Oracle Bones (45 page)

“The Chinese aren’t as good at direct competition,” He Huixian, the vice-president of the Chinese Olympic Committee, told me. “We’re better at sports where there’s a net between the players.” She described the Chinese as
xiaoqiao
—dexterous and coordinated rather than strong. But she added that mentality was just as important. “Confucianism makes people more conservative,” she said. “Look at America—children are taught to be independent and creative. In China, it’s all about discipline. There isn’t enough creativity, and if you don’t have creativity, then you can’t adapt and change. You just follow the same old patterns and you don’t get any better. That’s true for sport as well as other things.”

The Chinese also believed that the Olympics highlighted the differences between rich and poor countries. In Beijing, I met with Xu Jicheng, a former basketball player who had become a television announcer. Xu had accompanied the Chinese delegation to every Summer Games since 1988. “Developed countries see the Olympics as a kind of business,” he said. “It’s like they’re saying, ‘I have a big house, with all sorts of wonderful furniture, and I want to have a party and invite people to come.’ And they sell tickets. But it’s different for a developing country. The Olympics won’t just change the economy and appearance of Beijing—the most important thing is that it will change our values and concepts.”

I asked Xu if he had any reservations about China’s adopting a Western view of sport. He brushed the question aside, explaining that the issue was political rather than cultural. “I went to Seoul in 1988,” he said. “Korean people
told me that if it weren’t for the Olympics, nobody would know what Korea is. Before the Olympics, foreigners only knew about the Korean War.”

In Xu’s opinion, China needed to emulate the Western model of sport as a business. He said that Chinese athletics were essentially twenty years behind Chinese economics. Because sport was so closely tied to nationalism, it hadn’t yet been converted to the market, like a lagging state-owned enterprise. But the process had started; recently, Hilton cigarettes had funded the national basketball program, and Coca-Cola sponsored Chinese soccer. “After fifty years, we’ll be just like the Western countries,” Xu predicted. “The Olympics will be a kind of business to us. We’ll be saying, ‘We have a big house, and we want to invite you so we can show it off.’”

AT 5:30 P.M.,
Driver Yang finally found an Olympics site. We got out of the cab and walked over to an empty field. It was the size of four city blocks, smack in the middle of northern Beijing; any buildings that had formerly stood there had been cleared away. In
Chai nar,
that was a familiar sensation—the feeling that something had just been demolished. Pink flags on poles marked the field’s perimeter.

“That’s where they’ll have soccer and tennis,” Driver Yang said. He grinned and swung an imaginary racquet through the air.

“And badminton, right?” I said.

“Right.”

We stood there staring at the empty field.

“Well,” I said. “I probably should go back and get dinner.”

On the Fourth Ring Road, we got stuck in traffic. The meter had been running for three hours, and by now the numbers might as well have been calculating the sense of anticlimax. Driver Yang was feeling the pressure once more. Finally, he asked what I was doing for dinner.

“I don’t have any plans,” I said.

“Do you eat Chinese food or Western food?”

“Chinese is fine.”

He said it wouldn’t take us long to get to his home in Tongzhou, on the eastern outskirts of Beijing. We went east on the Fourth Ring Road, and Driver Yang started talking about sports again. He told me that Mike Tyson was his favorite American athlete, because the boxer has Chairman Mao’s face tattooed on his arm.

“Why do the Chinese people like
Tai Sen
?” Driver Yang asked rhetorically. “Because he likes China. If he likes China, China likes him. And he understands China.”

“Does Tyson really understand China?” I asked.

Driver Yang said, “If he doesn’t understand China, why would he put a tattoo like that on his arm?”

That was an excellent question and I had no response. Driver Yang smiled. “
Tai Sen
read four of Chairman Mao’s books while he was in prison,” he said. “I saw it on television.”

He explained his personal theory about why athletes from the United States are dominant. “Americans are big,” he said. “They eat very well from the time they’re born, and also America is more scientific. If you take a country like China, a developing country, we can’t compete with a country like America. Your health is important. Look at
Tai Sen
. If he wasn’t so strong, how could he win?”

Driver Yang also admired Michael Chang, the tennis player. “He grew up in America, but his blood is Chinese,” he said. “Obviously it doesn’t hurt him. That shows that there’s a problem with the system here.”

It was seven o’clock by the time we reached Tongzhou. Driver Yang said that he was in the mood for Mongolian hot pot. Neon signs along the highway proclaimed
BEIJING 2008,
and
WELCOME TO THE NEW CENTURY’S TONGZHOU
. In the center of town they had a McDonald’s and a big department store called Wu Mart.

ON THE FINAL
day of the I.O.C. inspection, I joined the press pool that accompanied the commission. Five of us represented the foreign media: three television reporters, one photographer, and me. The reports that I filed would be distributed to the other journalists in Beijing, to use in stories about the inspection.

In order to join the press pool, I had to agree to a number of simple rules that had been established by the I.O.C. The first rule was that I could not ask questions. I was allowed to follow the commission members around, and I could quote them on anything they said during the inspection. If an I.O.C. representative happened to speak to me, I was permitted to respond. But under no circumstances could I take the initiative and address an inspector directly. If caught asking questions, I would be promptly expelled from the press pool. The I.O.C. also informed us that at some meetings we would only be allowed to observe the opening proceedings.

The rules were effective, at least in terms of creating a sense of drama. Wherever the inspectors went, journalists tagged along, notebooks and cameras ready. We moved in silence, as if struck dumb by the momentous occasion. After the morning session, I filed my first dispatch:

This is the pool report for this morning’s meeting between the Chinese and the I.O.C. inspection commission, at the Beijing Hotel…. Members of the press were escorted to the back of the room, where we were kept behind a red velvet rope. Women in
qipao
dresses greeted the delegations at the door. The members of the delegations trickled in one by one. They appeared to be relaxed and greeted each other warmly. The I.O.C. members gave each other air kisses and the Chinese did not. The
qipaos
were of red silk.

One of the press handlers explained that this morning’s press opportunity would be extremely limited. “When we’re here, they won’t say anything,” she said. “When we leave, they’ll speak.”

I wrote it down. She told me not to use her name.

The only excitement was when one of the I.O.C. commission members, Robert McCullough, walked to the other side of the table and asked Chinese gymnast Liu Xuan to autograph his
International Herald Tribune
promotional insert…. The last page features a photograph of Liu Xuan in full dismount and this is what she signed. A photographer from
China Sports Daily
was in the press pool and he pointed out excitedly that he had taken the picture. He was not asked to sign it and he remained behind the velvet rope like everybody else.

Today the topic was Beijing’s hotels and medical services, and the first speaker was Doctor Zhu Zonghan, Director of the Beijing Sanitation Bureau. He has a degree from Harvard and the moment he began to speak the press was escorted out.

Outside the hotel, bicyclists were riding down Chang’an Avenue as part of the “Ten Thousand Bicyclists Support Beijing’s Olympic Bid Activity.” The bicyclists wore red and white and black athletic outfits and they rode in formation, carrying flags that said, in English, “Applying for Olympic Games is My Hope.”

It was a fine day with clear blue skies and the wind came hard from the north.

THE INTERNATIONAL OLYMPIC
Committee is a curious organization. It elects its own members, and for most of its history, the organization has not been particularly concerned with diversity. During the time of the Beijing inspection, the I.O.C. consisted of 123 voting members, of whom nearly half were European. The People’s Republic of China had three members. That was the same number as the combined royal families of Liechtenstein, Luxem
bourg, and Monaco, each of which had one I.O.C. member. Of the 123 total members, only 13 were women. Two of them were princesses and one was a Spanish infanta.

The I.O.C. was one of the few major international organizations where neither the United States nor China had any real political power. Nearly 70 percent of the I.O.C.’s operating funds came from American-based sponsors, but there were only four members from the United States. During Beijing’s bid, I spoke with John MacAloon, an American anthropologist who specializes in the study of sport. He had recently served on an I.O.C. reform commission, and I asked him how much influence American opinion would have on the host city decision. “It doesn’t mean beans,” he said bluntly. “I can’t tell you the number of times that I’ve been in a room with I.O.C. people and somebody from the American side comes in, and everybody smiles and says, oh, it’s wonderful to have your support—and then the person leaves and everybody laughs behind his back. It’s a colonial relationship. The Europeans colonize American money. The Americans are largely powerless.”

The I.O.C. also has a history of troubled interactions with the developing world. In the early 1960s, nations from Asia, Africa, and Latin America attempted to create their own version of the Olympics, known as the Games of the Newly Emerging Forces—GANEFO. Organizers defined their event as “struggling against capitalism and trying to create a new world order.” In 1962, the first GANEFO was held in Indonesia, and the People’s Republic of China provided much of the funding. The I.O.C. responded by banning all GANEFO participants from future Olympic Games, and the fledgling event never held a second installment.

In the summer of 1968, a developing-world country hosted the Olympics for the first time. Prior to the start of those Mexico City Games, thousands of students gathered in protests; one of their complaints was that their country shouldn’t spend money on an event that would scarcely benefit the millions of Mexicans who lived in poverty. The government called out the troops, who fired on protestors, killing hundreds. The Games went on as planned. The exact toll of the massacre was never determined, and since then, the event has essentially disappeared from the popular view of Olympic history. It’s rarely mentioned in the Western press, and for the next three decades the Games didn’t return to the developing world.

By 2001, though, the I.O.C. was struggling to improve its relationship with poorer nations. The organization had increased funding of developing-world sports centers, and it had expanded its membership to include more representatives from African, Asian, and South American counties. But progress in
this direction may have been slowed by the scandal that erupted in Salt Lake City in 1998, when the city, attempting to host the Winter Games, dispensed more than a million dollars in cash and gifts to I.O.C. members. Representatives of poor countries made easy targets: of the ten members who resigned or were expelled for taking bribes, nine were from the developing world. Most came from countries that hardly had winter—Mali, Sudan, Congo, Swaziland, Libya, Cameroon. It was easy to imagine how it happened: if you came from the Congo, would you really care who won the right to host the Giant Slalom? The scandal was a grim reminder that despite its claims of internationalism, the Olympics draws on the culture of only a tiny sliver of the world.

Since then, the I.O.C. had banned gift-giving from the application process. The search for the 2008 site represented the first time that these rules had been fully implemented, and it was also probably the last time in history that a Communist country would court the I.O.C. In a way, they seemed perfect for each other. When I spoke with Alfred Senn, a professor of history who had spent time in the Soviet Union, he noted some political similarities between the I.O.C and the Communists. “The I.O.C. is organized on the same principles as Lenin’s Communist Party,” Professor Senn said. “He organized the Communist Party on a series of concentric circles, and de Coubertin [founder of the modern Olympic Movement] said that there is a nursery that trains people so that they can eventually join the inner core. There is a structural similarity. You don’t start voting democratically on the edge and start a faction; you have to get into the inner leadership, the executive committee. There’s not going to be any dark-horse pope coming in to run the Olympic Games.”

THE FINAL AFTERNOON
of the inspection was perfect. Blue sky, bright sun: the
NEW BEIJING GREAT OLYMPICS
banners flapped in the wind. We moved through the city in a five-vehicle motorcade, with a police escort. Street cleaners lined the road, brooms in hand; bicyclists and pedestrians gathered at intersections, watching. A day earlier, the commission had visited Beijing’s traffic-control center, where the Chinese demonstrated how signals could be monitored by remote control. Today, whenever we came to a traffic light, it turned green, as if by magic.

The city seemed to hold its breath, awed by the deep solemnity of the occasion. In absolute silence, the Sovereign made his journey and his sacrifi
ce.
Lest even the whistle of a distant train break the impressive stillness and thus profane the rites, there was no railway traffic in or out of Peking from the time he left his Palace until his return to it.