History at a crossroad

Column by Francesco Grillo published on the Italian newspapers Il Messaggero 

Scan of the paper edition. 

One of the less known and sensational effects of climate change is how hosting the Winter Olympics is becoming increasingly difficult. The games beginning today in Beijing, were once assigned to the Chinese people in a competition from which everyone progressively withdrew from , after witnessing the amount of public resources which were wasted through the games hosted by the Russians in 2014 in Sochi. Ultimately, the “Middle Earth”’s enormous capital (which is how the Chinese people call what remains an Empire) prevailed among delegates of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) by four votes only over Almaty, the largest city in Kazakhstan. Today, many at the IOC headquarters in Lausanne feel that they have averted a disaster, given that over the past few weeks a civil war has been taking place in Almaty.

Xi Jinping himself should regret that victory, the man who is about to be deemed, by the Party, as the first President to be able to govern China without time constraints.

If, on one hand, the 2008 Olympic Games marked the inherently joyful consecration of a superpower, on the other, the 2022 Games risk to be the anticipation of a world in which everything - including sport - is influenced by the pandemic towards a dystopian scenario that many had feared. The games starting today at the “National Stadium” in Beijing, the famous establishment known for its bird nest shape, are dystopian.

Additionally, this Olympic was already born as a forcing of the natural characteristic of the place that hosts them. Beijing is, actual fact, not the place a visitor would associate to games that were born on the Alps: notwithstanding the fact that the minimum temperature in February is below zero, it is located in the middle of one of the driest areas in the world and approximately it is 500 kilometers away from the Gobi desert. The skiing competitions are going to take place at 200 kilometers from the Capital on mountains that are lower than Italian Apennines, in addition the Olympic snow is going to be all artificial. It is going to be an unnatural scenario, even though, as it always happens with the Chinese approach to innovation, these difficulties have forced them to find technological solutions that can always comehandy, even for the 2026 Cortina Olympics. A dystopian Olympiad as it was when it was hosted in Sochi, one of the the most prestigious beach destinations of the Black Sea, and as the FIFA World Cup is going to be, next Christmas, when taking place in the Qatar desert.

After all, sport is increasingly caught up in politics and commercial decisions such as sponsorships. To this rule there it is no exception, as Sebastian COE wrote, olympian of 1500 meters in Moscow and Los Angeles and head of World Athletics. This is demonstrated by the strange boycott which the United States (USA) and the United Kingdom (UK) will play at the Beijing games: a “diplomatic” boycott, as it has been defined, towards a Country in which the USA and UK will continue, of course, to have their own embassies, a manifestation that tonight will see American and British athletes regularly march with their own flag.

Despite the Chinese pride, Beijing’s Olympic Games risk of becoming the most “forgotten” in history. This is regrettable as they could be used to better learn about a parallel universe - such as China - that western public opinions keep ignoring to emphasize - between us and them - the conditions of the future in which we are about to enter.

China in 2022 is undoubtedly compared to the time HU JINTAO - XI JINPING predecessor - opened the summer games in 2008.

Fourteen years ago Beijing had more subway lines than Rome; today China has a third of all subways kilometers and two-thirds of high-speed trains in the world. At that time, China was perceived as “the factory of the world”, a poor Country that grew through a hard working and low cost workforce (which provided for the most powerful opportunity of development for western multinationals) and that sooner or later would convert to western democracy.

Fourteen years later, the dimension of the Chinese economy is three and half times larger

(the Italian one, for example, has managed to shrink), they compete with us through their skills (Chinese fifteen year olds are always scoring the highest in tests taken every two years by Paris’ OECD amongst teenagers from seventy-four different countries) and the challenge with the Americans is - directly - on the most important level: technology.

It is true, as some say, that this year the Chinese engine is slowing down: in 2022 according to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the growth rate will finally fall to +4,8%. Therefore, it is equally true that China is still the Country which will have grown the most between 2020 and 2023 (as the below graph highlights), where this figure is much less dependent on exports than we are stubborn to believe.

 More important is the concept which XI JINPING has made clear: China will never be a liberal democracy (there was, in fact, only one general political election in its millennial history). The goal is, on the other hand, to consolidate a political project which in 1989 we thought had died.

Therefore, these are games which are certainly not so playful. The athletes will live in a bubble and perhaps be even more restrained, as it was the case for their colleagues at the Tokyo Olympic Games only a few months earlier. In an atmosphere filled with tensions, both close to home and further a field. Ultimately, the Olympic Games are just a sign of the surreal transition that we are experiencing. From a world full of certainties which are melting like the snow in those artificial ski lanes, to an outcome that is not at all obvious and that depends on the willingness to rediscover the humble desire to get to know different worlds of which Marco Polo is the universal symbol.