The impact of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games on China and the Olympic movement: the legacy. (Special Issue: Asian Journal of Sport History & Culture, 2021, 3 - Special issue: Olympics.)

ABSTRACT

This paper aims to explore the impact of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games on Chinese sport and Chinese society as well as the international Olympic Movement and Games. It asks three questions What have been the purported impacts of the Beijing Games on China's sport culture and practice? Did the 2008 Beijing Games contribute to the development of the Olympic movement? What, if any, social progress has been achieved through the Beijing Games? In answer to the first question, the paper explores how the Games sought to bring Olympic ideals and spirit to China and the Chinese sports authority used the Games to popularize Olympic ideals within the country. Olympic education programmes played an important role in spreading and popularizing Olympic knowledge and culture during the Beijing Games as well as during the post-Beijing Olympics era. The Games also provided a platform for the development of a volunteer programme which gave direct support to the hosting of the Beijing Games, but also developed a voluntary workforce which has continued to serve China's social and cultural development. In answer to the second question, China used the opportunity to help the world to understand China, its history, its people, its cultures, and its ambition, and future direction. China's promotion of an Olympic slogan and the three themes One World and One Dream, the Green Olympics, and the Technological Olympics and Humanistic Olympics took the Olympic Movement and the Games to foster an intercultural Olympism, of 'One World' a twenty-first century phenomenon. Thirdly, the Games reflected economic and cultural changes since the 1980s when China opened its door to the outside world. However, the Games did not bring changes to the political system or to social structures in Chinese society. Nevertheless, it did give China the confidence to join the international sports community and gain rich experience to host the 2022 Winter Olympic Games in Beijing. Beijing, therefore, will become the first city to have hosted Summer and Winter Games in Olympic history, but the hosting of the 2022 Games will take place with China having grown in confidence and strength since the 2008 Games. The country is sufficiently confident to stage a successful Games despite the context of dealing with the Covid pandemic, the diplomatic boycott instigated by the USA, the objections of the sporting world to the treatment of the Chinese tennis star, Peng Shuai, and the environmental problems resulting from having to manufacture artificial snow.