Perspectives

Why is China Focused on Winning Gold Medals?

In a new column here at The Hypermodern we pose a question and have our writers offer their disparate opinions on the issue. Of course we welcome opinions from our readers as well. This first question comes from the results of the Olympics and China’s dominant number of gold medals. But why the emphasis on bringing home the gold? Here are our thoughts, in no particular order.

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Yulin Zhuang

Gold has intense cosmological significance to the Chinese. A friend of mine related the story of a court case involving a large building in Melbourne that many Chinese bought apartments in due to the fact that the top of the building was gold in the model. I’m sure many of us may have noticed that a lot of Chinese restaurants have names like “Golden King” or “Gold Lotus.” The drive for gold medals is certainly given extra fuel by this auspicious association.

But that’s only part of the reason. China’s major drive is to prove to the world that it deserves attention and respect, in any way it can. The Chinese are burning with a desire to prove their country’s eminence, powered by their seemingly unstoppable economic growth. In a country where many people are height-conscious, nouveau riche, and worried about their international image, the Olympic gold medal count provides a visible symbol of China’s rise. They are determined to prove that China is just as good as the United States, if not better. There’s an enormous chip on China’s shoulder where the United States is concerned—conspiracy theories about how the U.S. is trying to suppress China abound. What better way to get over insecurity about China’s place in the world order than to beat the U.S. soundly in the gold medal tally?

J.R. Siegel

The Chinese focus on winning the gold medal count is rooted in the institutional fabric of the nation. China is a country of superlatives—the highest train, the longest bridge over water, the most people, the oldest culture, and so on. For the state, winning the most golds validated the rule of the Communist Party by assuring the population that the Party was working to make China strong again. This is what the Olympics were about—proving that China could compete with, and defeat, the best other countries had to offer. It was about reinforcing beliefs of Chinese exceptionalism.

Striving to be the best is manifest in many other aspects of Chinese culture, perhaps none more so than business and education. Business in China is about haggling harder, making more money and winning. The gaokao is about outscoring your classmates and jockeying for position in competitive colleges. In China, the educational and economic pies are inelastic; if someone else wins a contract or spot at a university, it precludes you from doing the same. The belief that there is a limited amount of opportunity is perhaps the greatest difference between American and Chinese cultures.

American culture and democracy are rooted in an understanding that compromise is a central part of life. Perhaps this is why Americans take a certain pride in being sportsmen, win or lose, and are humbled by the very chance to compete. The lack of compromise within Chinese institutions and the constant focus on superlative achievements, on the other hand, may be why the Chinese were so focused on winning the gold medal tally.

George Ding

I once saw a Chinese woman with a fake D&G bag. I asked her, “Do you like Dolce and Gabbana?”

“What,” came the reply.

“Dolce and Gabbana.”

“I don’t know it.”

I pointed at her bag. “Dee and Gee.”

“Oh! Yeah, I like it.”

I imagine you could repeat this experiment with any number of hard-to-pronounce brand names but the point is, there is a tendency in China to emphasize things without understanding the historical and cultural context behind them, and the Olympics has proven to be another example of this semiotic myopia.

The woman knew that the letters “D” and “G,” when splayed on a purse, meant something important, just as the Chinese government knew that five colored rings and an inextinguishable fire meant something. But what?

The fact that China decided to focus on winning gold medals instead of addressing human rights issues, solving its long-standing internal disputes, or even warning its own citizens about tainted milk, shows that China has completely missed the point.

The plan to dominate the gold medal tally, Project 119, began seven years ago and shows China’s commitment not to athleticism but to winning. So much for the spirit of competition. In Chinese this ability to bend the rules without breaching them is called xiao cong ming—literally, small intelligence.

The emphasis on medal-grubbing cheapens China and the Olympics alike. It belies an insecurity or self-consciousness, like a classroom bully trying to prove something. Ironically, by attempting to showcase its power and gain international respect through the collection of gold trinkets, the government might have done just the opposite.

Oscar Moralde

There is undoubtedly a great amount of prestige associated with being on the top of the medal count; the last time any nation besides the United States or the Soviet Union was at the head of the leader board was Germany in 1936. “Winning the Olympics” via medal count is something that is automatically associated worldwide with being a superpower. The American media this past Olympics was very fond of calling nations “sports powers,” and most often this referred to the PRC.

The Olympics is a perfect platform for China—a non-threatening venue to show off its “peaceful rise” to a global audience. The same characteristics that garner success in the Olympics—a highly motivated and diverse populace, an intense and competitive training network, and the manpower and budget to sustain such a system—generally translate to national success. Each victory in the Games is emblematic of similar such victories in other fields.

An interesting dichotomy between the U.S. and China when discussing medals is the distinction between the gold count and the total medal count. The American media prefers to count total medals, while most of the world, including China, prefers golds when ranking nations. This could be ascribed to the Americans clinging to the count they won in 2008, but the U.S. has used the total count since the beginning of the modern Olympics.

Does this say anything about the two nations’ sports philosophies? One line of thinking is that the preference for total medals reflects the American preference for a sports system where excellence results from individual drive—the wide spread of medals reflects the breadth and depth of sports acumen amongst the entire American people.

The preference for the gold count fits with the viewpoints of smaller, more specialized countries, and nations with centralized, top-down sports infrastructures. For these nations, it doesn’t matter if no one else in the country is any good at a certain sport, as long as the best person in the world at that sport is one of their countrymen. In this view, silvers and bronzes are immaterial.

Which viewpoint is better? Are they even accurate? It’s conjecture, really; but it sounds good, doesn’t it?

© 2008 The Hypermodern.