Olympics as PR: Here’s the new China

The white-hot Olympic spotlight was meant to introduce the latest version of China to the world, with thousands of visitors and a global TV audience seeing a safe, clean, neon-lit Beijing as the focal point of the government’s vision an emerging world power commanding growing international respect and influence.

At the same time, Beijing has largely ignored foreign opinion on its human rights records and continued its repression of free of speech, even as it has run a successful Olympics. China’s harsh rule in Tibet has been downplayed, political dissidents locked up, beggars pushed out of Beijing, and journalists covering protests roughed-up.

Authorities said limited protests would be allowed during the games but then did not grant a single permit. “I think (the) China government has done a very good job of presenting a positive image overseas, but in doing so it didn’t change much of its behavior to do that,” said Russell Leigh Moses, an analyst of Chinese politics based in Beijing.

Beijing craved international legitimacy from the games that would in turn boost its standing among its own people. For many Chinese, the Olympics have been presented as a comeback from a century or more of weakness and humiliation, the culmination of a “100-year dream.” The Communist Party has gained from being able to achieve it.

China has also tried to present a non-threatening image to the world that helps dispel fears of the country’s rise on the world stage, allowing it to restore what it sees as its rightful place in the international community.

Beijing became obsessed by image in the lead-up to the games. Anything unsightly was deemed offensive. Neighbourhood food stalls were covered up by roadside barriers showing pictures of ancient Chinese-style curved rooftops or Olympics motifs.

Factories were shut down and millions of cars taken off the roads to clear Beijing’s notoriously pollution-clogged skies. “This was part of the grand plan to show a new China, and I think it’s delivered in many regards,” said Scott Kronick, president of Ogilvy Public Relations in China.

Chinese authorities are getting more polished and confident in delivering their message globally, he said. The games’ lavish opening ceremony, vetted by party leaders, barely touched on communism and the tumultuous decades after the Communist Party came to power in 1949. The ceremony focused on China’s ancient culture – Confucious was quoted, Mao was not.

“China is trying to present itself as non-threatening and in a lot of ways non-socialist,” said Michael Dutton, an academic at Australia’s Griffith University’s Asia Institute who studies political cultures. “They’ve gone all out to try and present a country that’s ancient yet super-modern.”

China’s political leaders have also changed their style. Dark-suited and often appearing stiff in public, President Hu Jintao smiled his way through the opening ceremony and was seen at a ping pong event clapping alongside his wife and International Olympic Committee president Jacques Rogge.

State-controlled media say the Olympics will allow foreigners to see the true China. “They can see from the Olympics the achievements of 30 years of reform and opening up, and the Chinese people’s good spirit,” said an editorial in the People’s Daily overseas edition this week.

Beijing also has another audience to please, the millions of Chinese who have benefited from the economic boom through growing personal wealth and greater access to the outside world via television and the Internet.

It serves the government for China’s people to forget about the excesses of Mao’s Cultural Revolution in the 1960s and the 1989 crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrators in Tiananmen Square.

Better that the government be thought of as the stewards of three decades of economic growth that have raised millions into a burgeoning middle class. Tiananmen Square has been spruced up to include a large flower decoration and a (55-foot) (17-meter) -tall Beijing 2008 Olympic symbol.

While a few short protests by foreigners were held there early in the games – and were quickly ended by a heavy police presence – a more common sight has been dancing and other activities on a government-sanctioned cultural program.

For foreigners too, the government “wants people to shift their responses beyond the man standing in front of the tank,” said Anne-Marie Brady, a political scientists at New Zealand’s University of Canterbury.