China won gold at more events than any other country in the Olympics, but it didn’t take home the most gold medals, as Duke University political scientist Michael Allen Gillespie points out (via Tim Johnson). The reason: Americans dominated the team events, while Chinese athletes excelled in individual sports.
If one looks over all of the Olympic sports, Americans took home 118 gold medals, 99 silver medals and 76 bronze medals, while the Chinese took home 76 gold, 35 silver and 38 bronze medals. That is 293 total medals for the USA to 149 for China.
The point here is that Americans are much more successful in team sports than the Chinese, and perhaps this is no accident. Voluntary cooperation has always been a hallmark of the American system, suffusing the lives of children and adults alike, an outstanding factor in our playrooms and in our boardrooms.
China, by contrast, has always put much less emphasis on voluntary cooperation than on hierarchical control and the obligation of those below to take directions from those above. Such discipline and obedience can produce individuals who become superb at repeating individual tasks, as in the diving competitions where the Chinese were outstanding, but it cannot produce the creativity and voluntary cooperation necessary to the successful operation of a team.
The Chinese government has begun to learn this lesson in the case of industry and the world has applauded its success, even if many have been intimidated by it. One might anticipate a similar success if the Chinese loosened the reins on other sections of their society.
The evidence from the basketball courts around China suggests this may be beginning to happen. In a cosmopolitan spirit, we therefore may hope that, in London in 2012 or in some future Olympics, Chinese teams will bring home more gold medals than the U.S. (as painful as that might be for our pride), for it would be an indication that China has in fact become a more open and creative society.
Ah, there’s that temptation, again. Suddenly sports most people pay attention to only once every four years become clear indications of cultural and political character. Gillespie (whose specialty lies on the other side of the globe) has an interesting theory, but I suspect there’s a simpler explanation:
Eight years ago, as China was vying to win its bid for the Olympics, officials like Cui [Dalin, the vice minister of the General Administration of Sport of China] began a government-financed effort called the 119 Project. Its purpose was to improve performances in the medal-heavy sports–track and field, swimming, rowing, canoe/kayak and sailing–in which the Chinese have been weak. The plan was named after the 119 gold medals awarded in those sports at that time. Other nations’ Olympic committees also attempt to win medals by allocating extra resources to certain sports. But none have been as elaborate, well financed and daunting as China’s plan.
“No secrets, no mysteries going on here,” [rowing coach Igor] Grinko said in a heavy Russian accent. “They’re just doing this like the East Germans did in the 1970s and ’80s.”
Rowing, judo, diving, track and field and gymnastics. Lots of medals for lots of athletes using the same training facilities. China won nine gold medals in gymnastics, seven in diving, eight in weightlifting, five in shooting. ESPN has a complete list.
Would being a “more open and creative society” make China better at basketball? Maybe. I’m sure the last 30 years of Reform and Opening Up have helped the country’s prospects, but I’d credit that more to Yao Ming and an economy that suddenly allows more people to own TVs and obsess over the NBA than to any underlying change in culture.
Politics lends itself to facile issues, to facile answers. The problem is you’ve got the rhetoric and you’ve got the reality. The rhetoric is, you’ve got candidates talk about bringing all those jobs back and not giving tax breaks to companies that send jobs overseas.
The problem with that is that it only tells half the story. One of the reasons America has been able to keep inflation down is precisely because WalMart imports all that stuff out of China, and Vietnam and Bangladesh and all the other places.
What I really want to hear is how these candidates are going to deal both with the issue of brinign jobs back to places like Michigan, and at the same time keeping inflation lower.
The media doesn’t cover it. Labor has not been a top story for a long time in this country. I hope it becomes that story again. It needs to be a much bigger story.
Media these days tend to cover stories that are immediate. What is most recent, not necessarily what is most important.
Getting into the whole labor issue, that’s a tough story, it’s a complicated story. It’s not easily covered just by sending a crew out for an hour or two and bringing them back for a Live at 5 o’clock.
It requires more work, and there aren’t quite as many news organizations out there that want to do that kind of story.
We knew beforehand that Joe Biden will be Barack Obama’s running mate. Obama has been the presumptive nominee (glad we can finally dump that phrase) since June (or arguably March). The only remaining questions concerned the presentation: Would Hillary Clinton give Obama the support he needed? Would Bill Clinton talk more about his presidency or Obama’s? How many people could the Democrats pack into Invesco Field, and how many would watch on TV? Would anybody screw up?
Now, we need real answers to real questions, and Koppel raises many. I have my own, and I’ll be posting them here, along with whatever answers I find.
Much of what really matters in this election, and what will continue to matter after, takes more reporting that many news organizations won’t provide. Much of it is dull, hard to find, decidely unsexy. But it’s critical.
Some of this will happen. Some of it will come from newspapers, wires, blogs. Some might even come from TV. I hope projects like Spot.us, which I’m grateful to be a part of, will help fill the void, too, especially on local issues and local impact. Because I really do want to know.
Fareed Zakaria of Newsweek seems to think so. While he’s no fan of the current president, Zakaria gives him credit for engaging the People’s Republic in last week’s cover story, What Bush Got Right:
The bilateral relationship between China and America will be the most significant one in the 21st century. Bush began his term poorly on the subject. During the campaign, when asked by Larry King for the single most important area where he would depart from Clinton foreign policy, he cited China. “The current president has called the relationship with China a strategic partnership,” Bush said. “I believe our relationship needs to be redefined as one as competitor.” The initial months of the administration suggested that Bush would adopt a confrontational approach to Beijing, just as many neoconservatives and Pentagon strategists hoped.
And while Bush talked tough, those in his administration were taking a harder line, especially on the Taiwan issue, as James Wilkenson told CQ last year:
While Bush publicly continued the one-China policy of his five White House predecessors, Wilkerson said, the Pentagon “neocons” took a different tack, quietly encouraging Taiwan’s pro-independence president, Chen Shui-bian.
“The Defense Department, with Feith, Cambone, Wolfowitz [and] Rumsfeld, was dispatching a person to Taiwan every week, essentially to tell the Taiwanese that the alliance was back on,” Wilkerson said, referring to pre-1970s military and diplomatic relations, “essentially to tell Chen Shui-bian, whose entire power in Taiwan rested on the independence movement, that independence was a good thing.”
In 2001, an American surveillance aircraft collided in midair with a Chinese fighter plane, killing the pilot and crash landing on Hainan island. Bush chose to negotiate with Beijing and to publicly express regret over the death of the Chinese airman. Bush eventually took an uncharacteristically internationalist line with China, including admonishing Chen Shui-bian against any movement away from the status quo. While he criticized the Communist Party over China’s human rights record, Bush resisted calls to boycott any part of the Olympic Games.
Further, engaging China led to engaging India and Japan, to balance the Middle Kingdom’s rising clout with others’.
All in all, it’s a far different picture of the outgoing president. As with Iraq, Iran, North Korea and elsewhere, Zakaria says these shifts in policy were driven by an administration that finally gave in to a reality that wouldn’t match the prescriptions of its most hardened ideologues.
“It doesn’t reflect a change of heart so much as an admission of failure,” Zakaria writes, “the old way simply wasn’t working.”
I’m watching the Olympics right now. I’ve been watching since early Friday morning, on TV and online, with and without the help of NBC.
The network has been the sole broadcaster of the Olympics as long as I’ve been watching television, but that monopoly is clearly ebbing. Yesterday morning, while I was sitting through an insufferable pre-taped Today show (summary: Isn’t China weird?!?), my friends back in China were watching the opening ceremonies in Beijing live and telling me all about it over Twitter. Meanwhile, others were doing whatever they could to get around NBC’s waiting game:
NBC’s decision to delay broadcasting the opening ceremonies by 12 hours sent people across the country to their computers to poke holes in NBC’s technological wall — by finding newsfeeds on foreign broadcasters’ Web sites and by watching clips of the ceremonies on YouTube and other sites.
In response, NBC sent frantic requests to Web sites, asking them to take down the illicit clips and restrict authorized video to host countries. As the four-hour ceremony progressed, a game of digital whack-a-mole took place. Network executives tried to regulate leaks on the Web and shut down unauthorized video, while viewers deftly traded new links on blogs and on the Twitter site, redirecting one another to coverage from, say, Germany, or a site with a grainy Spanish-language video stream.
As the first Summer Games of the broadband age commenced in China, old network habits have never seemed so archaic — or so irrelevant.
This may be the first distributed Olympics, or Olympics 2.0, or Long Tail Olympics. Whatever name sticks, fans and followers have never had more control over programming or the conversation.
Because we’re not just watching. This is the Beijing Olympics, and there’s plenty to talk about. Check out the Beijing Olympics room on FriendFeed, set up by Chad Catacchio, for a quick overview of everywhere the dialog is going. I’ll be posting links there and on Twitter, and maybe even a few updates here.
