China’s attitude toward the world has undergone a transformation since Beijing hosted the Summer Olympics in 2008. In the run-up to those Games, Chinese leaders embraced the theme of “one world, one dream,” and the title of the Olympic song, “Beijing Welcomes You,” captured the prevailing mood. A mass program was launched to teach Beijingers basic English so they could help foreign tourists in need. China even bent to the reality that human rights groups opposed its hosting the Games, designating three locations as protest zones during the Olympics (although they were never used). The Opening Ceremonies ended up attracting more than 80 state and government leaders, including those from the United States, Australia, Germany and Japan.
The scene is dramatically different 14 years later, as the city hosts the Winter Olympics. Forget about learning English: As part of the movement to reject Western influence, not only is teaching English increasingly discouraged, but a few weeks ago, the Beijing municipal government replaced English words on subway signs with Pinyin that few foreigners understand (“station” is now “zhan”). Beijing rejected some health protocols recommended by the International Olympic Committee and is pursuing its own outbreak-control strategy that seeks mostly to minimize Chinese people’s exposure to foreigners arriving for the Games. Unlike in 2008, Beijing has not made any high-profile promises of human rights improvements. Disregarding international pressure for a boycott by diplomats, a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman said, “No one would care whether they come or not.” These developments signal a sea change in China’s stance toward the outside world: Rather than integrating into the global community, it wants the world to “adapt to a more confident China.”
Through a network of closely guarded “bubbles” designed to keep the participants from the rest of the country, China has built a wall between itself and the Olympics so that thousands of athletes and other outsiders do not upend its zero-covid strategy. Fourteen years after the last Olympics in Beijing, China’s leaders simply see less reason to welcome foreigners, or foreign ideas, into the country.
It is not surprising that as China’s economic and military power has grown, so too have its ambition and capability to display on a stage like the Olympics its priorities and values. But the pandemic has bestowed on China unprecedented self-confidence. The United States and many other Western democracies, which have long presented themselves as standard-bearers for public health and good governance, floundered in the face of the coronavirus. By contrast, China’s success in quickly containing the virus, even before vaccines arrived, using lockdowns and rigorous quarantines drew the notice of the world. Although not all public health experts believe that China can keep the virus at bay forever, the perceived performance gap (as I noted in a new Council on Foreign Relations report) only bolstered the notion among Chinese authorities that China is rising and the West is descending, and that there is not much China can learn from outsiders, including those from the West.
In the past, the West could encourage China to cooperate in public health projects because of the promise of funding and technical know-how. That worked with previous crises, like HIV and AIDS prevention and control. But today, China no longer thinks it needs that sort of help. As President Xi Jinping proclaimed in July: “By no means will we accept someone bossing us around like a teacher. The [Chinese Communist Party] will stride proudly ahead on the path we have chosen and grasp the destiny of China’s development and progress in our own hands.”
What people in the United States may view as an illiberal and excessive approach toward fighting the coronavirus — shutting down regional economies to prevent any cases — is cherished in China for protecting lives and putting people first. “I’m not interested in being lectured by the so-called expert from a country where 620,000 people have died from covid,” a Chinese intellectual commented in August on an article I wrote calling for China to coexist with the virus.
This new attitude, coupled with the national narrative of China’s “century of humiliation” period between 1839 and 1949, when the country was a pushover for Western powers, encourages growing hostility toward the West. As Yan Xuetong, a leading international relations scholar in China, observed at a conference in Beijing last month, the nation’s Gen Z students think “humankind’s universal values such as peace, morality, fairness and justice are China’s inherent traditions” and that “only China is just, while other countries, especially Western countries, are evil.” Such a dichotomous view of the world not only tolerates no criticism of China, it also attributes China’s problems to external, especially Western, forces or factors. While the evidence seems clear that the coronavirus first emerged near Wuhan, for instance, Chinese diplomats have suggested that a bioweapons project at Fort Detrick, Md., spawned it. Just last month, Beijing health authorities blamed international mail or imported frozen food for causing the covid flare-ups in the country. No serious health official unaffiliated with China takes that view seriously.
This antagonistic approach, though, reinforces negative views of China in the West as a threat to a rules-based international order. In turn, Western nations’ moves to counter China, such as not sending official government delegations to the Olympics in protest of human rights abuses in Xinjiang, only confirm the Chinese perception of the West’s malicious intentions. According to a think tank scholar in China, “Chinese government has never extended invitations to those anti-China politicians, who hurriedly turn the ‘diplomatic boycott’ into a farce but are just foolishly sentimental and acting ostentatiously to impress others.” Recent reports that some U.S. Embassy staffers sought approval to leave China briefly because of the prospect of snap lockdowns helped illustrate this dynamic: Commenting on the idea, some Chinese experts contended that it exposed “the true intention of Washington in sabotaging the Winter Olympic Games.” Around the same time, the official China Daily reported that “anti-China forces in the United States” had tried to buy off athletes to “politicize the sports and maliciously disrupt and spoil the Beijing Winter Olympic Games.”
Starting with these Olympics, the rest of the world may learn that our biggest challenge is not to coexist with the virus but to coexist with a reinvented China that increasingly plays by its own rules.
