Charting China’s Winter Olympics Rise |
When Chinese President Xi Jinping appeared at the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia—the first time a Chinese head of state had attended a major sporting event abroad—he announced his intention to get 300 million Chinese citizens to participate in winter sports.
The next year, after China had won the bid to host the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing, the government launched a nationwide push to hit that target. China added winter sports into school curriculums, invested billions of dollars in sporting infrastructure, and began allowing elite, foreign-born athletes to compete under its flag.
When Chinese President Xi Jinping appeared at the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia—the first time a Chinese head of state had attended a major sporting event abroad—he announced his intention to get 300 million Chinese citizens to participate in winter sports.
The next year, after China had won the bid to host the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing, the government launched a nationwide push to hit that target. China added winter sports into school curriculums, invested billions of dollars in sporting infrastructure, and began allowing elite, foreign-born athletes to compete under its flag.
“The purpose of high-level sports in China is diplomacy,” said Susan Brownell, an anthropologist at the University of Missouri-St. Louis who researches Chinese sports. In that respect, the 2022 Beijing Olympics were less than successful. Though U.S. athletes participated, the White House announced a diplomatic boycott of the Games, citing China’s “ongoing genocide” in Xinjiang, and nine other countries joined in.
However, China’s athletic successes in Beijing........