Power games

Chinese policemen stand guard during the opening ceremony for the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games on August 8, 2008. (Photo by China Photos/Getty Images)

To the everyday viewer, the Olympics may seem like nothing more than sporting events – momentous, perhaps, but lacking a deeper purpose. Every two years, however, an entirely different game plays out underneath the athletic competition – a game involving image projection and soft power.

The global attention that comes with the Olympics affords host states a unique public relations opportunity. By carefully exploiting it, governments can show the world a particular image of their countries. But the process often reveals more than governments intend. How a state chooses to telegraph its national pride inevitably reflects deeper truths about its nature. The Olympic Games therefore offer a window into how countries think about themselves and victory. The pageantry can also reveal countries’ shortcomings.

The Paris Olympics, which begin in a few weeks, arrive two years after China hosted its own Games and will thus offer a stark contrast between how democracies and autocracies handle and manipulate such events. As athletes face one another on the field, liberalism will face off against authoritarianism – though the contest may not be as obvious as it was at Lake Placid in 1980.

Examining Paris, Beijing, and other recent Games, and comparing how their organizers used these events to send messages about their countries’ history, progress, and stance on human rights, allows one to unpack some of the differences between autocratic and democratic rule. Both types of governments think hard about their public image. Their use of the Olympics, however, differs dramatically. Autocracies obsess over maintaining the image of a flawless society by diverting attention from their shortcomings while shining a light on their accomplishments. Democracies, by contrast, try less hard to hide their problems – in part because that would be impossible in places with media freedom. They also try to project a positive self-image by actually confronting their problems. And while autocracies usually celebrate the collective, democracies tend to promote the individual.

The autocrats’ playbook

To see how these differences play out, start with the Beijing Olympics. China knows that criticism of its human rights record is one of its primary obstacles in its pursuit of soft power. These criticisms don’t just harm China’s image; they can also affect its economy. When media reports revealed that companies like H&M and Nike were using products made by forced Uyghur labor in Xinjiang, for example, the United States and the European Union both introduced regulations banning the import and export of those goods. Because Beijing is acutely aware of how its public image can affect its prosperity, it uses every opportunity to fabricate and broadcast its own, more positive story about itself – one showing that its people are happy and their rights are respected.

Children of the Malanhua Children’s Choir perform during the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics closing ceremony on February 20, 2022. (Photo by Maja Hitij/Getty Images)

In recent decades, China has had two opportunities to play this game: during the Winter Olympics two years ago, and during the Summer Olympics of 2008. On both occasions, China attempted to hide its problems behind grand performances and convince the world that all Chinese people are satisfied and proud. In 2022, China opened its Winter Games with a rendition of the Olympic anthem performed by the Malanhua Children’s Choir, a group of 44 young children from the remote and mountainous Shaanxi Province. The spectacle was intended to highlight China’s triumph over extreme poverty, which President Xi Jinping claimed in 2021 to have eradicated entirely. As Zhang Yimou, the Chinese filmmaker and director of the opening ceremony, said, “We all know that China has eliminated extreme poverty. Children in mountainous areas are not the same as they used to be.”

China struck a similar note in 2008, when it emphasized its cultural diversity and inclusivity through an opening parade featuring representatives of each of the country’s 56 minority ethnic groups, all wearing traditional clothing. Unfortunately for Beijing, it was later revealed that many of the participants were actually Han Chinese (that is, members of China’s overwhelmingly dominant ethnic majority). The irony of that fact should not be overlooked: Though the Chinese government wanted to show the world that all of China’s ethnicities enjoy happy, free lives, it couldn’t trust actual representatives of those groups to play along with the government’s narrative.

China’s 2008 parade also highlighted an important difference between autocracies and democracies: the former’s emphasis on the collective over the individual. These days, free societies tend to celebrate individuals and their accomplishments, especially those that exemplify liberty and inclusivity. A good example of this trend was the advertising campaign for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics (held in 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic) featuring the U.S. tennis star Naomi Osaka. The ad, designed for a U.S. audience, carried the slogan, “If you don’t fit the expectation, change it.” Such a slogan would never have been used by an autocracy, since such regimes prize conformity and view excellence, progress, and human rights as collective goods for which everyone should thank the government. Such thinking was on display in Tokyo, when China’s gold medalists Bao Shanju and Zhong Tianshi wore Mao Zedong pins at their medal ceremony.

A scene from the opening ceremony of the 2014 Winter Olympic Games in Sochi, Russia on February 7, 2014. (Photo by John Berry/Getty Images)

Of course, autocracies still do pageantry. In fact, they often try to distract attention from their lack of freedom through showmanship. The 2008 Beijing Olympic opening ceremony, praised as “one of the greatest opening ceremonies in Olympic history” on the official Olympic website, involved three years of painstaking work by Zhang, an Oscar-winning director. The goal, as always for autocracies, was to project national greatness through majestic displays of uniformity. Such displays may not fool anyone, but that doesn’t mean the performances are dull. To the contrary, the technologies, design, and artistic showmanship involved can be extraordinary. And while accountability limits what democracies can reasonably spend on these events, autocracies are not bound by the same responsibility to the public. They can invest as much money as they please without worrying about a public backlash to overspending. For example, the 2014 Winter Games in Sochi, Russia, were the most expensive Olympics in history; the construction of the opening ceremony stadium alone cost $600 million.

Let the light in

Even when democracies share the same overarching goals for events like the Olympics – namely, to celebrate their heritage and project national pride – they tend to pursue those goals differently from autocracies. For one thing, they generally feel less need to hide their problems. As a result, the creative teams involved in producing their Games are not pressured to stay within the confines of a one-dimensional, state-sanctioned narrative. The Tokyo Olympics showed what this can look like. The opening ceremonies, coming after the COVID-19 pandemic and the Fukushima nuclear disaster, were imbued with somber reminders of those tragedies – so much so that some audience members said they felt as if they had been tricked into attending a funeral.

Democracies also tend to deal openly with challenges to their public image. This tendency can already be seen in the run-up to this summer’s Paris Games. The organizers promised that “the world’s biggest sports festival, in the world’s most beautiful city” would celebrate France’s culture, art, diversity, and inclusivity. To this end, the Paris Games took up the slogan, “Open games, where everyone can play a role, where the spectator is also an actor.”

Such inclusivity turned out to have limits, and Paris’ homeless population has faced significant displacement in the run-up to the Games. The pre-Olympic “cleanup” of the city has reportedly affected thousands of people: asylum seekers, vulnerable families and children, sex workers, and drug addicts. But rather than try to hide the issue, which has been widely publicized by France’s media, the government assigned its Office for the Defense of Rights to investigate.

Simone Biles is embraced by coach Cecile Landi during the women's team final at the Tokyo Olympic Games on July 27, 2021. (Photo by Ezra Shaw/Getty Images)

Accountability is a key characteristic of democracies, and another important difference between them and autocracies. The airing of failures makes democracies more resilient because their legitimacy does not depend on convincing other countries that they are doing everything right. Democracies therefore rarely try to silence those who challenge the government’s account (at least, not anymore). Case in point: In advance of this summer’s Paris Games, a France-based charity, Surfrider Foundation Europe, sounded the alarm after discovering that, despite promises from French officials and 1.4 billion euros ($1.5 billion) already spent by the city to upgrade its sewage and water treatment facilities, pollution in the Seine – where some Olympic competitions will be held – remains well above safe levels. Rather than cover up the problem, however, France’s publicly funded broadcaster, France 24, publicized Surfrider Foundation Europe’s findings, and Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo and French President Emmanuel Macron both promised to take a dip in the Seine prior to the opening ceremony to prove its cleanliness. It’s hard to imagine a state broadcaster in China or Russia doing the same had such an incident occurred there, and even harder to imagine President Xi or President Vladimir Putin frankly addressing the problem in a similar fashion.

Indeed, such transparency was markedly absent from the Olympics held in Sochi and Beijing. In 2013, Russia received strong criticism from Human Rights Watch for tearing down legally owned properties as it constructed Sochi’s Olympic village. Affected residents received no compensation and the Kremlin dismissed all criticisms as Western propaganda. Beijing took a similarly rigid approach in 2022. In January of that year, one high-ranking Chinese official even threatened Olympic athletes with “certain punishment” should they speak out against the Chinese government or its laws. As experts like the University of Chicago’s John MacAloon have pointed out, such threats reveal fear, not strength. The Chinese state was clearly anxious about the athletes it had fought so hard to host. And no wonder – the greatest threat to autocracies is the power of the individual. In stark contrast to the behavior of China and Russia, France’s messaging leading up to this summer’s Games has resembled Japan’s a few years ago, promoting individual achievement and prioritizing the athletes’ well-being. To this end, Paris will offer its athletes better mental health resources than have been offered at past Games.

Of course, athletes’ ability to do and say what they want is still largely determined by the country they’re representing. The actions (or lack thereof) of participating athletes are therefore as much a reflection of the differences between autocracies and democracies as the messaging of the host. Simone Biles, the United States’ top gymnast, exemplified this in Tokyo when, with support from USA Gymnastics, she withdrew from several events in order to protect her mental health. “There’s more to life than just gymnastics,” she said at a press conference after her team failed to win the gold medal. This is not something one would likely hear from an athlete hailing from an autocratic country; such rhetoric simply wouldn’t be allowed. Authoritarian regimes view Olympic victories as contributing to the national good and see their athletes’ careers, health, and emotional wellness as secondary.

Looking back at recent Olympics and forward to Paris 2024, the virtues of liberalism clearly give democracies a strong upper hand in their soft-power competition with autocracies, especially when it comes to appealing to viewers around the world. Democracies are held accountable at home. Organizers may make mistakes and democracies are not immune to bad decisions, corruption, and past tragedies. Yet democracies do not need to waste resources trying to exert full control over their public image. They use transparency and openness to promote their societies, evoking principles such as individual growth, freedom, and achievement. These values offer citizens contesting autocratic rule in their own countries a stark contrast and may prompt them to ask: Which system would I rather live under?