controversy to unfold.
Last Saturday, Australian swimmer Mack Horton called his Chinese opponent
Sun Yang a drug cheat, in reference to a 2014 doping suspension, shortly
before narrowly beating him for the 400-meter freestyle gold medal. After the
race, a tearful Sun accused Horton of playing mind games: On the
Olympicss competition stage, every athlete deserves to be respected and
there's no need to use these cheap tricks to affect each other.
The reaction from China was similarly swift. Commenters posted a flood of
angry remarks on Hortons social media accounts, and Chinese media
condemned the athlete. Chinas swim team manager invoked a frequently
used phrase for responding to foreign criticism, saying that Horton hurt the
feelings of the Chinese swimmers.
Such reactions to fairly standard trash talk may strike some as thin-skinned.
But to many Chinese people, slights like Hortons can evoke strong
connections to a historic humiliation narrative pushed in schools, museums,
and mediaone in which Westerners look down upon China, insult it, and
conspire to keep it down.
At the same games, several upsets and disqualifications that cost Chinese
athletes gold medals were attributed to Western conspiraciessupposedly
borne out of a hysterical and paranoid fear of China, according to the
Communist Party mouthpiece, Peoples Daily. (These claims were never
substantiated).
The below video, made by a Chinese college student, went viral and captured
the mood at the time. Imperialism will never abandon its intention to destroy
us! it says over chilling music, adding that Chinas torch relay struggle is
just like the long march for [Chinas] rise from a semi-colony up to a modern
independent country.
At the turn of this century, this sentiment was formalized when a cabinetapproved government document called on different ministries and provincial
governments to cooperate for the purpose of winning honor at the 2004
and 2008 Olympics. In 2004, the website of the Beijing Organizing Committee
for the Olympic Games published an article titled From Sick man of East
Asia to Sports Big Power, which invoked a cartoon published in a foreign
newspaper that supposedly mocked Chinas early Olympic failures. This is a
humiliation and satire of the Chinese athletes but also indicates that the
disaster-ridden old China has no status in the world, it read.
In his book Never Forget National Humiliation, Professor Wang Zheng of Seton
Hall University explains how Beijing's extravagant hosting of the 2008
Olympics and its record medal haul (China bested the United States for the
first time ever) played into this narrative:
insecurity.
While comments like Mack Hortons would likely draw anger from any nation
whose athlete was subjected to such insult, this historical insecurity might
explain why grievances so frequently involve slights toward Chinese
competitors. These incidents once again play right into the idea that
Westerners look down on China and will do whatever they can to undermine
its achievements. In a 2008 interview with Asia Societys Orville Schell,
Chinese filmmaker Chen Shi-Zheng, whose work has explored psychological
dynamics between China and the West, put it this way:
We [Chinese] feel sensitive to any kind of slight and often have a very
sharp reaction to perceived unfair treatment or injustices. On an emotional
level we cannot help but associate treatment in the present with past injuries,
defeats, invasions, and occupations by foreigners. There is something almost
in our DNA that triggers autonomic, and sometimes extreme, responses to
foreign criticism or put-downs.