Why do we Brits look upon Chinese athletes as cheats, freaks and robots?
By Brendan O'Neill Sport Last updated: August 2nd, 2012
Why does China-bashing come so naturally to us Britons? Less than a week into the Olympics and we have already had the commentariat, kicked off by the BBC's Clare Balding, casting aspersions on 16-year-old super-swimmer Ye Shiwen's achievements. We've had reports about the "brutal training factories" in China where future Olympians are "tortured" until they become perfect physical specimens. And we have witnessed waves of glee in the media following the disqualification of China's top female badminton players (alongside Korean and Indonesian players) after they purposely tried to lose their games. This has been held up as the hard evidence we were waiting for that the Chinese are sneaks and cheats, who, unlike us Brits, understand nothing of fair play.
Some of us foolishly thought China-bashing would only be a feature of the 2008 Games, which were held in Beijing, where the entire world media gathered not only to watch sports but also to wag a collective white finger at the authoritarian, over-ambitious Chinese. But it is back with a vengeance in London. Observers treat the Chinese with an ugly mix of envy and incomprehension, suspicious about their ability to win so many medals and disgusted by their hardcore commitment to training and excellence. That's the real reason we see the Chinese effectively as an alien race – because they cleave to values that us relativistic, PC, post-Empire, increasingly defeatist Brits jettisoned long ago: the values of single-minded commitment and determination to win.
Consider the genuinely shocking discussion about China's Olympic training institutions. Reading the British press you could be forgiven for thinking they were sporting Treblinkas. The Daily Mirror tells us the Chinese use "training techniques [that] border on torture". China's Olympic system is a "£500 million Mandarin Machine", apparently, which is designed to "spew out" Olympians and "ensure China's world domination of sport". The Mirror says China's athletes have been "manufactured like automatons on a cynical human production line".
Not only do such reports echo the old racist view of Far Easterners, especially the Chinese, as less soulful and more robotic than us Westerners, as "automatons" produced in a "factory" – it also reveals our own profound discomfort with the idea of demanding excellence from young people, with putting pressure on the young to be brilliant. In modern Britain we even look upon school exams as a terribly heavy trip to lay on kids. We are obsessed with nurturing children's self-esteem and ensuring they are never made to feel stressed out. Disciplining children is all but against the law and increasing numbers of sports and dance institutions no longer even touch their charges, far less bend their limbs or stretch their bodies, for fear of falling foul of the vast governmental bureaucracy that treats everyone who works with kids as a potential paedophile. It is our own reluctance to make demands of young people, to have "great expectations" of them like we did in the past, which makes us look with horror upon Chinese people who put pressure on children! The Chinese don't "torture" their great sporting hopes – it's just that us self-esteem-worshipping Brits now consider discipline and testing as forms of torture.
Or consider the discussion about the Eastern badminton cheats. Was the behaviour of those women really all that weird? It is commonplace for athletes to put their brilliance on ice in the early rounds of the Olympics or to use tactics that might secure them a future advantage. No one complains when someone like Michael Phelps "eases through the heats" – that is, doesn't try to win too hard at that early stage in order to preserve himself for the finals. In the football World Cup there are frequently open discussions about how it might be in the interests of certain teams to avoid coming first in the group stages, in order to get a better draw in the knockout rounds.
The Chinese and other Eastern badminton players were only doing in a more upfront fashion what is an accepted tactical part of modern sport. What really shocks us about those them is their singular determination to win, to get that longed-for gold. As Simon Jenkins says, "Along come the Chinese, who clearly know how to win", and it makes us uncomfortable – not only because it means we will probably lose but more fundamentally because we're also uncomfortable with the "win, win, win" mentality these days, seeing that, too, as something alien, robotic, which goes against the grain of our sedate modern culture of All Must Have Prizes.
The founder of the modern Olympics, the French Baron Pierre de Coubertin, said he was inspired by the ethos of excellence and expectation on the playing fields of England's public schools. But that ethos doesn't really exist anywhere in Britain anymore. It does in China. Get over it. Or do something about it by trying to rediscover and promote that ethos here at home. But please stop treating the Chinese as cheats, freaks and robots.
