The New Yorker Radio Hour - The Olympic Games Return to China, in a Changed World

Episode Date: January 21, 2022

Much has changed since China last hosted the Olympics, during the 2008 Summer Games. Those Games were widely seen as greatly improving China’s international reputation. But the 2022 Winter Games have put a spotlight instead on its human-rights abuses, most notably the genocide taking place against Uyghurs and Kazakhs. Peter Hessler, for many years The New Yorker’s China correspondent, asks David Remnick, “When an athlete says something about the internment camps in Xinjiang, and the oppression of Muslim people in China, what is the Chinese response going to be? The I.O.C. has really left them out there.” The sports reporter Louisa Thomas notes that these Games may garner little American support or attention, with few big-name American athletes for NBC to promote. “I even have a lot of friends who have no idea there’s about to be an Olympics,” Thomas says. Plus, at the Beijing pizzeria Pie Squared, the owner, Asher Gillespie, glumly assesses the Olympics boom that isn’t coming. With ticket sales halted and the events in a bubble, he says, “We're going to be watching from TV just like everybody else.”  New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. The Lunar New Year is on February 1st. And three days later, the Winter Olympics kick off in Beijing. And with China maintaining strict COVID protocols, ticket sales have been halted. And the mood in the capital there is tense. Asher Gillespie has lived in Beijing for many years, and he owns a pizzeria there. Its English name is Pie Square. Fang Pai Pizza. I grew up in Michigan, so it's a Detroit-style pizza place in Beijing. Are you all going to eat Hawaii or do you want to do half a half a half a week?

You order at the counter, and then you go sit down. I've got six taps of different beers there. In 2000, Gillespie went to China to study as an undergraduate for a year. And actually in that time, that's when they announced that Beijing had gotten the rights to the 2008 Olympics, the summer Olympics. So that was one of the reasons that China seemed so exciting at the time. You could tell a boom was kind of coming. And I just figured there'd be a lot of job opportunities coming. In the era that I was here, so 2000 onwards, there was slowly a growing restaurant community.

so you could find barbecued. Eventually some Mexican places came into town. You could find kind of each and every type of food. And actually that kind of went all the way through the 2008 Olympics. And you got it by by just kind of having that style of food. And then kind of during and after the Olympics, people came in over the top and then you had to actually be good at doing that food.

2008 drummers. to coincide with the 2008 Olympic year. The 2008 games were a huge moment for China, a kind of debut on the modern world stage as not only an economic powerhouse, but a cultural force as well. And they had that amazing opening ceremony, and we were just all kind of blown away.

And then I remember getting phone calls for my parents and some friends just being like, that was incredible. So there was a real excitement for it. You know, it was the summer, it's hot. It was, I don't know, I think people were working, but it just seemed like two weeks of just going around, going to every venue, trying to check out this.

Water polo, volleyball. We are ready. Let's get this gold medal match underway. Beach volleyball, we went to some track and field. We did a baseball game. I don't know. I just felt like there was no shortage of events to go to it. And people just kind of handing tickets.

Oh, we went to a soccer game. it really, really was a good time. You know, when it was announced that Beijing got the 2022 Winter Olympics, we're all kind of excited and planning for how to maximize opportunities to do good business and have a good time during those games. You know, this is the one. It's right in Beijing. It'll be live when we're open, right?

we have a lot of local Chinese coming into the restaurant, but we also have people from all over the world in our restaurant. And so it would have been fun throwing on the games, having some friendly chit-chat over a couple beers while any event is going on because everybody's going to root for their country to win, but it doesn't really matter at the end. It's all just a good time, and it's competition. So we would have loved it.

Now, that, of course, was before way, after wave of COVID started hitting the world. We were all wondering for these last couple months, our tickets are going to be on sale? Are we going to be able to go? If we go, are we going to have to be in the bubble? Are we going to have to quarantine before we go in the bubble? Are we going to have to quarantine when we go out of the bubble?

So in these things are kind of changing as, you know, even as we speak. You know, we're going to be watching from TV just like everybody else is. Asher Gillespie at Pye Squared. in Beijing. The very real complications facing the Winter Olympics in Beijing go well beyond COVID. The games have put a gigantic spotlight on China's human rights abuses, most critically, the genocide taking place against the U.S. government and some other nations are boycotting the games in a limited way, leaving diplomats and officials at home, though their athletes are competing. I'm joined now by Louisa Thomas, a staff writer who covers sports for

from football to gymnastics to chess, and Peter Hessler, who's been our China correspondent for many years. Now, Peter, I want to start off with you. Normally, you would be in Beijing for these Olympics, but you're not. How come? Well, I taught in China for two years, 2019, until last July. And then my teaching contract was not renewed. No explanation was ever given. No official explanation was given for that.

but it seems obvious that it was for political reasons. And, you know, this has been a period when we've had the exposure of many American journalists. There's very few foreign reporters living in China right now. I mean, there's very few foreigners in general. There's probably never been a period that has had so few foreign correspondence, foreign observers on the ground in China. Certainly it's not the first time that we've seen an authoritarian government in China or many other governments. and foreign correspondents are allowed to stay, and certainly to cover something a spectacle like an Olympic Games.

Why would they clear out Beijing, much less where you were living in Chengdu? I mean, there's a number of reasons, but I mean, really what kicked it off in a lot of ways was the Trump administration. So the Trump administration expelled Chinese journalists in early 2020, and China immediately countered by expelling most of the American journalists. this. And so part of it was a tit for tat. And then the other element that has really played into this, of course, is the pandemic. They're following a zero tolerance strategy toward COVID, you know, which has been broadly supported by the people and probably, you know, has saved, you know, a couple million lives in China. So that's also part of the dynamic.

Peter, you covered the 2008 games in Beijing. How do you expect China's self-presentation to differ in 2008 and now? Yeah, I mean, it's a totally different moment. 2008, they were looking out. I mean, they won that bid in 2001. I was there for that as well. And at that point, I mean, China wanted to prove to the world that it was no longer a poor country, that it had arrived. And so 2008 was this moment where they were telling the world, you know, we are now, you know, a world power, but also a prosperous country with active and engaged citizens. And I think this year is completely different. I mean, I mean, in that year, there was a sense that China needed the Olympics. You know, we need this to show the world something. I think that this year, really, the Olympic International Olympic

Committee needed China. Because when the bids for the Olympic Games were made in 2013 and the decision was made in 2015, everybody pulled out, all the European countries pulled out. And, you know, Oslo was the favorite. They decided that they didn't have the support to do it. And it ended up just being Kazakhstan, the city of Almaty, and China. And so the IOC decided on China, basically, because they knew they could pull it off. Focus now is going to be much more domestic. They're going to be playing this to their own citizens, I think, rather than the outside world.

Louisa, over time, Olympic Games leave behind a kind of political historical, resonance, whether it was in Berlin in the 30s, Mexico City in the late 60s, certainly the games in Beijing, in Moscow, in the 80s. What do you think would be a success for Beijing this time around, and what would be the opposite? What would be a failure in their eyes? I think, you know, Peters refer to these games in some ways as a major domestic event. We're used to the Olympics as being as kind of huge international, but you know, from an American's perspective, largely American event in some ways in which the world comes together. But obviously, Americans are glued to American athletes and American success,

and the NBC broadcast often revolves around that. I think China will be happy to tell the story of how they pulled it off when no one else could, as Peter indicated. And I think that outside of China, it's going to be a smaller game than we're. used to in some ways. The Winter Olympics is usually smaller than the Summer Olympics. We're coming right on the heels of the Tokyo Olympics, which were already the least watched games in history. Ratings were down 42% on NBC over Rio four years before. And there aren't a lot of huge names. You know, 2008 had Michael Phelps, had Usain Bolt. Now we have Michaela Schifrin, but, you know, the major figure skaters are these young world.

Russians that are not a lot of Americans have heard of. And there aren't a kind of, there aren't the same kind of, you know, names in bright lights. The NBC is promoting in quite the same way. So I think in some ways, this is a games that is perhaps more than any others, like sort of flying under the radar for American audiences. And it will be a success, I think, if people know about it in some ways. Because I even have a lot of friends who actually have no idea that there's about to be an Olympics, which is extraordinary. Peter, what are the COVID restrictions? What are the COVID precautions like in Beijing, as you understand them? If you go to China now, which is hard to do, you have a long quarantine, usually three weeks or more. So they're not doing that

for the commentators, for the athletes, but as part of that, they will have no contact with Beijing citizens. So, you know, everybody going to the Olympics, all the people covering in the athletes are in a bubble. I mean, in 2008, I mean, my favorite moment of those games was when I was at a wrestling match and was just walking through the stands. I actually didn't go as a journalist. I just bought tickets and went to the events. And I was walking through the stands and I overheard some people talking and they said, oh, you know, the father of that guy who's wrestling, he's sitting up there. And I went up there and sure not there was this old guy who was, you know, straight out of the countryside, you know, watching his kid wrestle in the Olympics. And I watched him through that entire day.

You had this kind of contact. That's not going to be there this time. You can, you know, the commentators are not going to be on the street in Beijing talking to people. They're not going to be in the stands talking to people. It's unclear if they're even going to be fans. I mean, earlier they said they were going to have fans and they're going to be allowed to clap, but they couldn't shout. They were already saying that they're going to reduce the spectators, and they may decide to have none at all like Tokyo. It's amazing what gets leached out of a sporting event when there are no fans, whether it was the NBA playoffs last year or the Tokyo games.

Just the absence of that energy is just so striking, isn't it, Lisa? Absolutely. And I think it's particularly true for the Olympics because, I mean, part of the Olympics isn't just to figure out who is the best, you know, Bob's letter in the world. It's to create these connections between these sudden heroes in our lives. And part of what the Olympics magic is is that connection they build out of almost nothing with the crowd. You know, it's so spontaneous. and it's so pure in some way. And for that to be gone, we know it's a little sad.

These athletes who have been training since their children, year after year after year, day after day in a swimming pool, hours and hours, and then the zenith of their career, which is just going to take a minute or two or maybe 15 minutes if it's a long race, it's played out in absolute quiet. It was so strange to see that in Tokyo. Simone Biles was obviously one of the big stories of Tokyo,

and, you know, her parents had come to every single one of her meets in her career, in her life. She always look up at them and know they were there. And suddenly she looks up, they're not there, you know, and just obviously that happens. That happens in people's lives, you know, but it happened for this particular reason. And that's true of every single athlete. Part of it is the pride of representing their country and the pride they feel when they see their families and their friends. And that's not there.

They really have to figure out how to do it. it for themselves. Recently, the Biden administration, as well as Canada, Australia, and I think the UK, all announced that they would have a so-called diplomatic boycott of the Olympics, which meant that their diplomats and government officials would not come to Beijing and sit in the stands. The Biden administration will not send any diplomatic or official representation to the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics and Paralympic Games, given the PR scene's ongoing genocide and crimes against humanity in Jinjiang and other human rights abuses. The athletes on team USA have our full support. We will be behind them 100% as we cheer them on from home. We will not

be contributing to the fanfare of the games. Have they indicated to the Chinese care at all, Peter? Yeah. No, they, you know, this kind of thing bothers them and they will retaliate. You know, in Los Angeles, 28, something will happen. I guarantee you, right? there'll be, and look at the countries that didn't participate in this, France, right? France is 2024. They said that, you know, we're going. There's a reason for that.

The Chinese will retaliate. You know, when the Nobel Prize was given, you know, Norway got hit. When Australia called for an investigation into the origins of, you know, the coronavirus, you know, Australian beef gets hit, right? So there will be retaliation for this, definitely. The Chinese care. I mean, the real question, I think, is what happens if athletes make statements, which I think is bound to happen. When an athlete, you know, says something about the internment camps in Xinjiang and the oppression of Muslim people in China, what is the Chinese response going to be?

Because the IOC has really just left them out there. I mean, the IOC has said nothing about the political events. They've, you know, basically just washed their hands of it. And really, so it's up to the athletes. And there's not going to be any local dissidents. And so how does the Chinese government respond to? That's really a big question. And a lot of people that I've talked to are very concerned about this.

Now, given what you're saying, Peter, it seems the responsibility on NBC, the network carrying the Olympics, it's even more intense than ever. Louisa, how does NBC go about playing this? On the one hand, they have a news division. And on the other hand, NBC, as it were, is in business with you. China, and so is the IOC. So how do they handle this and how have they handled it in the past? It's not as it were. They are in business with the IOC. They are actually partners with the IOC. And I imagine that there will be some pretty strong, you know, division between the news division and the broadcast. I mean, you might hear some reference during the opening ceremonies to the

diplomatic boycott, but I doubt it. You know, the question will be if athletes are, you know, the are asked at any point about interments or any of the other questions they could be asked. And if they answer in a certain way, how will NBC report that, if at all, will we see it, will we know it? You know, that remains to be seen. And the IOC was asked about this, actually. They were saying, what if an athlete protest? And they said, well, that's a hypothetical. I mean, that was the word they used. I find it strange that the United States in the 80s refused to come to Moscow and the pretext and the reason for that policy was Afghanistan. At this moment, the Chinese government is doing what it's doing with the Uyghurs, which is an abomination, and yet our protests is much milder. What is the rationale for that?

I mean, I think that there is, the Biden administration has said that they don't want to take away the athlete's chance to, you know, you mentioned before, these athletes have trained their whole lives. I think a lot of the athletes who missed out in 1980 were devastated. You know, they've been looking forward to this. And there is a sense that you don't want to punish them for something that China is doing and for some fight that China and the United States are having. or the UK or any other country, and so they've taken this kind of much milder route. I think that there is less of a focus, a coherent focus on international affairs than there once was. I think that's safe to say. The Cold War was something that Americans broadly understood as being fully invested in, whereas now, you know, we're a much more fractured society in a lot of ways. And I think that there is not the same sort of sense of social cohesion.

Although, you know, obviously, we were fractured in all sorts of other ways back then, too. So I don't want to make too strong a statement, and I'm speculating a little bit here, but I do think that to a lot of people, what's happening in China feels far away,

whereas what was happening with the Soviet Union maybe felt more pressing to your kind of regular Americans. Well, I think it's also So, yeah, just the politics change and the tools change. I think the boycott has become less palatable. You know, this is also, you know, remember the Chinese, they competed in 1952. They didn't compete again until 1984 because the IOC was recognized in athletes from Taiwan.

You know, the Chinese had, you know, that long period, 30 years where they were not part of the Olympic movement. And, you know, Taiwanese athletes still go. They don't compete under the Taiwanese flag, but it's, you know, the Chinese decided that they wanted to compete. And so I think that the idea of a full boycott, an athletic boycott, is not nearly as, you know, likely now. And I think that after 1980, there was a general sense that the athletes had paid a high price for missing those games. And so I think people, you know, want to find other tools if they want to speak out about what's going on in Xinjiang. on the hopes of ending on a high note and maybe a less political note, what athletic performance are you looking forward to in these games?

Louisa. I'm one of those people who actually like watching people, you know, move around on little sticks. So I am really looking forward to the cross-country. I think Jesse Diggins is going to be on my TV a lot. You are killing me. You know the name. of cross-country skiers.

She's amazing. Okay, I'm with you. I'll be watching. You know, I spent just countless hours of my childhood, not only watching the Olympics, but recording them on VHS, which kids these days will not have heard of, and then re-watching the Olympics. Wow. So I go, I actually, you know, I actually did watch a lot of luge and boss-slide.

Peter, what athletic performance you're looking forward to? I like the skiing, and my daughters enjoy it, you know, because we live in Colorado and they ski. So we're watching skiing and snowboarding. They were very excited by Chloe Kim last time, and I suspect we'll be watching her again. Peter Hessler, Louisa Thomas, thanks so much. Thank you. Thank you. Peter Hessler has lived in and reported from China for many years, and Louisa Thomas covers sports for us.

you can find all their work at New Yorker.com. I'm David Remnick. Thanks for listening to the show this week. See you next time. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Yards,

with additional music by Alexis Quadrato. This episode was produced by Alex Barron, Ave Carrillo, Brita Green, Calalia, David Krasnow, Gofen and Putubuele, Louis Mitchell, Michelle Moses and Stephen Valentino, with help from Alison McAdam, Harrison-McAdam, Harrison Keithline, and Meng Fei-Chen, and guidance from Emily Boutin.

The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.