From 2006 to 2008 Chinese society was inundated with Beijing Olympics propaganda. The Beijing Olympics was also the predominant theme of the Chinese government's international publicity in this period. Propaganda and thought work (xuanchuan yu sixiang gongzuo 宣传与思想工作) has long been an integral activity in the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) rule. After undergoing a decline in importance in the 1980s, in the current period it is once again prioritized, albeit updated to reflect changes in Chinese society. For this reason, Beijing's Olympic preparations were never only about putting up new sports stadiums; hosting the Olympics was used as an opportunity for a major propaganda effort, what I call a campaign of mass distraction.

CCP propaganda and thought work has undergone a transformation in recent years, as has the Chinese economy and certain elements of the political system. China has embraced many new practices and systems from the outside world, especially Western democratic countries, while retaining many traditional features and practices from the past. Examining Beijing Olympics propaganda activities is a useful means to reveal the many ways in which China has adapted its political and economic system while maintaining the core political status quo: one-party rule.

Changes in the methodology and goals of the CCP propaganda system (xuanjiao xitong 宣教系统) reflect substantial changes in China's system of political control and an adjustment in the nature of the Party's authority to rule. The propaganda system is the most extensive and, arguably, the most important of all the CCP-controlled bureaucratic systems (xitong 系统)Footnote ² in China. Hence this article analyses the propaganda activities surrounding the Beijing Olympics as a key to interpreting recent changes in the underpinnings of legitimacy and indeed the whole process of legitimation in contemporary China. It is part of a ten-year project studying the modernization of China's propaganda system and is based on field work trips to China in 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002–03, 2004, 2005–06 and 2007, where I conducted formal and informal interviews with propaganda officials, theorists, policy makers and bureaucrats, academics, journalists, dissidents and ordinary Chinese citizens, while scouring propaganda policy documents, secondary sources in Chinese and English, and relevant information from the Chinese and foreign news media.Footnote ³

The CCP, Legitimacy and the Propaganda System

Superficially the two-year period of “welcome the Beijing Olympics activities” (ying Aoyun xuanchuan huodong 迎奥运宣传活动) looked rather like a Mao-era mass campaign (qunzhong yundong 群众运动): it involved the whole of Chinese society, received saturation coverage in all sectors of the Chinese propaganda system, centred on a handful of simple, easily understandable slogans, utilized all tools of mass communication including oral communications, and incorporated both the commercial and non-commercial sectors. However, the Beijing Olympics “mass activities” had some features which made them strikingly different from the mass campaigns of the past. Analysing just what those differences were provides a window on to the new underpinnings of the CCP's right to rule.

One significant difference was avoidance of the term “campaign” (yundong 运动) to describe the movement's mass, scripted, series of events. Yundong (when prefixed with “politics,” “mass” or “propaganda”) has become a negative term in Chinese official discourse.Footnote ⁴ From the late 1920s until the late 1970s, the CCP engaged in a series of mass campaigns, which though aimed at transforming China, often served as the fig leaf for power struggles and purges. The political thought reform of the masses was an essential government task in these years, frequently to the detriment of economic growth. From 1978 to 1989 CCP rule faced a legitimacy crisis,Footnote ⁵ and many critics both within and outside China argued that the source of this crisis was the Mao era's (1949–76) excessive emphasis on political thought work and mass campaigns. In response to these pressures, in the 1980s the Chinese government downplayed ideological goals (mass persuasion-based legitimacy) and instead focused its efforts on economic development (performance-based legitimacy). The senior leadership was divided on the issue of whether political thought work and propaganda should still have a role in China's modernizing economy and polity.

These debates were brought to a dramatic close with the political crisis of April–June 1989. The post-1989 leadership established the new formula that has been followed ever since: that the Party would base its legitimacy on both economic growth and a renewed emphasis on propaganda and political thought work.Footnote ⁶ However the debates of the 1980s meant that Party propaganda and thought work in the post-1989 years would be very different from what went before. Since the early 1990s, CCP propaganda has undergone a dramatic modernization, discarding outdated terminology such as yundong and in foreign-language publications even avoiding the term “propaganda,” while incorporating the latest technological and methodological innovations.Footnote ⁷

In terms of propaganda and thought work, the years from 1989 to 1992 were a period of consolidation and reflection on the lessons of the past. However not long after the 14th Party Congress in 1992, CCP General Secretary Jiang Zemin stated that propaganda should be an “extremely important department” with increased powers.Footnote ⁸ The 14th Party Congress is also notable as the moment when China formally designated itself a market economy. For propaganda officials, the challenge was to create propaganda and thought work suitable for both the market economy and China's unique political system. For enterprises within the propaganda system, such as sports, media, cultural and educational organizations, the challenge would be to find new sources of income as state subsidies were progressively withdrawn from this time on.

The period from 1992 to the 2002 16th Party Congress saw substantial reforms in Party propaganda work, reflecting radical subterranean shifts which were contemporaneously going on in the political sphere. One early shift in thinking occurred in September 1991, when an article in an internal publication argued that instead of calling itself a “revolutionary party” and trying to revolutionize Chinese society, the CCP should re-brand itself as a “party in power” with the aim of maintaining this status and the political system it led. The article's suggestions became mainstream opinion by the mid-1990s, and were formally adopted as Party policy during the 16th Party Congress. This means that propaganda now has an even more crucial role in Chinese politics, as the masses must be persuaded that the party in power and the political system it represents are legitimate and should be sustained.

Since 1989 the Central Propaganda Department has overseen the introduction to China of modern methods and tools of mass persuasion more in keeping with the government's re-forged social contract. China's propaganda and thought work now incorporates the methodology of political public relations, advertising, mass communications, social psychology and other modern forms of mass persuasion utilized in Western democratic societies, but adapted to Chinese conditions and needs.

Modern democratic states commonly use mass persuasion techniques to gain popular support and maintain political legitimacy.Footnote ⁹ According to political scientist Seymour Martin Lipset, “legitimacy involves the capacity of a political system to engender and maintain the belief that existing political institutions are the most appropriate or proper ones for the society.”Footnote ¹⁰ The governing elite in any given society uses mass persuasion techniques – propaganda to its detractors – in order to “manufacture consent” for its continuing rule.Footnote ¹¹ Contemporary CCP-sponsored forums promote Lipset's minimalist definition of legitimacy; meanwhile the (conflicting) theories of Max Weber and Jürgen Habermas are downplayedFootnote ¹² or critiqued as irrelevant for China.Footnote ¹³

As part of the revival of the importance of propaganda and thought work, the CCP has reworked many old traditions. An example is the practice of launching periodic mass campaigns in order to guide the public mind. However since the term yundong is no longer used, the ambiguous huodong (活动) (which can be translated as “activities” as well as “campaign”) is now preferred. The Chinese term for public relations campaign is gong guan huodong (公关活动) and the new-style mass campaigns do have much in common with PR efforts. The campaign to welcome the Beijing Olympics was particularly reminiscent of a PR promotion for a new product. This campaign was formally launched in February 2006 and ended in the last seconds before the opening ceremony.Footnote ¹⁴ It was the final stage of a long-term effort to link China's successful Olympics bid to ongoing efforts to maintain the political credibility of the CCP government.

Following the pattern of the Mao era, some contemporary propaganda campaigns are targeted at Party members while others are aimed at the Chinese population as a whole. Since 1994, every two years or so, Party members and senior non-Party state officials have had to stop work to engage in concentrated political study, sometimes for as long as 18 months. In 1994 Party members were instructed to “study Deng Xiaoping Theory”; in 1998 they studied Jiang Zemin's “Three Stresses”; in 2000 and 2003 they learned Jiang's theories on “the Three Represents”; from 2005 to 2006 they took part in the record-breaking 18-month “Maintaining the progressiveness of Party members education”; and from 2007 to 2008 they studied the theory of “scientific development.” Instead of political study, the masses are now targeted with soft propaganda messages aimed at gaining social and political stability such as the two-year “Welcome the Beijing Olympics campaign.”

Beijing Olympic propaganda activities reflect the changed circumstances in the justification for maintaining the political status quo in China. Rather than being a campaign of political indoctrination, Olympics propaganda was a campaign of mass distraction, designed to distract the population from more troubling issues such as political representation, inflation, unemployment, corruption and environmental degradation. It is a form of what Freudenberg and Allario call “diversionary framing,” whereby public opinion is shaped, in part, by distraction.Footnote ¹⁵ In China today the ultimate goal of propaganda and thought work is manufacturing consent for the continued political status quo. Consent can be active, as in societies where citizens choose their governments by election. However in China, passive consent is more appropriate. The Party needs the masses to be as disengaged from politics as possible, and to be optimistic and positive in order to maintain business confidence and trust in the political status quo. Under these circumstances the role of the Central Propaganda Department has shifted from being the engine house for the political transformation of China to overseeing the political mummification of the nation.

“Mass distraction” is a common political tactic from as far back as the Romans when the poet Juvenal spoke scathingly of the authorities using “bread and circuses” to distract the masses from political concerns. Many commentators have referred to the Bush administration's 2003 invasion of Iraq as a “weapon of mass distraction” with the real goal of securing Iraq's oil reserves.Footnote ¹⁶ North Korea's mass games are another example of mass distraction and diversionary framing.

Recent research into how performance magic works can give some insight into why “mass distraction” can be so effective at diverting attention from other issues.Footnote ¹⁷ Magicians engage audiences with smoke, mirrors and other sensory distractions while sleights of hand are performed. Audiences focus on the display while being robbed of their senses. In the same way, politicians and their spin doctors create spectacular events or seek out scandalous information on opponents while simultaneously working on other goals. For those who follow Lipset in believing that a government is legitimate if its people believe it to be so, then studies of “magic” help to explain why people within a given political system might ignore inequities in their society which are glaringly obvious to outside observers. Freudenberg and Allario state that mass distraction can help to make the whole issue of legitimation disappear from sight altogether. This makes it an extremely useful tool for governments in countries like China and North Korea which are under pressure to democratize, or like the United States when it engages in an activity illegal under international law.

China and the Olympics

The People's Republic of China's (PRC) Olympic participation and performance was long ago politicized, not only because of the PRC being excluded from the international system for much of the Cold War but as a result of China's even earlier reputation as the “sick man of Asia” in the late imperial and Republican period.Footnote ¹⁸ It is significant that Mao Zedong's first published paper was on the part sports education plays in building national strength.Footnote ¹⁹ In China, propaganda officials value sport as an “important means of engaging in mass political thought work, particularly towards youth.”Footnote ²⁰ Since the crisis of 1989, the CCP has singled out Chinese youth as one of the main target groups for political thought work.Footnote ²¹ Sport is an important way of building patriotism, which since 1989 has been one of the main themes of CCP propaganda.

The PRC first participated in an Olympic Games in Los Angeles in 1984. In 1993 Beijing's application to host the 2000 Olympics was turned down, in part because of international criticism of the Chinese government's actions to crush the pro-democracy movement in 1989. The bid was headed by Chen Xitong 陈希同, widely reviled for his role in the crackdown on the 1989 student protest movement. For this and other reasons it was a public relations disaster, vividly demonstrating the extent of China's post-1989 international image problem. Yet in China the popular reaction to the failed bid added fuel to government efforts to unify the country through promoting nationalism. For the CCP government, and indeed for many Chinese citizens, hosting the Olympics was always more about international and domestic image and prestige than it was about sport. Success in Olympic sport is, however, commonly regarded as a mark of a nation's power and China's Olympic sporting achievements have always been used to build nationalism. In 2001 Project 119 was launched by the State General Administration of Sport, which identified 119 gold medals (later expanded to 122) on which China focused its energies on winning in 2008.Footnote ²² In the end China obtained the highest number of gold medals of any country at the Beijing Olympics, outranking its nearest competitor the United States by 51 to 36, and gathering a total of 100 medals overall. This medal tally was a source of great national pride.

In marked contrast to 1993, and demonstrating just how much CCP propaganda methodology had changed in the intervening years, Beijing's 2008 bid was advised by two leading international PR firms, Weber Shandwick Worldwide of the United States and Britain's Bell Pottinger. The firms even lobbied the International Olympic Committee on Beijing's behalf. In the lead-up to the bid for the 2008 Games, China's well-prepared spin doctors made a point of stating that granting Beijing the Games in 2008 would help to improve China's human rights situation.Footnote ²³ This argument was not, however, widely promoted within China; indeed when I once mentioned it to a class of Chinese undergraduates they laughed in disbelief.

Re-branding China

It is no accident that the person chosen to head the Beijing Organizing Committee of the Olympic Games (BOCOG) from 2005, Liu Peng 刘鹏, was from 1997 to 2002 a deputy director in the Central Propaganda Department.Footnote ²⁴ Liu is also concurrently head of the State General Administration of Sports, which in terms of its place in the party-state system is under the guidance (zhidao 指导)Footnote ²⁵ of the Central Propaganda Department and part of the Chinese propaganda system. China had lost its last Olympic bid because of perceived image problems, so this time, Chinese (and Western) spin doctors worked hard to manage the process all the way through. Hosting the Olympics offered a golden opportunity to re-shape China's national image. BOCOG has its own propaganda bureau, led by officials who concurrently head the propaganda sections of the Beijing Party Committee and the State General Administration of Sports. In 2005 another layer of bureaucracy was added to Olympics propaganda in the form of the Beijing Olympics News Propaganda Work Co-ordinating Group (Beijing xinwen xuanchuan gongzuo xietiao xiaozu 北京新闻宣传工作协调小组, official English title Beijing Olympic News and Communications Co-ordination Group).Footnote ²⁶ The group was headed by Li Dongsheng 李东生, who is currently a deputy director in the Central Propaganda Department in charge of the news media. Equivalent committees were set up at the provincial and local level all over China to co-ordinate all aspects of Olympic propaganda. In a 2007 meeting jointly hosted by the Central Propaganda Department, the Central Office for Spiritual Civilization and BOCOG, it was emphasized that “getting propaganda on the Olympics right will be good for China's international and domestic environment; if Olympics propaganda has a clear direction then China's overall national strength will continually increase and the masses will give us wide support.”Footnote ²⁷

The CCP divides propaganda and thought work into two categories: internal (duinei 对内), targeted at Chinese people, and external (duiwai 对外), targeted at foreigners in China, Overseas Chinese and the outside world in general; as well as four types: political, economic, cultural and social. China's internal and external propaganda activities are frequently different, directed at different audiences and different goals. Beijing Olympics propaganda targeted at the outside world focused on cultural and economic themes. In recent years China has placed increasing emphasis on the role of culture to promote its image.Footnote ²⁸ Promoting a new national image (guojia xingxiang 国家形象) internationally was one of China's key strategic goals in hosting the Olympics.Footnote ²⁹ In 2006 the Central Propaganda Department sub-organization the National Planning Office of Philosophy and Social Science (the main body for social science research funding in China) commissioned a major two-year scholarly research project on how the Olympics might help to improve China's national image.Footnote ³⁰ The new image aimed to allay international fears about China's increasing political, economic and military power, at the same time as projecting awareness of its renewed strength and prosperity. In 2003 Party theorists put forward a theory which matches the new national image: the concept of China's “peaceful rise.”Footnote ³¹ This concept and the debate on the need to improve China's national image have been widely embraced by China's intellectual class, as it closely reflects their own heartfelt anxieties. The collaboration between party-state interests and elite concerns is an example of the CCP's success in recent years in regaining the support of many of those who, only a few years before, were its harshest critics.Footnote ³²

China's new national image has political as well as economic implications, and the government's efforts have been closely co-ordinated with Chinese and foreign firms who hoped to use the Olympics to increase international awareness and acceptance of their products. During the lead-up to August 2008, Chinese Olympic sponsors such as Lenovo put together advertising campaigns which were almost indistinguishable from government political advertising on the Olympics theme, thus reflecting the close relationship between advertising and propaganda in China. International PR companies such as Hill and Knowlton, Ogilvie and Maher, and Saatchi and Saatchi were also eager to help China re-launch what they call “the China brand.”Footnote ³³ The State Council Information Office (in charge of China's foreign propaganda activities) supports the notion of “re-branding China.” However, officials from its sister organization, the Central Propaganda Department, expressed objections to this terminology, as “China is not a brand.”Footnote ³⁴

An important aspect of promoting the so-called “China brand” was to shift international perceptions of China from dated stereotypes such as scenes of the demonstrators on Tiananmen Square in 1989 including pictures of “tank man,”Footnote ³⁵ the individual who stood down a tank in Beijing in 1989, and ubiquitous images of Mao Zedong. The image of “tank man” has been shown repeatedly in the Western media and is constantly referred to in Western-led debate on China as a symbol of both modern China and the battle of the individual against authoritarianism. Yet in China the image is virtually unknown. It was only briefly played on Chinese television in June 1989, shown as an example of the “tolerance” of the Chinese authorities towards the protesters.Footnote ³⁶ Few in China today, whether dissidents or not, would agree that “tank man” and the protests of 1989 are appropriate symbols for China's contemporary international profile. Similarly, China has now spent more years under the policies of “reform and opening up” (1978 to the present) than it did under Mao (1949–76). It is no accident that in 2008 the PRC Ministry of Culture refused to co-operate with the New York Asia Society's exhibition “Art and China's Revolution” which included numerous images of Mao,Footnote ³⁷ or that Olympic commemorative ten yuan bank notes (which normally display Mao's image) featured a picture of the Bird's Nest Olympic Stadium.Footnote ³⁸ Despite Western fascination with the Great Helmsman and his impact on Chinese culture and society, Mao Zedong long ago disappeared from China's foreign propaganda efforts and these days is only selectively used in its domestic propaganda.

Olympics propaganda aimed at Chinese audiences was designed to gain popular consent for the continuance of CCP rule and to build national pride.Footnote ³⁹ Like foreigners, the Chinese people were also being persuaded to “buy in” to the “China brand,” but for different reasons. Domestic Olympic propaganda activities focused on economic, cultural and social themes. Hosting the Olympics was an opportunity to step up the ongoing efforts to educate the Chinese public to embrace the new “brand values” appropriate for this new, New China, such as innovation, industry, civil obedience and national unity. It also served as a chance for the Chinese authorities to showcase the achievements of the government in recent years, while editing out the problems. Although the Olympics feature elite sports, a strong theme of China's domestic Olympics propaganda was inclusiveness and participation. This is in keeping with current government thinking on the need to build a (managed) civil society in China.Footnote ⁴⁰

Reflecting the complexity and reach of the CCP propaganda system, Beijing Olympics propaganda activities began long before any sports stadiums were built and incorporated a lot more than media content. The CCP-led propaganda system includes not only the media but also advertising and all forms of publication; the education, cultural, science, sport, health and technology sectors; the network of propaganda cadres installed in Party committees and branches at all levels of organization in both the state bureaucracy and non-state enterprises; the political department system of the People's Liberation Army; and all mass organizations. Beijing Olympics propaganda activities were a massive, long-term effort, with many strands. The following sections analyse a few key threads of this “campaign of mass distraction” as examples of China's changed social pact.

Beijing Olympic Slogans

Every successful propaganda or PR campaign must have simple, easily understandable catchwords which sum up the underlying message. In the past the CCP galvanized Chinese people with phrases such as “Smash the Four Olds!” or “Surpass Britain in 15 years!” and targeted certain groups for demonizing. In the current era, CCP propaganda slogans are deliberately inclusive of everyone in Chinese society and avoid offending foreign sensibilities. Rather than revolution and radical social transformation, the goal of China's propaganda work is now social unity and cohesion – what the Hu administration calls “harmony” (hexie 和谐) and “harmonious society” (hexie shehui 和谐社会). The slogans of Beijing Olympics domestic propaganda: “Welcome the Olympics, be civilized and follow the new trend” (ying aoyun, jiang wenming, shu xinfeng 迎奥运讲文明树新风) and “I participate, I contribute and I am happy” (wo canyu, wo fengxian, wo kuaile 我参与我奉献我快乐) are hard to oppose. The first slogan refers to efforts to prepare the Chinese people to be good hosts during the Olympics, while the second relates to the government's efforts to guide and encourage the development of civil society in China.

The Beijing Olympics foreign propaganda slogans “One world, one dream” (tong yige shijie, tong yige mengxiang 同一个世界,同一个梦想) and “New Beijing, new Olympics” (xin Beijing, xin Aoyun 新北京新奥运) are also hard to disagree with. The images associated with the first slogan reveal what the ideals of the “same dream” are: world peace and social harmony. In the last few years the theory of “harmonious society” has also been introduced into China's foreign policy as building a “harmonious world.”Footnote ⁴¹ The second slogan reflects China's increasing desire to promote its own views and values internationally. This is a defensive strategy. In the post-Cold War era, China has felt increasingly challenged by successive American administrations' international promotion of “democracy,” through force if necessary. The 1999 conflict in Kosovo – when the United States used the “right to protect” as a justification for intervening in ethnic conflict in Serbia – brought about a major shift in Chinese foreign policy. After 1989 China had adopted a “lie low” strategy to deal with Western criticism, but from 1999 the new foreign policy line was to “use two hands to combat two hands.”Footnote ⁴² This meant that China would be proactive in both political and economic activities in order to combat what were perceived as strong attacks from the West on both political and economic fronts.

It is noticeable that neither China's domestic nor its foreign-targeted Olympic propaganda featured political messages. Most people associate the word “propaganda” with political topics, but non-political propaganda and thought work have always been an important theme in the Chinese system. Examples of this from the Mao years are the numerous “hygiene campaigns” (weisheng yundong 卫生运动) aimed at educating the Chinese population about various healthcare issues. However the fact that politics were downplayed at the Beijing Olympics is in itself political. Many voices inside and outside China sought to use the occasion as a vehicle for political reform, encouraged by China's Olympic bid promises. However the Chinese authorities were extremely strict on anyone, Chinese or non-Chinese, who linked dissent on any theme – including the demolition of housing to make way for Olympic buildings – to the Beijing Olympics. There was surprisingly strong public support in China for this stance, as shown by the response to protests along the international Olympic torch relay and subsequent events. The CCP government explicitly linked support for the Olympics to patriotism, so to oppose or in any way criticize the Olympics was to be unpatriotic or, for foreigners, anti-China.

Olympics Media Strategy

In the crucial two-year lead-up to the Olympics, propaganda officials devised a complex media strategy aimed at both building positive international and national public opinion and deflecting any “anti-China” attacks (the code word for negative reports on China and its government). In August 2006 the News Department of the Central Propaganda Department issued instructions to the Chinese media that for the next two years they should focus their energies on promoting the Beijing Olympics.Footnote ⁴³ They were instructed to report on how the Olympics were improving China's international image, improving relations between the peoples of the world and the Chinese people, and helping to push forward China's economic transformation. All Chinese Olympic reporters had to attend classes on “Olympic news propaganda.” The classes provided background on the Olympics as well as the dos and don'ts of Olympic reporting. Chinese media organizations were forbidden to employ anyone who did not have journalist registration to work on Olympic-related stories, thus ensuring that only politically reliable journalists covered these topics.Footnote ⁴⁴

The Chinese media were given strict instructions on what they should and should not cover. They should not publish negative stories on problems with food and medicine safety, city construction, environmental protection, labour matters and major disasters, other than to use the official reports of the relevant departments, and they should at all times follow the “news management bottom line” (xinwen guanli dixian 新闻管理底线), that is, censorship, and check the origins of articles and the accuracy of stories.Footnote ⁴⁵ Propaganda officials urged Chinese journalists to focus on positive news when reporting the Olympics.Footnote ⁴⁶ This instruction was faithfully obeyed by the Chinese media. “Focus on positive propaganda” has been a phrase repeated like a mantra by successive leaders in propaganda work since 1989. Positive propaganda is regarded as an essential tool for maintaining Chinese citizens' confidence in their political and economic system. Negative news is only allowed to be reported very selectively, as it risks undermining public faith in the system. Journalists were urged to create emotionally moving stories about Olympic preparations in order to “draw in, touch and move people.”Footnote ⁴⁷

Olympic restrictions meant that through much of 2008 the Chinese media were banned from reporting on a simmering scandal about adulterated infant formula produced by one of China's major milk companies, San Lu, 43 per cent of which is owned by the New Zealand company Fonterra.Footnote ⁴⁸ The scandal was only allowed to be publicized when the New Zealand government put pressure on Beijing to withdraw the product and allow the media to discuss what had happened.Footnote ⁴⁹ Some 300,000 infants suffered kidney damage from the formula and at least six died. It appears that in this case commercial as well as political interests profited from the propaganda ban on bad news during the Olympics.

Any sensitive topics directly related to the Olympics needed the approval of BOCOG's Propaganda Department before being published. Stories relating to foreign tourists at the Olympics were particularly delicate. Chinese journalists were told that if there were any incidents involving foreign tourists they could only report the official line, and if there was no official line, they were not to report anything.Footnote ⁵⁰ On 10 August 2008, an American tourist in Beijing, the father-in-law of one of the US Olympic coaches, was stabbed to death by a Chinese attacker. BOCOG officials confiscated the notebooks and tapes of Chinese reporters who covered a press conference where the American team talked about the killing. However, online reports were allowed greater freedom to cover such sensitive stories than the print media.Footnote ⁵¹ This is because of the different audiences in the print and online media, and the porous nature of the internet, which meant that foreign reports on the same story were available to Chinese “netizens.”

While officials had the means to control the Chinese media, it was much harder to influence what the foreign media were saying about China during the lead-up to the Olympics. As the opening ceremony drew closer, international and domestic pressure increased on Beijing to live up to its earlier promises linking hosting the Olympics and improving human rights. At a 2007 meeting to discuss Olympics propaganda, officials complained that “anti-China forces” (foreigners) were using the Olympics to attack China's “national image,” as were Tibetan, Xinjiang and Taiwan independence groups, falun gong (法轮功), and democracy activists.Footnote ⁵² The Chinese media were instructed to contradict foreign negative reports on China's human rights situation and religious policies by promoting “the achievements of the construction of a harmonious society.”Footnote ⁵³ They were told they should write about the important role of the Olympics in China's economic reforms and how the whole nation was preparing for the Olympics. They should also continually note the superiority of the socialist system in organizing important events. This theme was heard repeatedly as the Games drew near, and gained international attention when Zhang Yimou 张艺谋, artistic director of the opening and closing ceremonies, mentioned it as an explanation for the success of the opening ceremony.Footnote ⁵⁴ Such rhetoric is a literal example of what I have called elsewhere “marketing dictatorship”Footnote ⁵⁵ in China, the ongoing efforts to persuade the Chinese population to accept the current political system.

Ironically, the barrage of negative foreign reporting on China's hosting of the Olympics – which like the government's own campaign intensified as the countdown to the opening ceremony progressed – ultimately turned out to be in Beijing's favour. Western reporting on politically timed protests in Tibetan areas in March 2008, and on the protests that dogged the international route of the Olympic torch relay from March to May 2008, were perceived by many Chinese, in China and abroad, to be prejudiced and hostile. Their response was an outpouring of nationalistic support for both China and the Beijing Olympics using online forums, public rallies outside China and even a few within China.Footnote ⁵⁶ It was a resounding confirmation that the CCP's post-1989 strategy of indoctrinating Chinese youth with pro-PRC nationalism had worked and that hosting the Olympics could help to unite the Chinese people around their government.Footnote ⁵⁷

In principle, Beijing Olympics organizers tried to adopt a positive attitude towards the massive influx of foreign journalists who came to report on China and the Olympics. In the crucial period of August 2008 more than 20,000 foreign journalists were registered to report in China, compared to the usual 600–700. The strategy advocated for managing these large numbers reflected traditional CCP political hospitality techniques directed at foreigners.Footnote ⁵⁸ Beijing Olympics media managers were instructed to “be good at looking after the media, be good at using the media. Utilize all-encompassing and detailed hospitality work on the media as a means to get the media to represent our views, ‘borrow a boat to go out on the seas,’ and report objectively on China and the Olympics. Pay special attention to cultural matters, small details, and courtesy; be warm and people-focused.”Footnote ⁵⁹

However in practice, during the Olympics many foreign journalists reported feeling suffocated by the excessive hospitality from volunteers who even followed them into toilets, and they were frustrated by continual stonewalling from Beijing Olympics press officials when raising any “political” questions.Footnote ⁶⁰ In 2007 BOCOG had announced that foreign journalists would be able to report unrestricted in China during the year leading up to the Olympics. Many foreign journalists found that this policy was interpreted very differently on the ground. When it came to politically sensitive topics they were just as constrained as usual. A further concession of interest to the foreign media contingent was the announcement that during the Olympic period restrictions would be lifted on many English-language websites which are normally blocked in China, such as that of Amnesty International.Footnote ⁶¹ However censorship of sensitive Chinese-language websites continued unabated.Footnote ⁶²

Olympic Volunteers

In the Mao years activism and volunteering formed an essential role in the construction of new China, helping to build both new social values and a new infrastructure in a relatively short space of time. In the 1950s and 1960s thousands of Chinese volunteers worked on projects such as the Miyun Reservoir or joined in bringing in autumn harvests. Participation in such activities reflected Mao's ideas on education: that people could, and should, learn through labour. The backlash against the extremes of the Mao years meant that these practices fell out of favour in the 1980s and 1990s, though they continued on a much smaller scale. However since 2005, the CCP is again advocating and overseeing large-scale volunteering projects. This is in response to the ever-increasing rise in the numbers of non-governmental organizations in China and the government's awareness that such groups could become agents for political change, as they have been in other authoritarian societies.

There were 1.47 million volunteers (zhiyuanzhe 志愿者) involved in the Beijing Olympics, 400,000 in Beijing alone. Volunteers performed at the Olympic opening and closing ceremonies, did translation work, acted as “gofors” during Olympic events, and even provided security in the case of People's Armed Police (wujing 武警) students who were selected to accompany the worldwide Olympic torch relay.

Volunteering is an important part of the Olympic tradition. In the 2000 Sydney Olympics, as in previous Games, volunteers came from a wide range of ages and social groups. However at the Beijing Olympics, volunteers were primarily selected from university students, mostly those based in Beijing.Footnote ⁶³ This reflected the post-1989 emphasis on the political education of youth, particularly educated youth. Despite the restricted pool of applicants, more than two million people applied to be Beijing Olympics volunteers. They had to undergo a rigorous series of theoretical and physical examinations before being chosen.Footnote ⁶⁴ All volunteers had to undergo extensive training in Olympic etiquette and protocol. The courses emphasized patriotism and provided participants with model answers on issues such as the status of Taiwan.Footnote ⁶⁵

Volunteering is under the “guidance” of the Central Propaganda Department and the network of controls and checks within the propaganda system. Volunteer groups (non-governmental and government-directed) are considered to be mass organizations (qunzhong tuanti 群众团体). The recent emphasis on volunteering is a response to the lessons learned from the series of “colour revolutions” in a number of former communist states in the early 2000s. These deeply worried the CCP leadership and have been studied as an anti-model for what China should avoid if it wants to maintain political stability.Footnote ⁶⁶ Since 2005 the party-state has been working on building up civil society in China, albeit one which is managed by the Party rather than one which will undermine it.Footnote ⁶⁷ This is why Beijing Olympic propaganda emphasizes “participation,” and state-managed volunteerism has expanded at the same time as controls have been increased on genuine non-governmental organizations.

Civilizing Beijing

Although they couldn't all be Olympics volunteers, from February 2006 ordinary Chinese people were still drawn into preparations for the Olympics through a massive public etiquette movement, aimed at “civilizing” Beijing.Footnote ⁶⁸ This campaign formed part of the “welcoming the Beijing Olympics activities.” It was also part of a larger and even more ambitious effort: the “construction of spiritual civilization” (jingshen wenming jianshe 精神文明建设) in China.Footnote ⁶⁹ The spiritual civilization project aims to build a new, modern set of values for Chinese society to match China's modern “material civilization” – economic development and infrastructure.Footnote ⁷⁰ Spiritual civilization is a soft form of social control, backed up by the Chinese legal and policing system.Footnote ⁷¹ It is a form of mass education which replaces the political indoctrination of the Mao era with social education.

Spiritual civilization activities are administered by the Office of Spiritual Civilization (Jingshen wenming bangongshi 精神文明办公室), a sub-agency of the Central Propaganda Department. Discussion on the need for “spiritual civilization work” (a code for the CCP continuing to engage in ideological education and persuasion) began in the early 1980s as China embarked on its new economic path and rejected the political excesses of the Mao years. In 1996, the then CCP General Secretary Jiang Zemin signalled the resumption of the importance of mass ideological education in China with the launch of the first nationwide spiritual civilization construction movement.

The civilize Beijing campaign targeted indiscretions such as spitting in public, queue-jumping and littering, and also promoted public-spirited values such as helping others in difficulty. It wasn't only directed at Beijing residents, though hosting the Beijing Olympics was the focus. The movement was given saturation coverage in a series of public advertisements on central and local television. The advertisements educated Chinese people on topics such as how to be a “good sport” by cheering for others' teams, how to clap, appropriate chants at Olympic sporting events, what to do with their rubbish in public places and how to look after lost foreigners.

Another aspect of the campaign utilized Olympic English classes to promote the desired values of the movement. Taxi drivers, police, Olympic volunteers and other relevant groups had to enrol in Olympic English, which combined practical vocabulary for managing everyday interactions with foreign tourists with set phrases on what to say if an Olympic visitor asked them a tricky political question. According to one Beijing taxi driver, if this happened, his brief was to stick to “the five goods”: “the Olympics are good, the Communist Party is good, the government is good and the taxi company is good.”Footnote ⁷² Such attention to detail reflected the CCP's long tradition of carefully managing a foreign presence in China and maintaining a certain distance between foreigners and Chinese. Local residents' associations (juweihui 居委会), the lowest rung of the Chinese party-state, also ran Olympic English classes in the lead-up to the Games. The classes weren't confined to the able-bodied who might possibly be out on the streets and encounter a foreigner during the Olympics: special sessions were also held for the blind, physically disabled and mentally handicapped.Footnote ⁷³ The classes were a means to engage in further spiritual civilization education and involve as great a number of Chinese people as possible in the Olympics.

As a result of these strenuous efforts to “civilize Beijing,” during the middle two weeks of August 2008, Beijing and other Olympic venues were effectively turned into massive Potemkin villages. The popular response to tightened official control was generally resigned and good-humoured.Footnote ⁷⁴ The authorities had long ago signalled that any protests relating to the Olympics would be quickly quashed. Protesters who persisted in raising the issue of inadequate compensation for housing demolished as part of the Olympic preparations were sentenced to a year's re-education through labour.Footnote ⁷⁵ Jokes circulated through mass text messaging and popular blogs told of Beijing residents taking a special drug so they could go to sleep and wake up when the Olympics were over and of other ways in which they tried to “bi yun.” This was a pun on two words 避孕/避运 with the same sound in Chinese but different meanings: the first meaning to “to use contraception” and the other to “avoid the Olympics.”Footnote ⁷⁶

During the two-year countdown to the Olympics local spiritual civilization offices organized and/or supervised a multitude of local-level Olympics-related events, and Olympic propaganda was the main theme of public bulletin boards and other local propaganda formats.Footnote ⁷⁷ One of the most visible ways in which the Olympics was promoted at the grassroots level was through countdown clocks which recorded the number of days, minutes and seconds till the opening of the Games. The first Olympic countdown clock – which was donated by watchmakers Omega – was installed in Tiananmen Square on 22 September 2004. Like so many aspects of the Olympics, the clock intertwined political and commercial interests. From 2004 to 2008 Olympic countdown clocks were ubiquitous throughout China, but especially in Beijing. Counting down to the Olympic opening ceremony became an officially encouraged national pastime, and served as a useful diversion from other less positive social and economic issues.

The Opening and Closing Ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics

The 8 August opening ceremony was the climax of years of building excitement. The two-hour ceremony surpassed all expectations, combining stupendous special effects with 14,000 performers. Many commentators had predicted that it would be Beijing's “coming out party,” the one event which signalled China's re-launched national image. But the word “party” has connotations of spontaneity and fun, the very opposite of Beijing's awe-inspiring, highly scripted event. In fact the 2008 Beijing Olympics opening ceremony was very like a product launch, on a scale that no company could ever hope to replicate. New, New China emerged to an international television audience estimated to have been the largest of all time. Approximately two billion viewers worldwide watched the 8 August ceremony.Footnote ⁷⁸

In a 1998 speech in Beijing at the China International Brand Strategy Conference, Kevin Roberts, CEO of Saatchi and Saatchi, suggested that the brand values of “new” China should be “eternity, wisdom, mystery, harmony, invention, energy, high intelligence, high craft, industriousness, pragmatism.” He went on to say:

Examined ten years later, Roberts' advice reads like a detailed description of the programme for Beijing's 8 p.m., 8 August 2008 Olympics opening ceremony. Even the timing was chosen to reflect traditional Chinese ideas on numerology, concepts which, only a few years before, were denounced as feudal and superstitious.Footnote ⁸⁰

The opening ceremony closely reflected recent readjustments in China's national narrative.Footnote ⁸¹ The central themes were the richness and the mystique of China's historical culture, and the strength of its current economic development. The first part of the ceremony was a stylized chronology of Chinese history. In this narrative the Mao era was virtually elided, with only a few oblique references, such as the faux Mao suits worn by one set of performers, and a blank (electronic) scroll which was unfurled and gradually filled in throughout the performance. This referred to a famous Mao quotation that the Chinese people were like a blank sheet of paper: “On a blank sheet of paper free from any mark, the freshest and most beautiful characters can be written, the freshest and most beautiful pictures can be painted.”Footnote ⁸² Throughout the opening ceremony the “blank screen” of China was painted into a landscape picture by the steps of dancers, then coloured in by the tracking of Olympic athletes across the LCD screen. The ceremony also appeared to hint at another famous dictum, Deng Xiaoping's advice to Chinese people on how to deal with the pain of earlier eras: “Put the past behind you and look to the future.”Footnote ⁸³

The ceremony highlighted the power of the masses, which reflects yet another Mao adage: “The people have strength.”Footnote ⁸⁴ Individuals only featured in the ceremony when they were supported by the masses. This was particularly emphasized when a single female dancer in Tang dynasty costume was borne aloft around the stadium on a platform lifted by thousands of male supporters. In a tragic twist, only days before the opening ceremony the original dancer who was to perform this piece fell in rehearsals and became a paraplegic. The Chinese media were initially forbidden from reporting this story, along with other Olympics-related controversies such as having another key performer mime her performance because it was believed that the singer with the better voice was less photogenic.Footnote ⁸⁵

In accordance with Olympic tradition, the second half of the ceremony consisted of the athletes from the various countries filing into the stadium. This part was enlivened by the dancing and smiling of hundreds of identically dressed and styled young Chinese women, who lined the route as the athletes walked in, then formed a guard of honour enclosing them into an area at the centre of the stadium. The young women's presence (and their discreet security role) made the ceremony seem even more like a product launch than a sporting event. Chinese companies frequently use bevies of identically clad beauties as a decorative feature in PR functions. The young women danced and smiled for hours. Like all Olympic performers they would have had to rehearse for up to a year to perform their role in the opening ceremony, received no pay and had only an Olympic certificate to thank them for their effort.Footnote ⁸⁶ The event's artistic director, Zhang Yimou, praised all the opening ceremony performers and what they had achieved, saying that “uniformity brings beauty” and to follow orders “is the Chinese spirit” which he said, “many foreigners cannot achieve.”Footnote ⁸⁷ Some 9,000 of the 14,000 performers were soldiers in the People's Liberation Army.Footnote ⁸⁸ PLA General Political Department Propaganda Department deputy head Zhang Jigang 张继刚 was the executive director of the Olympics opening ceremony.Footnote ⁸⁹

The programme for the opening ceremony was so sensitive that it had to be vetted and approved by the most senior leaders of the CCP, the Standing Committee of the Politburo. According to Zhang Yimou “No other artistic activity has had this many layers, and such a high level review.”Footnote ⁹⁰ During the closing ceremony the former General Secretary of the CCP, Jiang Zemin, appeared second after the current General Secretary Hu Jintao 胡锦涛, an indication of Jiang's continued prominence in the senior leadership. The closing ceremony also featured Jiang's favourite singer Song Zuying 宋祖英 in a duet with Plácido Domingo. Both these moves were an attempt to appease the Shanghai clique within the senior leadership. I was able to watch the American broadcast of the opening ceremony and the New Zealand broadcast of the closing ceremony as well as the Chinese broadcast of both. Non-Chinese coverage focused on the performers and the sports people; however the Chinese coverage frequently switched from scenes of the performers to show the Chinese leadership impassively viewing the spectacle from their red and gold throne-like seats. It was a subliminal reminder to the Chinese people of the continued importance of the role of the CCP in overseeing this new, New China, a China which promises prosperity and opportunities for all who work hard in the Chinese equivalent of the American dream.

The Olympics closing ceremony had considerably less “hoopla” than the opening. The propaganda messages were more muted and entertainment appeared to be the main goal. Following the trend set by the opening ceremony, the closing ceremony fused the traditional with visions of the future. The highlight of the show was a “memory tower,” a futuristic pagoda reminiscent of the Integral in Zamyatin's dystopian novel We,Footnote ⁹¹ which seethed with men in silver suits. It was an echo of another stereotypical image from the Mao era which has now been summarily renouncedFootnote ⁹²: that of the Chinese people as hundreds of thousands of “little blue ants.”Footnote ⁹³ The men in silver suits climbing and performing gravity-defying acrobatics over the tower referred to China's aspirations to send an astronaut to the moon by 2020. Towards the end of the closing ceremony the same band of female erhu 二胡 players who had featured in China's 2008 Olympics promo at the 2004 Athens Olympics closing ceremony reappeared. After the Athens performance Zhang Yimou was pilloried for approving the musicians' skimpy outfits and risqué dancing.Footnote ⁹⁴ This time the women were discreetly clothed in sports outfits and gently swayed rather than the “cancan” they performed previously. Beijing's Olympic ceremonies were notable for their absence of sex and humour.

Many Chinese families gathered together to have dinner and watch the opening ceremony in the same way that in recent years they have celebrated Chinese New Year by watching the televised New Year extravaganza. “Live sites” for showing the opening ceremony on big screens were also set up around Beijing, and 21,000 gathered to watch it at the Temple of Heaven site.Footnote ⁹⁵ The Olympic opening ceremony had record television audiences in China, quite possibly the largest audience ever.Footnote ⁹⁶ All over China, the Olympic broadcasts had extremely tight security.Footnote ⁹⁷ The fear was that some dissident group might attempt to take over the broadcasts, as the outlawed spiritual group falun gong had done on several occasions in recent years.

Exactly how many people in China were watching the Olympics coverage was a political matter, as well as being commercially sensitive. Chinese journalists were instructed to use CCTV's figures only. The higher the ratings, the more CCTV can charge for their advertising in future. CCTV's own figures on the audience for the opening ceremony were considerably higher than those estimated by foreign firms. Figures for viewer turnout ranged from 39.5 per cent from AGB Nielsen Media Research to 68.8 per cent from CSM Media Research, a partnership between London-based TNS Group and CCTV-affiliated CTR Market Research.Footnote ⁹⁸ According to AGB Nielsen, Chinese viewing levels during the actual sporting events were high; they were up 45 per cent on usual television viewing on day three of the Olympics alone.Footnote ⁹⁹