minzhu
, or “democracy”;
minzu
, or “ethnic group.” Sometimes, a familiar phrase reappeared with a different meaning.
Kaogu
originally meant “investigation of the ancient”; in the twentieth century, it returned from Japan with a new definition: “archaeology.” The characters themselves weren’t new, but they described new ways of looking at familiar things. Artifacts had always been collected, but they hadn’t been excavated and studied in a scientific manner. The Chinese had always had different ethnic groups; they just hadn’t described them as such. Athletics hadn’t been categorized and arranged into tournaments.

The language changed because the world was changing. After the Opium War, missionaries and other foreigners introduced Western ideas of athletic competition, often at Christian schools. In the early twentieth century, China began to take an interest in the Olympic Movement, and a single Chinese sprinter competed in the 1932 Games. Four years later, at the Berlin Olympics, China sponsored a delegation of sixty-nine athletes, among them a mixed-gender
wushu
exhibition troupe that performed before Hitler.

By then, the Chinese were committed to the Olympics, and they had come to see sports as a way in which the country could avenge the injustices of the past century. The goal was to beat the foreigner at his own game. After the Communists came to power, they established sports-training schools that were modeled after the Soviet system. The People’s Republic competed in the 1952 Summer Games, but they boycotted the next Olympics because the I.O.C. recognized athletes from Taiwan.

It wasn’t until 1979 that the mainland finally agreed to return to the Olympic Movement. The I.O.C. continued to allow athletes from Taiwan to compete, but the Taiwanese flag was banned. In 1984, in Los Angeles, a mainland Chinese team competed for the first time in nearly four decades. They finished sixth in the overall medal standings. But that year’s Soviet-bloc boycott had weakened the field, and the Chinese were badly outclassed in such marquee events as swimming and track-and-field.

Over the next decade, China rapidly improved its medal count, largely through success in events where the competition was less intense. Chinese women athletes excelled, and the nation became particularly good at sports that involved routine-based activities, such as diving, gymnastics, and figure
skating. In such sports, bureaucracy pays: athletes can be created through careful organization and training rather than a combination of strength, hard-core competition, and performance-enhancing drugs. In the Atlanta Games of 1996, China ranked fourth overall. They moved up to third in Sydney, and by Athens they would be second, behind only the United States.

Despite the growing success, the key emotion behind Chinese athletics was still shame. On the surface, there was plenty of pride, but it was as shallow as pink paint on an old building. In 1993, when the I.O.C. awarded the 2000 Games to Sydney instead of Beijing,
China Daily
responded with an editorial linking the decision to the West’s history of “brutal colonialist aggression and exploitation.” During the month of Beijing’s bid to host the 2008 Games, I visited the China Sports Museum, where historians explained that modern athletics had begun in the year 1840, when the arrival of the full British fleet marked the turning point of the Opium War. The Chinese Olympic Committee had prepared a book that described this great sports moment, in English:

The Opium War turned China from a feudal into a semi-feudal and semicolonial society, in which sport came under the unavoidable influence of violent social upheavals and followed a tortuous path linked closely to the precarious national destiny.

Sport was grim. It often showed on the faces of Chinese athletes: many of them looked tight, nervous. In highly competitive sports like soccer and basketball, they had a tendency to choke in crucial situations. It was rare to watch a Chinese athlete perform with true joy, which wasn’t surprising; most had been trained in assembly-line sports schools since childhood. Their fans didn’t help much, either. The average Chinese athletics observer didn’t care much about understanding a sport or respecting individual effort; the victory was all that mattered. Fans were brutal toward losers, and they had a history of bad sportsmanship and even violence when foreign teams won matches on Chinese soil.

In a sense, the nation’s wholesale transition—from their own athletic traditions to those of the West—had left China with the worst of both worlds. They had adopted the competiveness and nationalism, which were the bluntest and most obvious characteristics of Western athletics, but they had missed out on all the subtleties. In my own experience, these were the only things that actually had any true value. As a child, my participation in athletics had revolved around my father, not a sports school, and his most important lessons were often counter-intuitive: that it was better to lose with class than win at all costs, and that the final goal wasn’t victory but self-improvement. For many people in the West, athletics are simply part of a well-rounded education and a healthy life.

Of course, that doesn’t make for good television or public sporting events, which celebrate competition. It wasn’t surprising that this aspect of Western sport was most accessible to the Chinese, who came to view their own traditions as if through a foreigner’s eyes. Athletics such as
wushu
, whose spiritual, non-competitive qualities should have been seen as a healthy alternative to the excesses of Western sport, were instead described as embryonic stages in the Chinese march toward Olympic glory. The logo for the Beijing Olympic bid featured five interlocked rings twisted into the shape of a person practicing Tai Chi, an exercise that is profoundly non-competitive. Tai Chi is a hell of a lot closer to Falun Gong than it is to the Olympics.

Many Chinese sensed that something was wrong with national athletics, although they struggled to identify the problem. The failures nagged at them, and sometimes people fixated on philosophical or psychological explanations. During my Olympics research, I met a number of Chinese who were intrigued by a sort of net theory: the notion that the Chinese perform well at Ping-Pong, badminton, and volleyball because there is no contact between opponents.