CAPTURING THE PLATFORM

HOW PUBLIC RELATIONS SPUN THE BEIJING OLYMPICS

MANFRED BECKER

A THESIS SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES

IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS

FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS

GRADUATE PROGRAM IN INTERDISCIPLINARY STUDIES

YORK UNIVERSITY

TORONTO, ONTARIO

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1+1 Canada Abstract

As a carrier of cultural meanings that are available to international audiences amounting to 4 billion viewers, the modern Olympic Games are global events unparalleled in history. The Olympic spectacle provides a unique opportunity for a host nation to construct a desired image and narrative of itself for the world. The Games also give global civil society the opportunity to conquer the

Olympic platform and draw attention to various socio-political agendas. Focusing the inquiry on the global civic debate prior to the 2008 Beijing Olympics, this thesis documents the sophisticated yet tactically diffuse public relations campaigns mounted by the organizers and detractors of the Beijing Games. The purpose of this thesis is to contextualize the correlation between the Olympic spectacle and public relations within several theoretical frameworks, by situating it in the interface between state, non-governmental organization advocacy groups, and mass media. Central to the inquiry is the creation of a desired narrative by the

Olympic host country, China, as well as the counter-narratives created by the two dominant opposing civil society actors, the NGOs "Dream for Darfur" and

"Students for a Free Tibet." The thesis will track which stakeholder occupied the

Olympic platform in the lead-up to the Games, and for what reasons. The thesis concludes with the finding that neither side of the conflict, Olympic host nor civil society actors achieved its goal to alter the public's perception of 'China' in

Western society.

iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract Table of Contents

1.0 Introduction/Chapter Layout/ Methodology/ Limitations

1.1 "Ritual, Game, Festival, Spectacle"- Olympism from Coubertin to MacAloon

1.2 "Shifting Grounds" - From Television to Cyberspace

1.3 "How to Sell a Nation" - Public Relations and National Identity

2.1 "Genocide Olympics" - Dream for Darfur and Group SJR

2.2 "A Pebble in the Chinese Shoe" - Students for a Free Tibet (SFT)

2.3 "Politics and Sport Don't Mix" - BOCOG and Hill & Knowlton

3.1 "Countdown from 'Genocide Olympics' to 'Earthquake Olympics'

3.2 "Missions Accomplished" - A Post-Games Assessment

3.3. Conclusion: "The Games Did Not Take Place" - Olympics as Simulacra?

List of Interviews Appendices Bibliography

v Introduction

Iconic Images in Olympic History

The Olympic Games have grown to become the largest event in which humanity meets to engage in a self-conscious common activity. The era of the

Modern Olympics began in 1896, but it wasn't until the latter part of the twentieth century that the Olympic platform was established through intense capital investments by main stakeholders like corporate sponsors and the International

Olympic Committee. The IOC is the self-declared guardian of the "Olympic

Spirit" and selection agent of future host cities. Together these "legitimate" stakeholders have built an elaborate system to advance commercial and political messages. After being voted down to host the 2000 Summer Olympics, China set the theme for the awarded 2008 Beijing Games as "One World, One Dream" to project the image of a harmony-seeking country that was emerging as a positive global force. The Olympics were intended as China's introduction to the world for recognition as an economic, political, and social power. If the twenty-first century was to become China's century, the 2008 Olympics would serve as its dramatic entry. That dominant narrative was challenged by various international civil society actors, each offering their own counter-narrative, and each trying to hijack the Olympic platform and its mega media spotlight.

Dayan and Katz (1984) applied the term "hijack" to describe the sometimes forceful but always antagonistic seizure of world attention in a singular public

1 event. By making use of public relations methodology to maximize their visibility, a multitude of civil society players benefit from the Olympics as a global media event as it provides them with the opportunity to perform in a global theater of representation by intruding on the expected and dominant narrative. Various dramatic forms of hijacking have been witnessed worldwide in the past when seemingly powerless groups or individuals have gained momentary attention by subverting the Olympic Games in order to take control of the narrative. The following are some key examples.

Berlin 1936

2M '*

Sources: US National Archives, retrieved at http://www.ushmm.org/lcmedia/photo/wlc/image/14/1449

& Associated Pictures, retrieved at http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/othersports/olvinpics/6008196

The official motto of the Berlin Olympics in 1936 was "I Call the Youth of the World." Hitler's intention was to make use of the Games as a platform to present the ideals of a new National Socialist Germany to the international community. However, a black American athlete subverted that desired narrative by contradicting the idea of the superiority of the Aryan master race. Jesse Owens won four gold medals and - unintentionally - hijacked the Olympics from its host.

2 The image of Owens exploding out of the starting block became the defining moment of the 1936 Games, celebrated even in the official film of the event,

Olympiad, which was created by order of Adolph Hitler (Riefenstahl 1938).

Mexico 1968

Sources AP, tetneved at http //pictzz blogspot com/2008/08/olympic-opening-ceiemonies-thiough html &

Getty Images, http //apps detnews com/apps/multimedia/index php^search=mitt&page=7

Mexico City's motto was "Everything Is Possible in Peace." The 1968

Games were hosted by a military dictatorship that was representing itself as friendly and welcoming to the world: during the opening ceremonies, colourful balloons were released into the sky, while hot pink and vibrant yellow banners framed a white dove of peace that lit up Mexico City. But these images were quickly replaced by that of two American athletes, Tommy Smith and John Carlos, who bowed their heads and raised their fists in a salute to the Black Power movement as they received their medals and stood listening to the American

National Anthem. That picture became the defining moment and provided the iconic image of the Mexico Games. However, the visual of more than 300 student and worker demonstrators killed by the Mexican military days before the Games hardly registered in the public conscience, because the world "wasn't watching."

3 Munich 1972

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,. "."" ...i.Viii ""ji- '--• .'

Sources: Fairfax, retrieved at http://www.smh.com.au/ftimages/2004/07/14/1089694403703.html

& AP, retrieved at http://www.spiegel.de/international/0,1518,391525,00.html

The motto for the 1972 Munich Olympics, the birthplace of Nazism, was

"The Happy Games." These were Germany's first postwar Games and as such they had one central purpose: to replace the Holocaust as the universal collective memory with the projection of a new, open, and non-threatening Germany. The

Olympic platform was stormed - literally - by the Palestinian guerilla group

"Black September," which carried out the attack on the Olympic Village. By the end of the day, eleven Israeli athletes had been murdered. The image of a masked gunman on the balcony of the athletes' village became the defining moment and provided the iconic image of the Munich Games. A spokesperson of Black

September stated: "Sport is the modern religion of the Western world. So we decided to use the Olympics as the most sacred ceremony of this religion, to make the world pay attention to us. And they answered our prayers" (Dobson and Payne

1978, 15).

4 The dramatic question for this thesis, then, is what would become the central image of the Beijing Olympics, who provided it, and to what effect?

This thesis will examine the public relations efforts used by each actors to achieve their objective for the 2008 Beijing Games, while pursuing an inter-disciplinary approach, making use of public relations literature, the psychology of message reception, media studies, critical sports studies, Olympic studies, as well as

Chinese history and anthropology.

The field research and evidence gathering for this thesis took place in advance of the formulation of the key research questions. In the process of formulating them, I needed to establish certain theoretical and applied paradigms e.g. audience reception theory and public relations. PR literally means 'to relate to the public' In crafting and shaping the message for public consumption, would either stakeholder be in control of how the desired public would receive that message, and what its impact would be?

The established communication model as an activity of conveying meaningful information breaks into three components: sender, message, and recipient. Audience reception theory can be traced back to work done by British

Sociologist Stuart Hall and his communication model first revealed in an essay titled 'Encoding/Decoding' (Hall, 1980) and his discussion of the 'base grammar' within media representations. As a proponent of reception theory, developing his own theory of encoding and decoding, Hall focused on the scope for negotiation and opposition on part of the audience. That audience does not simply passively

5 accept a text or image, but it actively engages by decoding, negotiating the meaning of the text or image. The meaning depends on the cultural background of the recipient and may explain how some readers accept a certain reading of a text or image, while others reject it. Even though the producer encodes the text in a particular way, the reader will decode it in a different manner — what Hall calls the "margin of understanding" (Hall, 1980) The meaning of a text lies somewhere between the producer and the reader. I will return to Hall's model in the concluding answer of my main research questions.

Many commentators assume that the orchestration of the 2008 Games was targeted mainly at an international audience (Ramo 2007; Hagan 2008, Finlay

2008). I will question that assumption and suggest that the Chinese government as the Games' host was targeting its own domestic audience as it created its preferred narrative of the 2008 Olympics. I will further examine whether the civil society actors who intended to occupy the Olympic platform, although guided by principles of advancing human rights and people's self-determination, were making use - intentionally or not - of stereotypical and questionable depictions of the Far East "otherness" in the West to forward their agenda. In the final analysis, I doubt if the public relations efforts by both actors for the 2008 Games, Olympic host or civil society, did in fact have any measurable impact on how the world perceived China and the Chinese people after the Olympic flame was extinguished on August 24, 2008.

6 Chapter Layout

In addition to an introduction and a conclusion, there are three main parts to this thesis, each divided into three chapters.

Part one provides a background on the relationship between the Olympic

Games, public relations, and mass and social media. Chapter 1.1 brings together several theoretical frameworks, connecting the Olympics with images constructed by various stakeholders. Chapter 1.2 provides an overview of the shifting role of the Olympic audience during the dawn of broadcasting and a now evolving digital revolution as I briefly examine the Internet in the construction of desired images and narratives. Chapter 1.3 looks at the history of Public Relations in context of the creation of national narratives and identities, and the Olympic Games.

Part two introduces the various stakeholders for the Beijing Games.

Chapters 2.1 and 2.2 discuss the global civil society groups that attempted to occupy the Olympic platform for 2008 by applying a human rights narrative: the

NGOs Dream for Darfur (DFD) and Students for a Free Tibet (SFT). Chapter 2.3 identifies the official organizers for the 2008 Olympic Games, BOCOG, and their public relations consultants, Hill & Knowlton.

Part three is presented in three chapters as well: chapter 3.1 is a chronological breakdown of the key events leading up to August 8, 2008, the opening day of the Beijing Games. I will examine foreign media coverage of the period leading up to the opening day, how international actors and the Chinese host approached the issue of human rights in the construction of China's image,

7 and the ways foreign media absorbed those different perspectives in their coverage. Chapter 3.2 is a post-Games analysis of the desired and accomplished narratives for the 2008 Beijing Games by competing stakeholders, and chapter 3.3 predicts a possible future of the Games as simulacra, existing only as an "image" that is completely separate from "reality" as postulated by Jean Baudrillard.

At the end of this thesis, I present my choice of the iconic image of the

Beijing Olympics and invite the reader to make his/her own selection based on the discussion that follows and after viewing the visual material that accompanies this thesis.

Methodology

In departing from established thesis writing, where academic field work is conducted later in the creative process, "Capturing the Platform" evolved in reverse, building a theoretical framework after the initial research phase. This project started in late 2007 with the research for a documentary on the historic relationship of public relations and the Olympics. Early in 2008,1 made three visits to Beijing and Hong Kong, conducting interviews with representatives from the key stakeholders for the 2008 Games while following their day-to-day activities with a camera:

- Sun Weide, official spokesperson, and Jeff Ruffalo, international media liaison for BOCOG (the Beijing Games organizers) - James Heimowitz, president of Hill & Knowlton China, and Frances Sun, vice-director for the Western public relations company Hill & Knowlton, acting as the communications consultant for BOCOG

In addition, I interviewed representatives from three other Western PR companies

8 with offices in China and stakes in the Games, as they represented commercial clients who were official sponsors of the 2008 Games:

- Scott Kronick, CEO of Ogilvy & Mather, China - William Moss, associate, Burson & Marsteller, China (no video) - David Liu, executive, Weber-Shandwick China, who had masterminded China's successful 2001 bid for the Olympics

I also interviewed Eliot Cutler, senior counsel, Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer &

Feld, and five international journalists who were either based in China or were in the country on assignment and who included Andrew Potter, columnist for

MacLean's Magazine, and Brendan O'Neill (Spiked online), London and various other countries.

For the creation of various counter-narratives, extended interviews and videotapings took place with representatives of the NGO "Dream for Darfur":

- Jill Savitt, executive director - Ellen Freudenheim, research director

As well as with Dream for Darfur's public relations consultants, SJR Group, in New York City:

- Jonathan Freedman, project manager

- Mitch Stoller, founding partner

As well as with "Students for a Free Tibet" in New York and Toronto:

- Lhadon Tethong, executive director - Kate Wosznow, deputy director

At this early phase, the selection of interviewees was made not based on academic research criteria but on my own subjective evaluation ("Who are the key players in this story?").

9 In addition, between November 2007 and February 2010,1 maintained a

"Google News Alert," which scanned articles that were published daily on the

World Wide Web using pre-determined search terms, and I tabulated the results that were relevant to my research. This way I accumulated over 2,000 newspaper

and magazine articles about the Beijing Games that I was able to evaluate within the context of this thesis. These were coded in terms of positive, negative and neutral valence.

I initiated this collection of data because mass media helps make nations real and tangible through depictions of images, symbols, and events (Madianou

2005). To this day, information from within China is still subject to significant and

systematic government censorship (Redl and Simons 2002). Western media still relies on inadequate, often inaccurate, internal sources (Peng 2004) and frequently

creates and disperses images of China based on journalistic interpretations of out­ dated stereotypes (Roberts 1999). I wanted to investigate how those stereotypes

and China in its "otherness" factored into the reporting during the lead up phase to the Beijing Olympics.

There was also a larger, ideologically driven framework. Mass media and political communications commonly employ the construction of the "enemy" to generate fear and anxiety to attract viewers (Altheide 2002). Research into the social psychology of intergroup relations notes that the identification of a

scapegoat or enemy affirms the sense of group membership and projects any threat out-of-group, restoring self-consonance and group integrity (Husting and King

10 2005; Tajfel 1982). Research has shown that greater perceived differences between an in-group and an outsider group increases the likelihood of negative stereotyping

(Campbell 1967). It was my intent to analyze those assumptions within the framework of this thesis. Did the biased perception of China as "the enemy" influence the dominant narrative of the country in Western reporting in the months prior to the 2008 Games?

As well, this thesis was originally conceived as a comparative study between the Beijing and Vancouver Games, as I had devised a detailed field research plan for the actors who were constructing narratives and counter- narratives for the 2010 Vancouver Games, namely, its official organizers,

VANOC, and the Olympic Resistance Network (ORN). While stakeholders for the

Beijing Games showed a degree of openness in allowing me access so that I could interview its partners, record internal meetings, and videotape closed sessions, both

VANOC and the ORN proved to be impossible to access. The Olympic Resistance

Network rejected the very idea of applying public relations techniques as a means to garner wide public support. VANOC simply refused me, along with other academic as well as documentary researchers, entry into their organization, making any meaningful field research and data collection impossible.

Because of that lack of access to the stakeholders for the Vancouver Games, financing for a documentary film could not be secured. Coupled with my desire to explore the theme on a more theoretical level that an audio-visual treatment does not allow, I decided to take the project into the academic environment of York

11 University's Interdisciplinary Study program. I deepened my understanding by taking courses in various academic disciplines such as media studies, public relations and crisis management, visual anthropology, social and political thought, marketing and culture and communications at York University, Schulich School of

Business, McMaster University, and the University of Western Ontario. The need for an interdisciplinary approach arose out of the deficit I encountered in the academic literature that has been published on the subject of this thesis.

The audio-visual component of this thesis, an accumulated fifty hours of video material, was first meant to form a documentary in the "expository mode"

(Nichols 2001) and was to be edited in an argumentative frame. However, I later revised this approach to an "observational frame," documenting the work of the participants in my field research so they could speak and act without any interference. I have up-loaded several selected rushes of these videos online for the viewer to access.

Videolinks:

8 minutes selected rushes of China/Tibet Material http://www.sendspace.com/pro/dl/x5cage

30 minutes selected rushes of China Material http://www.sendspace.com/pro/dl/7rc0kf

7 minutes selected rushes of Vancouver Material http://www.sendspace.com/pro/dl/fdlrru

12 Limitations

The issue of the Olympic Games and public relations remains a largely unexplored area of scholarly research. The academic discourse that does exist is fragmented and lacks both the quantity of solid empirical data and theoretical perspective from which to build a comprehensive analysis. Public relations research to date has not only widely ignored other disciplines inquiries into social relations (e.g., political science, psychology, media studies), but has furthermore failed to recognize their ability to influence public opinion as a crucial element: "Activist groups have traditionally been placed in the less effective - and therefore less important - stakeholder categories" (Wolf 2009, 5). This view is largely reflected in public relations theory, "which frequently assumes that the public only come into existence as they are identified as such" (Leitch and Neilson 2001, in Wolf 2009,

5). The three dominant agents in the Olympic context are the International

Olympic Committee (IOC), main commercial sponsors, and the host country. Until recently, most sports and public relations scholars have overlooked the increasing number of civil society actors like non-governmental organizations that - until now - had not been registered due to the perceived limited power in their ability to shape public perception.

As well, scholarly research into activism has been "largely focused on damage limitation and issues management, but not towards genuine recognition of the public in public relations" (Karlberg 1996, in Wolf 2009, 14). In general there appears to be a lack of data and actual perspectives from civil society actors, as

13 "the majority of literature focuses on case studies based on secondary data analysis" (Demetrious et al. 2008, in Wolf 2009, 14). The above points caused some limitations for this thesis. In order to further understand the role of civil society actors, future scholarly analysis should continue to explore the activist- organizational relationship from the civil society actor's perspective.

As well, there were several purely pragmatic issues that limited the depth of this thesis. Public relations - as compared to propaganda as a means to disseminate information - is relatively new to China. It also proved rather difficult to penetrate relevant stakeholders like major commercial sponsors and to conduct meaningful research. The Olympic Games have become a high stakes global event involving powerful interests, which in this instance was the government of the most populated country on earth, the People's Republic of China. Given these stakes, the degree of openness to allow for data collection and the willingness to engage in dialogue with the Chinese stakeholders was extraordinary.

14 1.1 Ritual, Festival, Game, or Spectacle?

Roche postulates that mega-events are to be understood as "large-scale cultural, commercial and sporting events that are dramatic in character, have a mass popular appeal and international significance" (Roche 2000, 1).

Contemporary mega-events have two characteristics: they have a considerable impact on the host nation, and they attract extraordinary media coverage. As all three elements - mass media, mass sports, and the modern Olympic movement - emerged with a twentieth-century wave of "invented traditions" (Hobsbawm 1983,

1), sport and media studies have until now assumed national identity as the point of reference.

Baron de Coubertin revived the idea of the ancient Olympic Games late in the nineteenth century. As an aristocrat and product of the Age of Enlightenment, he gathered other like-minded men and formed a civil organization known as the

International Olympic Committee. The Olympics were intended to have a

"civilizing mission" in the modern world based on an ideology called

"Olympism," which would elevate sports into a broader idealistic and universalistic meaning: the harmonious development of humanity within a peaceful society, and a way of life based on Western-centric fundamental ethical principles of justice, fair play, non-discrimination, and international friendship.

Currently, there are more nations that are members of the International

Olympic Committee (205) than are members of the United Nations (192). The broadcasting of the opening of the 2008 Beijing Games reached approximately 4

15 billion people who were within reach of a television set - nearly two-thirds of the world's population converged to watch a singular event (see also chapter 1.3).

I will preface my examination on the interplay between the Olympic

Games and public relations by laying out the shifting position of the public within that Olympic framework. To do so, I shall situate the Games in the dynamic tension between four distinct categories: "ritual," "festival," "game," and

"spectacle": "Competition, consecration, enjoyment and wonder as played out in

Olympics are primary modes of human action, orchestrated, and in turn orchestrating, ideological, social, and psychological formations. These modes of action and experience are particularly condensed in discreet genres of cultural performance: games, rites, festivals, spectacles" (MacAloon 1984, 242). These four genres are distinctive forms of symbolic action that are distinguished from one another. While certain features are shared between some genres, others, like the role assigned to the audience, are in tension or in opposition.

a) Game

Sport as an institutionalized game involves fixed and public rules, definite goals, and unpredictable outcomes. Sporting events provide a universal dramatic form and language through which otherwise distant and uncommunicative peoples might appear and communicate with one another. The Olympics, as any sporting game, are self-contradictory since the Games both dramatize and equalize while being at the same time spontaneous and hierarchical, having at best three winners

16 and many losers. Athletes are set apart and audiences are asked to respond cognitively and emotionally in predefined categories of approval, disapproval, arousal, or passivity. Audience interaction with the athletes may enhance performance, but it is not meant to become part of its definition (MacAloon 1979).

b) Festival

From the Latin "festivus" meaning gay, merry, and lighthearted, festivals are defined as a joyous time of celebration, marked by special observances. To sustain its mood, a festival tries to contain itself as a defined time and space, set apart from the everyday world, retaining the tasteful aesthetics of festivity. Unlike the other categories, the festival frame blends the role of performer and audience, encouraging and requiring the active participation of the audience. The festival offers a "framework of transcendence" for and between all participants, including bringing all into an imagined "Olympic family."

c) Ritual

A ritual takes the dominant tendencies in a culture and makes them sacred by turning them into popular and repeatable forms through which members of the culture can celebrate their common values. The ritual element of the Olympic

Opening and closing ceremonies is embodied in symbols like the sacred Olympic flame and the five rings, as well as in rites like the torch relay and medal presentations, which include the flag-raising and national anthem ceremonies.

17 For the audience, rituals pose a clear distinction between sacred and profane, with the former providing the element of the "unreal" and "transcendent"

(MacAloonl974, 252). I suggest that the element of the "unreal" can be located again in the Olympics as an accumulation of "hyperreal" imagery as described in the concluding chapter of this thesis.

d) Spectacle

From the Latin "spectare" meaning "to look at," the spectacle is primarily visual and grand in scale. Spectacles institutionalize the distinctly separate roles of spectator and actor, compared to rituals, which are about participation, and festivals, which blend the role of performers and audience. Here, the spectator is

"liberated" - or confined to passivity - "All you have to do is watch!" The

spectacle is emotionally unpredictable, in contrast to the reliable affective structure of the festival. Unlike the festival, it can be either "fearful" or "joyous," as a broad range of emotions is generated within the spectacle frame.

Various forms of contradictions between Olympism's declared ideals of internationalism and individualism and its displays of nationalism have existed since its re-creation in 1896. Olympic rhetoric emphasizes that "it's the taking part that matters" and that the competition takes place between individuals, not nations.

But the presentation and the pageantry on display at the Olympics are distinctly nationalist. De Coubertin himself was aware of that problematic. For him, humanity existed not despite of but because of social and cultural diversity. He

18 wanted to make the world "safe for our differences" (Benedict 1989, 15).

Internationalism was compatible with patriotism rightly understood. De Coubertin also believed that through the playing of competitive games those contradictions would be resolved and there would be a dramatic revelation of a higher order where non-contradictory truths would occur.

However, despite De Coubertin's internationalist aim, the historical evolution of the Olympics became a confirmation of the national community instead of a desired affirmation of a "community-as-sacred" (Turner 1982, 13) that reached beyond national boundaries. Fuelled by nationalism, the Olympics acquired a distinct ideological role in Berlin in 1936, aided by the introduction of broadcast television and the invented "rite" of the torch relay. Both the spectacle and the ritual lent themselves to the projection of the desirable images promoted by

National Socialism, which retooled the Olympic event to become a propagandistic triumph with global reach.

Since the end of the Second World War, the "festival" and "ritual" frames of the Olympics have transformed into that of "spectacle." The audience, previously engaged in the festival and ritual that require its participation, has been reduced to passive "spectator." Henceforth, the Olympic spectacle platform would provide a continuous staging ground for political conflicts, e.g., the Cold War, as boycotts nearly paralyzed the Games in 1980 Moscow and 1984 Los Angeles, allowing for a penetration of the "stuff of ordinary life" (MacAloon 1982, 103) into the "public liminality" of the Games (Turner 1979, 465f).

19 With the ascendancy of television following the Second World War and the dominance of television in the Olympic spectacle developing simultaneously, the stakes have grown exponentially: Olympic host cities now quest for a once-in-a- life-time recognition and prestige and for a country's political system to establish its legitimacy. As the Games became a global success, Olympism aligned itself with the capitalist market system. Olympic sport became an expression of globalization, as it followed commercial rationality. Sponsorship has added yet another financial dimension. The budget of the International Olympic Committee for the period between 2005 and 2008 was U.S. $5,450,000,000 (IOC 2010), exceeding the GDP of more than eighty independent countries. That shift signifies the evolution of the Olympic Games from De Coubertin's nineteenth-century idealistic notion to a high stakes business venture of the twenty-first century.

For the Beijing Games, a dozen multinationals like Coca-Cola and

McDonald's paid U.S. $100 million each to become one of its global sponsors. In return, the International Olympic Committee granted them exclusive global marketing rights. An additional eleven companies, including Volkswagen and

Adidas, paid up to U.S. $50 million for the right to connect their products to the five rings as "official partners." Dozens of other companies had less expensive ties, from the "official supplier of wine" to the provider of "detergent for sheets, shorts, and other laundry" (campaign asia, 2008). Every Olympics generates enormous advertising activities, but the Beijing Games went a step further: it provided advertisers with the chance to reach a Chinese middle class of nearly 300

20 million consumers who come with a significant disposable income and who are ready to spend their currency on consumer goods.

The Olympics have turned into a Trojan Horse for commodification. Once again, the audience's primary role has shifted, this time from passive "spectator" to that of desired consumer-audience for the Olympic advertisers. Civil society actors like NGOs have entered the framework of the Games with their own aims to reach an Olympic audience that is unparalleled in scope and size. Now that the Olympic platform guarantees a maximum of worldwide exposure, it has become contested territory between a growing set of stakeholders, as elements of civil society challenge the dominant narratives by attempting to insert their own agendas.

This expanding area of contestation between several players - including mass media, advertisers, local host representatives, and civil society, all seeking a stage for expressing their views, sell their products or ideology - saw the growth and influence of public relations intersect with television's role as the primary global distributor of entertainment and information. The role of television is central to understanding the "Olympic media complex" - the broadcast rights for the 2006 Winter and 2008 Summer Games amounted to U.S. $2,570,000,000 (IOC

2010).

Since the emergence of TV as the dominant medium for entertainment in the latter part of the twentieth century, cultural skeptics have questioned whether

Olympic audiences are actually sharing an experience as a community or whether the concept of community exists only as an artificial and manufactured illusion.

21 How do audiences experience and negotiate the contradictory values projected in today's Olympic events?

In the following chapter I will argue that the international broadcasting of

Olympic Games now produces the experience of a "global village" (McLuhan

1960) on regular occasions. With the entire world watching as the games are played on a global stage, the Olympics have evolved into an all-embracing cultural and commercial event, dramatic in its character, with a wide popular appeal and an international importance. Running parallel to this is the desire of corporations to be associated with such events and the chance for cities and nations to globally communicate their own narratives. Because the diffusion of dominant and counter- narratives for the Olympics happens mainly through mass media, I will examine the reciprocal relationship between the Olympic Games and television, and resolve the tension between the four distinct categories of game, rite, festival, and spectacle by blending them into a single paradigm, the "media event."

22 1.2 Shifting Grounds - From Television to Cyberspace

"Take away sponsors and TV from sports and what is left? A finely tuned engine developed over 100 years, and no fuel."

- Dick Pound, Canadian IOC Member (cited in Hodder, 2001)

Olympics are televised to a global audience; television networks vie for broadcast rights; marketers promote their association to the Games via television commercials. Television doesn't "cover" sporting events as much use them as the

"raw material for the construction of an increasing ambitious kind of show"

(Richardson and Corner 1986, 488). Television clearly influences sports and is central to the Olympic Games, as they have become "the world's most prominent media event" (Gruneau 1987, 7f). The majority of people - now an estimated 20 billion cumulative global audience - experience the Olympics through a medium rather than through straight participation (Pound 1997). Electronic media, particularly television, are able to bring remote events simultaneously to a disparate population (Rothenbuhler 1985).

Today's Olympics exist because of television (Pound, 1997). The IOC now receives more than U.S. $1 billion dollars in revenue from television rights - making it dependent on these television rights for its power and legitimacy. As discussed in the previous chapter, television has become the dominant force in the presentation and orchestration of the Olympics, which in turn has created the

"media event."

23 Media analysts Katz and Dayan qualify the Olympics as a "media event broadcast on television that disrupt usual social routines, [they] have a beginning and end, feature heroic personalities, are highly symbolic, and accompanied by social norms like obligatory viewing. They are history making. They are mediated holidays, holy days experienced via the electronic technology of broadcasting"

(Katz and Dayan 1992,5).

The simultaneous worldwide mass spectatorship involved in viewing the

Olympic mega-events creates a unique cultural environment and provides unparalleled opportunities to dissolve distances in space and time. The broadcasting of these events on such a scale can produce moments where the viewer appears to belong to a "global village."

Anderson (2003) has depicted how "nations were consolidated, in part, by populations being able to collectively imagine themselves by the media technology of print capitalism" (28). Today, the broadcasting of the Olympic Games is an example of the medium of "synchronized collective imagination, the collective experience of 'being there,' in real time, seeing the same image" (Schrag 2009,

1084). That virtual presence goes further than the sports stadium, across the host city and country. One can argue that the 2008 Games were both the central and symbolic event in which the rest of the world imagined China's national community emerging as a visible challenge to the dominant political and economic status quo.

Pamela Rutledge (2009) contends that media technologies play a

24 significant role in people's understanding of the world through the selective distribution of information and in the way the media emphasize, package, and transmit content, which in turn frames and influences how the receiver perceives the meaning. Audiences rely on the information provided in the media to construct the core beliefs that define their view of the world. Core beliefs are central to the development of individual and group behaviours. Scholars have identified several core beliefs - vulnerability, superiority, distrust, injustice, and helplessness - that function at both the individual and group levels (Rutledge 2009). This thesis will examine how existing core beliefs of Chinese people and culture in their otherness were either confirmed or contested as various stakeholders attempted to capture and maintain the Olympic platform.

As described in the previous section, the Olympics emerged within a ritual framework and evolved into a festival and, since the latter part of the twentieth century, into a spectacle. The nature of its current presentation through mass media has turned it into a media event, which is still delivering "spectacular" images.

Debord (1995) applied the term 'spectacle' to MacAloon's in his work Society of the Spectacle, but does attach a very different meaning to the word compared to

MacAloon. Debord mounts an all-encompassing critique of contemporary society in a series of 221 short theses. Referring to a "negation of life" or "social life as mere appearance" (Thesis No. 69), Debord writes, "The power of the spectacle derives from its role as a social relation among people mediated by images"

(Thesis No. 4). According to Kellner's (1999) interpretation (Debord himself only

25 mentions sport once), Debord declared "the sports entertainment colossus to be responsible for the transformation of sports into a forum that sells the values, celebrities, and institutions of the media and consumer society" (129). Debord uses the notion of the spectacle as a metaphor in understanding consumer society, and at the same time goes beyond it: "The spectacle exceeds the cultural form of the mediated event: while the mass media provide its most glaring superficial manifestation, the spectacle is not just a mere visual deception produced by technology. It is a view of a world that has become objective, a social relation mediated by images and thus the ultimate commodity" (Debord 1995, Thesis No.

5).

For Debord, society as a whole had become a spectacle. Despite the linguistic similarity to MacAloon's "spectacle," I will continue to use the term

"media event," as delivering spectacular images. Applying this terminology in the concluding chapter of this thesis, I move away from Katz and Dayan's "media event" - the Olympics as mediated images - and Debord's "spectacle" - the

Olympic spectacle as ultimate commodity - towards Jean Baudrillard, who develops the idea of a "simulacrum" as being not a copy of the real event but as a truth in its own right: the hyperreal. In that context, a larger technological shift has taken place that needs to be considered, as it is repositioning the role of the

Olympic audience.

26 Cyberspace

"We are the future. We have no complicated history to deal with. Anti-CNN has had a stronger impact on people in the West than our own government's propaganda."

- Rao Jin, Founder of www.anti-CNN (conversation with author)

Lenskyji (2008) borrowed Noam Chomsky's terminology of "manufacturing consent" and "necessary illusions" to describe the established relationship between the Olympic industry and mainstream media, claiming that there is an absence of real debate because the public is not given the full complexity of the issues surrounding the Games. However, her observation, as well as that of Olympic critic Varda Burstyn, that "most people know little about the efforts and concerns of hundreds of citizens' groups around the Olympics" (2000, xii), is no longer supportable. By embracing the Internet and social media, civil society groups can mobilize more effectively than they ever could before, using their technological skills to counter the propaganda of the Olympic industry, governments, and mainstream media while providing a forum for public debate. The last decade has brought about fundamental change in both the "medium" and the "message." Atton and Couldry (2003) proclaim the Internet has increasingly become a key means of communication for dominant and grassroots political movements.

27 Although the most obvious links between the mass media and the Olympic

Games, especially television rights and its coverage, have attracted considerable scholarly attention (Rothenbuhler 1995; Wenner 1994, 1998), the increasing role of new media in the Olympic discourse has not been adequately explored. Even progressive fields of media studies and cultural studies have, until recently, paid relatively little attention to Internet activists who use their information technology expertise to organize for social change (Atton and Couldry 2003). Insights from that area of inquiry provided a useful starting point for an analysis of the communication battle of civil society groups taking on the Olympic industry's dominant narrative and to disseminate their own alternative narratives (Lenskyji

2008). That radical change continued with the Beijing Olympics, although I believe that the reason for that shift can only be partially explained by the emergence of new and social media, but, as I will argue in the next chapter, it is also rooted in traditional and deep-rooted prejudice within - but not exclusively -

Western societies against "the other" - China.

With the revolution in information technology, ever-increasing globalization, and over 500 million "friends" connected via Facebook, technology also provided immense mobilizing potential for the Games' host, and for cyber- nationalism. In the context of the Beijing Olympics, the Internet played a key role in promoting Chinese nationalism. Especially during the Tibet uprising and the international torch relay in the spring of 2008 (see chapter 3.1), nationalistic expressions of the Chinese "went viral" - through chat rooms, text messaging, and

28 blogging. The year China sought to project its preferred narrative of measured confidence and cyber-nationalism, a new feature of Chinese contemporary nationalism challenged the official narrative. Grassroots actors like the twenty- one-year-old Rao Chin, who founded the website anti-CNN mobilized which was not authorized but tolerated by the central government, reminded the Chinese not to forget history and the "century of humiliation" the West had caused the nation, instead portraying China as "the inheritor of a glorious civilization and a great ancient power" with a legitimate claim to the status of becoming a player on the global stage.

In this context, the significance of "shame" in East Asian societies, and its potential as a motivating force for change, requires further examination. Cultural context is necessary for understanding the role each emotion is likely to play and how it relates to identity. Bedford's (2002) ethnographic study established the dimensions of the experiences of guilt and shame for the Chinese people as they experience themselves as members of a group to a greater extent than people in the

West. A large part of their identity is concerned with their relationships to those around them. The central difference between Western and Chinese notions of self- concept leads to a differential sensitivity to shame. Chinese people are sensitive to being personally shamed by actions (or lack of action) on the part of others. When other people's actions infringe upon their sense of identity and order, it is enough to arouse a feeling of shame (Bedford 2002). Bedford provides support for the hypothesis that the actual experience of the emotion differs cross-culturally, since

29 the Chinese make discriminations that Westerners do not make, as in Western culture the concept of shame is less developed. Bedford concludes that in their the use of the terms guilt and shame, Western commentators are often ignorant of the roles and functions of guilt and shame in Chinese culture and the differential relations of guilt and shame to morality and identity (see also page 50 in this thesis), including the centrality of shame in Chinese culture as a conduit for instruction, moral growth, and reinforcement (Fung 1999; Li, Wang, and Fischer

2004).

30 1.3 How to Sell a Nation - Public Relations

and National Identity

"Because it's intangible, some people find public relations hard to grasp. It shouldn't be. PR is simply about gaining influence - identifying the people and organizations that have it and enlisting their support to achieve certain ends. The goal can be to sell a product or raise a country's profile but the common denominator is always influence."

- Winter Wright, American Chamber of Commerce in China, 2003

To achieve his vision of "Olympism" elevating sports into a broader idealistic and universalistic meaning, the founder of the Modern Olympics, Baron de Coubertin, foresaw that his ideal would need to be disseminated using mass communication and promotion and applying techniques that were not yet part of the vocabulary - namely, public relations. De Coubertin created the Revue

Olympique as the official publication of the International Olympic Committee to be an effective instrument in establishing the prestige and force of the Olympic

Games. But he was also aware that in order to spread the Olympic message, he would have to rely on established popular press. Since his Olympic dream was global, his network of allies had to be international. De Coubertin constructed a propaganda network among newspaper editors and journalists that reinforced and

31 embellished the message while retaining control of it (Brown 2001).

As the Games grew in popularity, Olympic host countries assumed this

"propaganda work." Throughout the twentieth century, this has led to an alliance between the IOC, major sponsors, and respective host countries to promote the

Olympic ideals. With their "pageantry of flags and national colours, the Olympics are examples of positing and promoting the circulation of national symbols and images as an international currency of identity, following the expectations of an implicit grammar of visual aesthetics, and provides for the reliable repetition of made-for-television images to be reproduced and circulated in positive association with the games" (Schrag 2009, 7).

Anderson's "imagined community" classifies the nation-state as "imagined and socially constructed" (Anderson 1983, 5). As the Olympic host country, China constituted not a physical existence but rather an identity built on images:

"Communities are to be distinguished, not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined" (Anderson 1983, 6).

Boulding defined the interconnection of "national images" and "international systems." Images are defined as "total cognitive, affective, and evaluative structure of the behavior unit, or its internal view of itself and the universe" (Boulding 1969 in Kunczik 1997, 48). He suggested that people believe that their image of the world is true even though these images are shaped by mass media. Jervis (1970) focused on the techniques utilized by national governments to create a "desired image" for international consumption, while Manheim (1984) investigated the

32 relationship between public relations, mass media, and created and existing national images by examining the phenomenon of "image management."

The idea that the image is not reality but a simple perception of reality defines the mission of image construction. Kunzcik (1997) acknowledges the potential of image-shaping as part of public relations, and identifies the image as

"something created and cultivated by its possessor, that is something that can be actively influenced by PR activities in maintaining that propaganda is the manipulation of symbols to influence attitudes" (40). He argues that foreign image cultivation involves public relations or propaganda as persuasive communicative acts (44). Within the theoretical framework of psychological studies, Kunzcik defines a national image as "the cognitive representation that a person holds of a given country, what a person believes to be true about a nation and its people"

(46). In cultivating a national image, both the past and elements of the present are considered crucial. According to Hodge and Louie, the strongest image-shapers are mass media in the process through which the nation is constructed" (Hodge and

Louie 1998, 11).

Cornelisson (2008) contents that sport mega-events like the Olympics or the World Cup of Soccer have gained increasing importance as a means to access global capital and to gain international visibility. The degree to which politics and sport can be combined in an elaborate exhibition and deployment of host resources, culture and other facets of distinction have made sport mega-events also an important instrument for policy-makers seeking to gain both political and

33 financial capital. Just like China, South Africa, the host of the FIFA World Cup in

2010, had to overcome an extensive degree of international skepticism, even though the issues were more about its ability to provide the infrastructure and capacity required for an event of this magnitude. Both host countries could look at the example of Germany hosting the World Cup in 2006, where "displays of football loyalty flowed over into unexpected and benign demonstrations of national pride" (Comelisson, 2008). Xenophobia in Gennany was displaced during the country's hosting of the tournament and served to successfully project a more affable image of Germany to the outside world.

As a primary theatre of image making, in 2008 the Olympic Games theatre of representation was China's, a country in need of an image makeover. The

McKinsey Global Institute (2006) argues that in the past quarter century, China's economy has evolved faster than any other nation's. This growth has pulled several hundred million citizens out of poverty, and state capitalism has reshaped its cultural and political environment. However, these changes have created a tension between the ruling party's openness to innovation while at the same time holding on to established ideological controls (McKinsey 2006). Chinese society is under increasing pressure to absorb the gap. As well, China's image in the world has not been adjusted to this new reality. The global view of China is out of date and permeated with prejudices and fears (Ramo 2007). At the same time, China's view of itself fluctuates between confidence and insecurity, caution and arrogance.

Chinese officials continue to struggle as they try to project an unmistakable image

34 of what the country stands for and where China hopes to go.

The Chinese government recognized the Olympic event as a political instrument toward the attainment of domestic and/or foreign policy goals - the fostering of national cohesion and to legitimize unpopular domestic policies.

Therefore, the hosting of the 2008 Olympics by the PRC would be an opportunity by Chinese authorities to seek the legitimization of the adapted form of capitalism which has been underpinning the PRC's enormous economic advances in the recent past, but also to enhance the countries particular variant of 'modernism' against the posed 'Western' alternative. This goal flows over into the foreign policy domain, since the event would be marked by contrasted expectations by

Western policy-makers who wanted to see the event provide some impetus toward democratization in the PRC. However, the question remained, which audience, foreign or domestic, would be dominant in pursuing either goal?

The image of openness and progress that the Chinese government tried to project in the 1980s came to a dramatic end in 1989. The Tiananmen Square massacre, officially referred to as the "June 4th incident," was an image disaster.

Until that moment, the Chinese government and state-owned media had been solely responsible for the maintenance of the image of the Chinese nation (Ramo

2007). With Tiananmen Square, it looked for help from Western communications consultants to help with the crisis. A crisis that was embodied in the single image of a man holding up a column of tanks and that was to become an iconic representation of a nation in turmoil (Ramo 2007; see also chapter 2.3).

35 Souice lutp Vchinadigitaltimes net/wp-content/up1oadsf2009/06/89-63_tank_man

Hill & Knowlton was the company of choice for the Chinese government

in the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square uprising to assist the country in improving its global image. Hill & Knowlton's strategy involved directly lobbying key members of the U.S. Congress and hiring sympathetic academics to appear at

conferences and write articles that were placed on the op-ed pages of leading

American newspapers sympathetic to China. Hill & Knowlton also prepared

"upbeat promotional items" for distribution to educational organizations, to

encourage U.S. engagement in China without mentioning the problematic of human rights or any other potentially controversial issues.

The ongoing process of requesting Western PR help to re-brand the nation

continued during China's bidding process for the 2000 Olympics, which China lost to Sydney, and the repeat bid for the 2008 Games, which promised to provide

China with a premier stage on which to showcase its brand and improve the many negative perceptions still plaguing its performance (Ramo 2007).

In this chapter I present some of the historical and contemporary political circumstances that specifically surrounded the 2008 Beijing Olympics. These circumstances reflect what Chinese policy analyst Joshua Ramo (2007) calls

China's branding problem. He breaks this problem down into three points: first,

36 China's national image was misaligned with its current complex reality. Second, the transformation of China's national image into something sustainable and coherent was just as important an element in the evolution of the country as any executed reforms. And third, "the idea of newness as a core piece of the Chinese brand offered a way to open to the world and a path for foreigners to try to concentrate on the real, emerging China instead of the one they are pre-conditioned to see" (Ramo 2007, 43).

China's insecurity about itself has deep historical roots that took hold during the country's "humiliation" at the hands of foreigners, beginning with the Opium

Wars in the nineteenth century and continuing with the racist treatment of Chinese immigrants to the United States and Canada in the 1800s (Cohen 1997). It continued with Japan's invasion prior the Second World War and was compounded by Japan's quick economic ascent after the war, while China's own economic development lagged.

This inferiority complex evolved into an essential segment in its collective identity: bainian guochi - "100 years of national humiliation" became a common slogan. To ignore China's failures as a nation was considered to be unpatriotic by the Chinese themselves. Since then, China's historians and ideologues have "dug up the country's past sufferings to serve the political, ideological, rhetorical, and/or emotional needs of the present" (Cohen 1998, 10).

Sun Yat-sen described China as being "a heap of loose sand that had experienced several decades of economic oppression by the foreign powers"

37 (Schell 2008, 127). Chiang Kai-shek wrote: "During the past 100 years, the citizens of the entire country, suffering under the yoke of the unequal treaties which gave foreigners special 'concessions' and extra-territorial status in China, were unanimous in their demand that the national humiliation be avenged" (in

Schell 2008). With the founding of the People's Republic of China, Mao Zedong declared, "Ours will no longer be a nation subject to insult and humiliation" (Mao

1948). Still, highlighting their historical role as the victim encouraged recent

Chinese leaders to rely on "the moral authority of their past suffering" (Gries 2005, in Schell 2008). This has continued to the present day. Even in 2001, the year

China was awarded the Olympic Games, its National Congress passed a law proclaiming an official "National Humiliation Day" (People's Daily 2001).

However, delegates couldn't agree on any particular date, as so many historical dates had been proposed.

Beijing's pre-Olympic campaign turned out to be a theatre of image construction in which both Chinese and foreign actors engaged in the production of their own images of China, each serving their own purpose. By adopting

Ramo's frame for understanding China's image problem as a branding problem, this discussion sets the stage for my analysis of how the projected national images embedded within the visual narrative surrounding the Beijing Olympics functioned in the Chinese leadership's attempts to re-brand China.

The Olympics, given their spectacular nature and worldwide media attention, are the premier event in which to engage in nation branding and other

38 types of international image "work." The Central Communist Party (CCP) and the

Beijing Organizing Committee for the Olympic Games (BOCOG) - the bodies most responsible for planning and executing the Beijing Olympics - invested more than U.S. $40 billion in infrastructure, venue construction, and marketing promotions for the 2008 Olympics (Broudehoux 2007). Since most commentators have described the stake for China as its reputation on the international stage, I will question if the relevance of hosting the Games was more of an exercise in legitimating the Chinese Communist Party in the eyes of its own people than a projection to the outside world. In either case, China's preferred main narrative was to present itself as a developed, prosperous, modern, and powerful country.

The Communist Party was determined to turn the mega-event into the affirmation of a Chinese renaissance under the theme slogan "One World, One

Dream." For China, in contrast to most other Olympic hosts, the 2008 Games were also intended as presenting a narrative not about what it currently believes it is, but about what it desires itself to be in the future (Hagan 2008). Symbols and images occupy a central position in the representation of the collective identity (Hagan

2008), so Beijing's Olympic campaign became an example of how to examine the symbolic characteristics in the creation of an imagined national identity. A country's national identity is an imagined, multi-sited discourse marked by competing ideologies and relations of power: externally, a country's image or its

"nation brand" is the sum of the diverse ways of experiencing another country and its products, ideas, and culture (Hagan 2008). The "nation brand" reflects the

39 values of a country's elite, as it is they who possess the power to decide what aspects of the country's history and culture are highlighted, silenced, or ignored.

One way that consumers typically encounter brands is visually - in logos, emblems, and advertisements. The Olympics are about visual spectacle and visual communication. Therefore, by deconstructing how the images, themes, and motifs in China's Olympic visual narrative created a vision of a certain "nation brand" or

"brand China," we can provide a better understanding of what narrative China intended to project.

Tom Doctoroff, CEO of the advertisement agency J. Walter Thompson in

China, called China's opportunity "the most ambitious brand building exercise in history" (in Berkovitz et al. 2005, 8). It was considered one of the largest challenges to face a public relations company. The task required a purposeful and consolidated campaign that would engage a Western audience to believe in a "new

China." The campaign was challenging because the country came up against a system of Western mass media dominated by the framework of Western ideology.

As well, a host of global civil society actors had set out to construct connections between the Olympics and a vast number of contested issues. While traditional

Chinese propaganda continued with "positive reporting" traditions, and Western communications consultants were invited to introduce new PR strategies, Western civil society groups and the mass media intensively exploited the human rights narrative. Multiple actors pursuing diverse agendas sought to define the story of the 2008 Games by invoking issues such as Tibet, Taiwan, Darfur, animal rights,

40 press freedom, Falung Gong, Korean refugees, housing activists, environmentalists, copyright laws, homelessness, Christians, child labour activists, food safety, product safety, Zimbabwe, the one-child policy, and so on and so on.

Prior to the 2008 Games, the three most prevalent and damaging views of

China's international image were (1) the lack of human rights, (2) low-quality manufacturing of goods, and (3) a poor environmental record (Hagan 2008). These negative views were directly addressed in the Olympic's three narratives: (1) the

"People's Olympics" dealt with China's image as a centre of human rights abuse by building on China's rich culture and heritage; (2) the "High-Tech Olympics" countered China's image as a centre of low-quality goods and cheap manufacturing; and (3) the "Green Olympics" addressed China's image as a country affected by environmental degradation (BOCOG 2008).

The absence of any negative or undesired characteristics in the projected national narrative is not just a simple illustration of the socially constructed nature of "brand China," as all host nations portray themselves in the best light (Ramo

2007). As a "nation brand" is the extension of a country's constructed national identity, gaps in the Olympic narrative tailored for image-building during the

Olympics is the rational and deliberate intention to achieve particular political and economic goals.

Nation-branding practitioner Simon Anholt (2006) believes in the idea that staging international mega-events such as the Olympics can raise a nation brand's profile, but he agrees with Ramo that they are not a means by which countries can

41 "whitewash" the problems afflicting their brands. Because of the crucial role that credibility and the audience play in any brand-marketing campaign - whether for a corporation or a country - audiences must believe the narrative is credible if they are to accept the brand's pitch (Twitchell 2000). In marketing, the importance of credibility and audience perceptions relates to the country-of-origin effect, and it is certainly applicable to the re-branding of China's negative international reputation.

Without sufficient credibility, the projected national images in the Communist

Party's visual narrative would not achieve the desired changes in China's image.

Ramo describes it this way:

China's leaders needed to avoid the temptation to paper over China's real identity with politically palatable, saleable images that don't correspond to reality. To assume old-style broadcast propaganda campaigns was an out of date idea. Chinese who solely pin their hopes on the 2008 Olympics to remake the nation's image are similarly making a miscalculation. The only single events that remake national images tend to be bad ones. And positive events, no matter how large, can only impact the image of a nation if there is a framework for people to fit that image into. (Ramo 2007, 18)

In terms of public relations and branding, China has evolved significantly over the last decades. Since its socialist revolution in 1949, Chinese propaganda followed the tradition of Marxist media theory, in which all information being distributed must be in accordance with the all-encompassing party. In Chairman

Mao's words, those working in the media had to be "good at translating the Party's policy into action of the masses, to be good at getting not only the leading cadres but also the broad masses to understand and master every movement and every

42 struggle we launch" (Mao 1948, in Li 1979, 213).

With China's internal media landscape, this directive is very much still in effect. Because of the hierarchical relationship between the central government and the Chinese media, the coverage prior to the Games by Xinhua and China Daily, the two major publications, functioned as promotional tools of the state version, offering "presentations of scripted events and preferred interpretations" (Chang

2003, in Li 2005, 87).

According to Wernick's notion of promotional culture, the Chinese government adopted "marketing techniques from advertising and public relations practices in order to re-position government publicity and respond to the negative implication of the word 'propaganda' in Western society" (Wernick 2007, vii).

One step was to adopt new terminology that led to significant symbolic adjustments in the officially approved translations of key terms. The English translation for "propaganda" (xuanchuan) was changed into "publicity," and

"propaganda for audiences abroad" (duiwai xuanchuan) was replaced by

"international communication." The "State Council's Office of Foreign

Propaganda" changed its label to "the Office of Information" (Wernick 2007, vii).

A central part in creating a media strategy that would reach audiences in the West was to enlist the support of a credible Western player. China's leadership transferred the task of an "image design" to a Western public relations company with a global reach. The goal was to replace the single image that had provided the world with a negative iconic representation of China in 1989: the "Tank Man" of

43 Tiananmen Square. The business of PR as the art and craft of "relating to the public" had only emerged in China that decade.

Just as the Chinese advertisement market has grown into a U.S. $11 billion industry and now stands as the second largest advertising market in Asia (Jones

2002), so too did public relations experience a rapid growth, even though it came to China many years after modern advertising. Not until 1985 did Hill & Knowlton open an office in the country. At that time the Chinese business community and the political leadership had no concept of the need to manage a public image or to build brand awareness. Neither was there an appreciation for basic PR devices like the issuing of press releases or holding of news conferences. Relationship building with media organizations remained rudimentary (Kynge 2002). Within thirty years, public relations as a sector in the Chinese economy grew at an annual rate of between 30 and 50 per cent.

Public relations itself came out of capitalism's growth in the United States during the 1920s. Edward Bernays, considered "the father of PR" (Ewen 1996), combined French philosopher Gustav Le Bon's thinking about the "fear of the masses" and Walter Lippman's need for elites to lead and educate the common man with the theory of his Viennese uncle, Sigmund Freud, regarding the subconscious and irrational motivations of human behaviour. Bernays argued that it would be possible to "control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing it. Theory and practice have combined with sufficient success to permit us to know that in certain cases we can effect some change in

44 public opinion, just as the motorist can regulate the speed of his car by manipulating the flow of gasoline" (Ewen 1996, 169).

PR grew into a professional practice that was concerned with maintaining the public image of any type of organization or any national state. It was defined as

"the art and social science of analyzing trends predicting their consequences, counseling organizational leaders, and implementing planned programs of action, which will serve both the organization" (Assembly of Public Relations

Associations, in Zhao 1999, 1). Public relations strategies include any of the following:

• ensuring that client-adverse stories carry modifying statements

• keeping positive stories in the spotlight through active stewardship and

constant communication with the media

• building rapport with journalists and utilizing the full range of communications

options

• being highly visible, creating platforms such as speaking tours and roundtables

to transform the client into a modern, transparent, and effective trustee

• placing op-ed pieces in key newspapers and organizing editorial board

meetings with key global media outlets

• identifying and media-training a team of credible third-party supporters to

establish a system of message consistency

• identifying the most vocal potential critics and strategize accordingly

45 Hill & Knowlton won the contract from BOCOG to assist in marketing

"brand China" to the international community, to counter stereotypical images that

Western audiences continued to associate with Chinese culture, and to counter

China's opponents in their attempt to occupy the Olympic platform and create a counter-narrative.

The main opponents of the official narrative were Western "activists."

Public relations literature defines activists as "collections of individuals organized to exert pressure on an organization on behalf of a cause" (Grunig 1992, 504). As outlined in the "Limitations" section in chapter 1.0, scholars have only slowly started to recognize activists as serious PR practitioners of their own, whose tools and strategies have become increasingly sophisticated (Karagianni and Cornehssen

2006). I will expand on this observation in the next chapter as I examine one civil society actor that would be awarded the gold medal for occupying the Olympic platform if that category had existed. I am referring to Dream for Darfur and its spokesperson, Hollywood actress, Mia Farrow.

46 2.1 "Genocide Olympics" -

Dream for Darfur and Group SJR

Source http://www feer com/tales/wp-content/uploads/2007/09/skulls jpg

Dream for Darfur (DFD) was designed as a time-limited NGO campaign which aimed to use the Olympic Games as a way to pressure China into using its influence with the regime in Sudan to bring security to the Darfur region. The campaign's narrative was to brand the Olympics as the "Genocide Olympics." The campaign began in May 2007 and was completed in August 2008 when the Games concluded. DFD believed that lobbying China to take action in the lead-up to the

Games "would help stave off further collapse in Darfur as China was worried about its image before the Games" (DFD 2008).

Darfur is a region of Sudan where, according to human rights observers,

200,000 people have died and more than 2.5 million have been displaced because

47 of a civil war that has been waged between the government of President Al Bashir and rebel groups aiming to overthrow him. The crisis emerged in the 1970s over competition for natural resources. It is alleged that the Bashir regime is actively supporting an Arab militant organization, the Janjaweed, in its campaign of ethnic cleansing in the region (Wax 2005).

DFD claims that even though China plays no active role in the armed conflict, China's close economic ties with Sudan allowed the Bashir regime to ignore calls for the interventions that Western governments and human rights groups demanded. The Sudanese government failed to comply with the UN

Security Council's resolution condemning the Khartoum regime and requesting to allow international peacekeepers into the region (Foreign Policy 2007). The DFD campaign's intention was to "belie" China's claim of exercising a policy of non­ interference based on its argument that it did not want to get involved in the humanitarian crisis in Darfur. DFD also wanted to "introduce a new style of advocacy to the anti-genocide movement and help expand and strengthen the grassroots anti-genocide constituency" (DFD 2007) while it had the opportunity to do so. Jill Savitt, executive director of DFD, explained:

We are seeking to make sure civilians on the ground in Darfur are protected. We will leverage the Olympic Games and the worldwide attention they come with against the Chinese. We know that once the Games are over that window of opportunity will be closed again.

Dream for Darfur's central campaign challenge was to generate news and public debate that linked Darfur to China and to pressure China to take action by

48 threatening continued negative public exposure prior to the Olympics. In May

2007, the link between China and Darfur was not widely known. Measured on an ongoing basis, the indicator of the ongoing campaign's success was to be "the number of action emails generated, the traffic to our web site, and the number of organizations who affiliate with us, participate in our activities, or launch their own initiatives" (DFD 2007). The DFD budget was about U.S. $1.2 million that was raised from personal donations and grants from philanthropic organizations.

As an overriding principle, DFD used a "bank shot" strategy in its publicity campaign (in billiards, a bank shot is in the setting up of a shot so that the ball is propelled into a pocket indirectly). That is, the campaign took direct shots at targets that had some indirect stature with China because of the upcoming

Olympics: the International Olympic Committee (IOC), National Olympic

Committees like the USOC, corporate sponsors, Steven Spielberg, the artistic director of the opening ceremonies, selected athletes, the media, as well as U.S. and UN policymakers. DFD mapped out a customized plan to reach each of these audiences, calling on each actor to pressure the Chinese government on Darfur or risk tarnishing the Olympics. Most of DFD's targets were chosen on the basis that they would not want to risk having their names associated with the term

"genocide" for fear of damaging their reputations. DFD believed that this would motivate them to take some form of action on the issue.

One component of the bank shot strategy was to question the Olympic corporate sponsors "if they [would] remain silent in the face of genocide in Darfur."

49 Another was to issue a worldwide call to "turn off the sponsors' advertisements and hand out a report card for each of the sponsors' actions. "It will feel better to drink Pepsi than to drink Coke" (Jill Savitt), as Coca-Cola was a main sponsor of the Beijing Games and its competitor Pepsi was not. (The grades for the sponsors can be found in Appendix D.)

Jill Savitt engaged M+R Strategic Services, a consultancy specializing in high-tech campaigning, to provide advice on a public relations strategy. The goal was to focus the campaign and galvanize a grassroots insurgency. M+R suggested gaining access to other organizations' databases of activists so DFD could distribute information through mass e-mail messages and social-networking websites like Facebook. The message had to be kept short and easy to comprehend: "Genocide bad. China helping." As Savitt explained:

Our campaign is all designed to get media coverage. We target the media to make them our ally. That's how pressure is created. Make news pegs for reporters. The same message again and again. We are like David with a slingshot. We won't fell China, but at least we want to wound them as the Olympic host country. They must understand if they are not moving on Darfur they will face a vigorous, unrelenting and omnipresent campaign to shame them.

However, as described by Bedford (2003, 38), the cultural significance of

"shame" for the Chinese people differs widely from the understanding of a

Western commentator like Ms. Savitt and therefore could result in different responses to efforts at shaming by outsiders relative to what these activists expected.

50 DFD drew on the celebrity status of its spokesperson, Mia Farrow, to boost its popularity. The organizers took advantage of the fact that in today's media environment celebrities can capture the public imagination more so than politicians can. In November 2007, DFD hired a second public relations firm, Group SJR, to execute a communications strategy that would further raise the profile of the

Darfur crisis and, in particular, the role of China in supporting the genocide.

Founded in 2004, Group SJR is headquartered in New York City and provides specialized communications services to leading public companies, fast-growing digital startups, and notable public figures. The firm works "under the radar," that is, it does not seek a public profile for itself but works behind the scenes to design strategic media relations campaigns, create brand apps and editorial content sites, and run market and research campaigns for its clients. SJR is made up of a diverse group of PR professionals, pollsters, bloggers, speechwriters, advertisers, and guerrilla marketers who "examine communication challenges to deliver both strategic and public affairs expertise combined with an ability to secure media results" (Group SJR corporate website 2008). Jonathan Freedman, an SJR consultant, explained the challenges and opportunities facing the DFD campaign:

The difference between the Chinese and us is that we are running a campaign while the other team has their hands tied. They can't respond to political issues. The media is not interested in press releases. You need a good point-of-view. Talk narrative. Have a good story. DFD approached us because they weren't getting headlines. The biggest challenge is to keep re-telling their story. You can't recycle, so you got to come up with new ways. It is really a series of campaigns, and it can't just repeat the same message. Keep the media interested who don't care about killings in Africa.

51 It was also a hard sell to link Darfur with China and the Olympics. Overall, we have chosen an aggressive approach as it was recommended to us that quiet diplomacy was not the way to go in this case. That's why we went for the Genocide Olympics brand. Mia Farrow took that right into Hong Kong.

Freedman accompanied Farrow and Savitt on their highly publicized alternative torch relay (see selected audio-visual material, with download links provided). The success of that campaign did not go unnoticed in Beijing, as Frances Sun of Hill &

Knowlton, the Games corporate public relations agency, explains:

We knew Mia Farrow spoke at FCC in HK. The Chinese complained to me: "Mia Farrow is a star and more attractive. They listen to every word they say. The Western media don't hear us, whatever we say." I told the Chinese to be more angry and more emotional. Just as you need to be first in the headlines, otherwise you lose out in the battle. That does not come natural to the Chinese. There are lots of differences in communications between the East and the West.

Dream for Darfur's major opponent, it turned out, was not the Chinese government but another activist group; one with the same target but a different agenda and strategy.

52 2.2 "A Pebble in the Chinese Shoe" -

Students for a Free Tibet (SFT)

The image that the Students for a Free Tibet wanted to disseminate during the 2008 Olympics was one that would demonstrate the determination of the people of Tibet against the Chinese occupation.

Source: http://www.topnews.in/amnestv-savs-more-l-000-remain-detention-tibet-248380

The Chinese government has laid claim to Tibet since the thirteenth century, when the landlocked country fell under Chinese rule. In 1912, Tibetans declared their independence from China, although the Tibetan government was not officially recognized as independent until 1951. China invaded militarily again in

1959 and forced the Dalai Lama, the spiritual leader of the Tibetans, into exile.

Since then, China has imposed harsh sanctions on Tibet's religious, cultural, and political practices. The Dalai Lama declared that for fifty years the occupiers were waging a "cultural genocide on Tibetans" (The Independent 2008). Resistance continued and led to the popular uprising by Tibetans against China's oppressive role in March 2008. The uprising seemed to have been carefully timed to coincide

53 with the Olympic Games, which were going to be held in Beijing five months later, in order to achieve the best possible exposure. The tactic worked. As images of killed and injured monks reached the West, calls for a boycott of the Olympics came from both Western governments and from activists in the streets.

Activists for Tibetan independence had been struggling to get their voices heard for sixty years. In following the reporting on Tibet in the last decade, I observed that Western journalists didn't consider it a "fresh issue" and the violence didn't happen in front of the cameras, which would have given the conflict some newsworthy urgency. Just as it did for Dream for Darfur, the awarding of the 2008

Olympics to China provided a window of opportunity for the Tibetans to assert their own narrative and present their issues to the world. The exiled Tibetans decided that the Olympics should be the single focus of their activities for the next one and a half years. The focus on the Olympics brought an unparalleled degree of professional coordination and media focus among the Tibet support groups.

The NGO Students for a Free Tibet (SFT) was the most effective and prolific civil society actor to step into the anti-Olympic breach. With 650 chapters worldwide, the New York-based organization had a highly visible leader - Lhadon

Tethong, a Canadian-born ethnic Tibetan:

We realized seven years ago, when China got the Olympics, what an incredible opportunity this would be to shine a spotlight on the terrible treatment of Tibetans. Young people really got it; they've been signing up and telling us that they have a real determination to push the bar, to make this the year when there's some change for Tibet. They know that every media organization in the world is going to be focused on the Olympics, so for years we've realized that what we have to do is to be creative and find ways to insert the

54 Tibet issue into that frame.

SFT exemplified what Reber and Berger (2005) describe as a "PR savvy activist organization." Despite its youthful membership and leadership, SFT's outreach strategy was sophisticated and strategic. Like Dream for Darfur, SFT embraced the Internet as a low-cost communication channel and effectively expanded its interactive features for both its supporters and the media. The SFT website was supplemented by two Students for a Free Tibet Facebook pages where supporters could sign up to support the cause that brought in 37,900 members, and a YouTube account where organizers posted reports about and footage of the protests. The SFT website provided a comprehensive guide to successful campaigning, including "how to create a strategic campaign" and "action ideas."

The group also organized week-long "action camps" that included workshops on grassroots fundraising, political theatre, and campaign planning (Clifford 2008).

Targeting the mainstream media as an effective tool to get their message out and to ensure that their message stayed on point required a training program that would prepare every SFT supporter to act as the organization's media spokesperson. SFT held conferences for members of other pro-independence Tibet groups that focused on media training. The sessions covered topics from "how to give a good sound bite" to "answering reporter questions strategically." This author attended several of SFT's media training sessions in Toronto (see accompanying visual material).

Lhadon Tetong explains the importance of media training:

The Chinese are on a propaganda offensive with their "One World, One Dream" slogan. It really means "One China" and no to Tibet. So

55 we have to counter them. The only space we can counter them in is the court of public opinion. We come up with the most media savvy campaign that is attractive, using the right moment. Olympics are such a moment. And yes, we are using the media to our advantage. It helps that the Dalai Lama is charismatic. We have young creative people who find new ways to get our message out. The media is the main tool we have. We use them and they use us. Every time they say Olympics we make them think "Tibet." It's a battle of perceptions, a propaganda war. That's why we do media training.

Melanie Raoul was a media boot camp instructor for SFT in 2008. She opened a media boot camp session with these suggestions:

The media! We all kind of know why we want to use them. The key is how do we insert Tibet into the Olympic message. It requires all our preparation as the best way to be successful. That is why we have these media training sessions. When answering questions, make sure you insert your answer eloquently. Always remember what your main messaging points are, personalize them, make use of your ethnic heritage, but focus on the general picture: Olympics and Tibet equals suffering. That's why Tibet is an issue right now. Control the interview and content. But be careful, as you don't have much time. Get the emotion across and make it stick! Politicians hide behind sound bites, but you can afford to show emotions. Canadian media are usually more sympathetic. U.S. media are much more fickle. You got 5 to 10 seconds to make your point!

Despite their youthful appearance and forward thinking, the Free Tibet activists had their historical burdens to contend with - one of which was the traditional Western prejudice against the people of the Far East. To exemplify this,

I have chosen to examine one piece of print media used by the civil society actor in their media campaign. The year prior to the Games, the UK chapter of Free Tibet, a sister organization to SFT, produced a postcard so people could express their opposition to the completion of the Gormo-Lhasa railway line that was being built

56 to connect China's mainland to Lhasa, the capital and heart of Tibet. According to the Free Tibet Campaign, the railway "helps to strengthen China's military and political grip over the region" (Free Tibet 2007). Activists and supporters were asked to send the postcard to British holiday tour companies that were promoting tourism travel on the railway.

The postcard by the British chapter of SFT featured a drawing as seen below, which asks the viewer, "Which side are you on?" One side depicts serene- lookmg Tibetans on a peaceful hillside in traditional dress. On the other side,

Chinese soldiers are riding towards them on a train that emits thick grey smoke, which contributes to the creation of smog. The Chinese are depicted with a sickly yellow pallor and almost featureless faces, except for their expressive buck-teeth.

In striking contrast, the Tibetans are depicted with calm and peaceful faces and gentle smiles. Their skin tone is a pale white colour. Where the Tibetan characters have open expressive eyes, the two Chinese soldiers are featured with diagonal slits for eyes.

57 The Free Tibet postcard displays a degree of rhetoric and visual imagery that draws on racial stereotypes. Starting with the Western hysteria of the "Yellow

Peril" invasion, to the late-nineteenth-century narrative of the "sick man of Asia," to the depictions of the Japanese during the Second World War, the people of the

Far East have traditionally been shown with exaggerated physical features such as buck-teeth, slit eyes, and yellow-tinted skin (Keen 1986). But here is one major difference: while the depiction of the Chinese in the Tibet postcard graphic is frozen in the ethnography of another propaganda war, the Tibetans, even though

Asian peoples as well, are portrayed with distinct Western features.

For decades, Tibet has symbolized a sought-after desire of peace and tranquility for Westerners disillusioned by modernity. Since James Hilton's depiction of the country as a "Shangri-la" in his 1933 novel Lost Horizon, Tibet has become an image of pure existence and mystical purity in contrast to Western and (by now) Chinese consumerism. This fabled place is a wonderland where man and nature coexist in harmony as do several ethnic groups. It is a land of eternally young inhabitants blessed with magnificent landscapes shrouded in mysticism

(Llamas and Belk 2011). Tibetan culture offers an untarnished and coherent narrative to the materialism dominating Western societies. New Age interpretations of the Tibetan Buddhist teachings and Tibetan medicine, travelogues, and numerous coffee table and popular books foster a continued romanticization of life in pre-communist Tibet. Many Westerners appear to yearn

58 for a tranquil place that has not been destroyed by humanity's quest for material goods. The tendency for Tibetan activist groups to romanticize the past is largely driven by the awareness that many Westerners desire the existence of that mythical

Shangri-La.

The invasion of Tibet by China was and still is represented as an undifferentiated mass of godless Communists overrunning a peaceful land devoted only to ethereal pursuit. Tibet embodies the spiritual and the ancient, China the material and the modern. Tibetans are superhuman, Chinese are subhuman. (Lopez 1998, 7)

In an anthropological context, Asian stereotypes in Western media are the products of centuries of exploitation and marginalization. James Moy (2003) suggests that American prejudice against Asians originally evolved out of a

European prejudice constructed out of a Western need to differentiate itself from the East. For Europeans around the fifteenth-century, the process of categorizing differences, constructing and labelling foreign identities, became a means of establishing and maintaining a sense of dominance. For the colonial group, the development of stereotypes has the ability to reduce diverse identities into a binary relationship of "what is us" and "what is not us." Perpetually accentuating the differences between colonials and "the other," the West can construct and continually reaffirm its own sense of dominance. Moy suggests that the West is in constant fear of similarity, because the recognition of similarity would in turn offer the possibility of equal standing between itself and the out group, robbing the West of their claim to dominance. The process of categorization is a step towards oppression.

59 Can the postcard campaign in question be called "cartoon politics"? Is it about avoiding serious debate and instead taking refuge in a simplistic moral condemnation? Anthropologist Mahmood Mamdani laments "a reduction of a complex political context to a morality tale unfolding in a world populated by villains and victims who never trade places and so can always and easily be told apart" (Mamdani 2009, 67).

Aside from building on existing images of Chinese and the recognition that

Western audiences have the longing to regain a lost "Shangri-La," Free Tibet groups like SFT mounted an effective public relations campaign that included their own celebrity star, the charismatic Dalai Lama, who gave open and willing access to the media. They were also successful in encouraging the internal opposition within Tibet to speak to a European and North American audience. Free Tibet protesters used English-language slogans like "Tibet Needs You." Tibetans were wearing headbands sporting the phrase "Free Tibet" - the favoured slogan of

Western supporters. One could spot posters with the message "Beijing 2008: A

Celebration of Human Rights Violations" in India and Nepal. Its instant global distribution via cellphone technology suggests that the demonstrations were aimed predominantly at Western audiences.

In comparison, the Chinese government's investment in its narrative that

Tibet's development and growth depended on Chinese intervention could not compete with the strong campaign mounted by the civil society groups (Magnier

2008). China's prevailing narrative about Tibet has been that China liberated it

60 from feudalism and helped it to advance. This narrative had been established domestically, but it has never been accepted in the West. China's ability to promote its actions internationally has been hindered by its historical credibility gap with Western audiences, which continues to be reinforced by an anachronistic use of language, as expressed by the secretary of Tibet's Communist Party, Zhang

Qingli (New Republic 2008):

The Dalai [Chinese officials don't grant their enemies the honour of calling them "lama"] is a wolf in a monk's robe, a monster with a human face but the heart of a beast; we are in a fierce battle of blood and fire with the Dalai clique, a life and death battle between us and the enemy.

The Chinese leadership recognized that international audiences were not going to be convinced by a narrative that doesn't allow the possibility of genuine discontent in Tibet, and open-minded Party officials, like Zeng Jian-hui of the Propaganda

Ministry of the CCP Central Committee (Zeng 1993), called for bold steps forward:

We should reinforce the work of utilizing the power of foreign propaganda. Therefore, we should be more open-minded in our external propaganda work. By arranging foreign journalists and other people to go to visit we should be able to use foreign forces to carry out our external propaganda and gradually change their minds about us through what they have seen with their own eyes.

Eventually, the more reform-minded elements in the Communist Party recruited

"foreign propaganda" to their own cause - to put the Chinese narrative into a more favourable light for the 2008 Games. That goal required a bold and clear public relations strate

61 2.3 "Politics and Sports Don't Mix" -

BOCOG and Hill & Knowlton

"The Beijing Olympics will not be about sport, it will be about creating a super brand called 'China,' and the brand essence is progress."

- Anonymous Chinese Marketing Expert, 2007

Over the past 50 years, a considerable transition in the People's Republic of

China's relationship with the IOC has taken place. Because of the issue of Taiwan a period of controversy dominated that relationship since the establishment of the

People's Republic of China in 1949, when the IOC endorsed a "two Chinas" solution, accepting both countries as legitimate representatives of the Chinese people. In protest, the Olympic Committee of the PRC suspended its relationship with the IOC in 1958, which left only citizens of Taiwan to compete in the

Olympic Games. But after 20 years of controversy and negotiation, the IOC recognized PR China as the only legitimate representative at the International

Olympic Committee in 1979. The policy change became an early expression of the

"one country, two systems" policy as proposed by Chinese Premier Deng

Xiaoping. Taking into account the humiliating experiences in the modern history of China, "recalling all the suffering and disgraces imposed by the foreign powers,

China was so eager to try its best to achieve success in the international sports arena" (Hai, 2002). As the country returned to the international Olympic family for the Olympic Games in 1984, competitive sports in China were re-oriented towards

62 Olympic disciplines. Since 1984, that approach produced many medal winning performances by Chinese athletes. What was missing was to become its host.

Beijing's right to host the 2008 Olympic Games was not the country's first attempt at becoming an Olympic city. An earlier bid to host the 2000 Olympics failed in 1991 in the shadow of the Tiananmen Square uprising, and amid concerns expressed by the IOC that the country would not guarantee journalistic freedom for the 20,000 foreign journalists expected to attend or the right to protest and general freedom of expression to Chinese citizens during the duration of the Games. The inherent contradiction to the parallel claim by both the IOC and the Chinese that

"sports and politics don't mix" shall only be pointed out for the purpose of this thesis. In its second attempt to become the Olympic hosts, Beijing recruited

Weber Shandwick, a leading global public relations firm, which suggested that

Beijing "separate China's human rights record from its Olympic bid" (David Liu,

Managing Director, Weber Shandwick China). Liu also suggested that the bid focus on Beijing as the host city and not on China as the host country. The IOC wanted the 2008 Games to be awarded to China. Their main rationale was that the international spotlight would force China to engage with the West since hosting the games would not be a reward but an incentive for China to change. The strategy paid off. Beijing won the bid in two rounds, with a wide margin over

Toronto. Now China had to follow up with promises it had made. Sun Weide, the official spokesperson of BOCOG, was aware of the challenge:

The Beijing Games is a once-in-a-life-time-experience. It is our goal to give visitors to our country a sense of our nation. Ten

63 thousand journalists will come and write about us. Many have a bias against us. We have to try to work harder. We have to better communicate to the world.

The overriding goal for the Beijing Games was to prevent "defining moments" like the two raised fists in Mexico, the Palestinian mask on the balcony in Munich, or a repeat of "the Tank Man" from Tiananmen Square. For that, the

Chinese government and the Games organizing committee, BOCOG, needed assistance. Advice was coming from many directions. One of them came from

Scott Kronick, CEO of Ogilvy Public Relations China:

You can always count on the Olympic Games to provide drama. The Beijing Games will produce powerful stories and riveting television. They will also focus on the clashes between the Chinese police and the activists who will arrive from all around the world. The causes that motivate their activism range from human rights to global warming, from Darfur to Tibet, from Christianity to Falun Gong. The clashes outside the stadiums are likely to be more intense and spectacular than the sports competitions taking place inside. And the showdown will be captured as much by the video cameras in the cellphones of protesters and spectators as any news agencies' camera crews. A governmental bureaucracy organized according to twentieth-century principles will meet twenty-first-century global politics.

William Moss of Burson & Marsteller in Beijing commented:

Early in 2008 there was a potential for a constellation of issues gathering into a perfect storm. Is China ready for a "multi-stakeholder world"? That's PR language asking if the Chinese can gracefully juggle the pressures that will accumulate from governments, activists, and Olympic sponsors. I think the success or failure of the Olympics will be determined not by the campaigns themselves, but by the grace and sensitivity with which China can respond to them. The PR rule of thumb operating is that response to an issue can become the issue if it is handled badly. That is a rule that Beijing needs to stay mindful of. China will be judged differently than other countries that host the Olympic Games. No matter how glamorous the venues, how exciting

64 the games, or how successful China's athletes, the Games will be judged in large part based upon how gracefully Beijing can manage the inevitable protests.

Aside from communications, the other main area of expertise for public relations companies is crisis management and intervention. Stoldt (2006) offers a

definition of a crisis as "any event that significantly alters the activities that were

going on, anything that would stop the normal flow, like a situation or occurrence possessing the potential to significantly damage an organization's financial

stability and or credibility with constituents" and defines the need for advance

crisis plans as guidance to "limit damage and make positive impressions" (56) with the public. Given the early activities by civil society groups like Dream for Darfur

or Students for a Free Tibet, that "perfect storm" as described by Moss required the hiring of experienced PR consultants. In April 2006, more than two years before the Games, the Chinese organizers named Hill & Knowlton as "the

communications consultant for the 2008 Games, providing support for major

events, communications outreach to the international media and assistance in

communicating Beijing's Olympic vision" (Xinhua News Agency 2006).

Hill & Knowlton was founded in 1927 and was one of the earliest PR

companies in existence. Today, it has a global reach with seventy-nine offices in

forty-four countries. The firm's motto is "All clients deserve representation in the court of the public," and its client list includes many controversial ones: the

American tobacco lobby, the Church of Scientology, the Pro-Life Campaign, and

"Citizens for Free Kuwait," a clandestine NGO set up by wealthy Kuwaitis in 1991

65 in an effort to persuade American public opinion to favour endorsing a military intervention in response to the country's occupation by Iraq. The well-published

"incubator story," told by the "innocent nurse Nayirah," achieved that goal.

Nayirah testified at a U.S. congressional hearing that she had witnessed Iraqi soldiers storm a maternity ward of a hospital in Kuwait, throw the babies onto the cement floor, and take the incubators back to Baghdad. By the time Nayirah was revealed to be the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the U.S. and not a nurse and the incubator story was proven to be a fabrication, "Operation Desert Storm" had been launched. It is likely but unproven that Hill & Knowlton fabricated the incubator story. In 2002, the IOC hired the firm in the wake of the bribery scandal surrounding the awarding of the Winter Games to Salt Lake City in hopes of communicating a better image of the Olympic organization to the public.

Hill & Knowlton's proposed strategy to BOCOG was to regain and keep control of the narrative and defuse controversy by arguing that NGO's and civil society organizations that opposed the host country should not "exploit the Games" or be allowed to "politicize a sporting event" to further their own agendas. James

Heimowitz, CEO of Hill & Knowlton North Asia, advised BOCOG to not respond to questions by international reporters concerning political issues, but instead to refer to "the appropriate government ministry, as the Beijing Organizing

Committee is not empowered to comment on Chinese government policy." The strategy to separate sports and politics was reminiscent of China's loss in its first

Olympic bid in 1993. Weber Shandwick had advised the same approach for China

66 when it suggested separating its human rights record from its Olympic bid. Frances

Sun, executive project manager of Hill & Knowlton, summarized it this way:

The Chinese are inexperienced in international communications. They don't know how to play the game. That's why we came in. Political issues like Darfur or Tibet is not BOCOG's work. Those questions belong to the Foreign Ministry. We know that crisis around issues happen every day - [what's] important is how to respond to them.

Hill & Knowlton's team offered BOCOG lessons in "media skills" and

"reputation communication" during a crisis, and suggested how to communicate in the face of heavy opposition "to get their message across and confidently present

[their] case in a public debate" (Hill & Knowlton Issues & Crisis Management

2008). The company's strategic approach to crisis preparedness embodied "risk analysis and auditing, development of crisis procedures and manuals, and simulated training and testing" during "politically-based controversies." Wiener draws a parallel to military tactics:

The creation of a military campaign is similar to the creation of a public relations campaign as strategists must take into account a variety of factors, including their own current situation and the position of their opponent, their place within a particular environment, and their strengths and weaknesses, as well as calculated alternatives, risks, and timetable. (Weiner 2006, 109)

Frances Sun revealed in my interview that proven interview tactics and

Asian cultural behavioural codes did at times create a dilemma for her team: PR dictates that responding to any crisis situation with silence is a mistake, as silence in the eyes and ears of the Western press and public is seen as "guilt at worst,

67 indifference at best." A central social concept in Chinese culture is "saving face."

Even a carefully worded statement by a sponsor about Darfur would have been seen as disrespectful to the Olympic host - one simply does not challenge a business partner publicly. Sun explained: "When something happens you need to respond immediately. But the Chinese don't do that. If they think it is wrong or stupid, they simply remain silent. So I told them that they needed to overcome that."

Once again I encountered a gap between different concepts and understandings between separate cultures. Bedford (2008) describes that in

Mandarin, diu lian is literally translated as "loss of face." In traditional Confucian societies where one's behaviours are constantly evaluated by others, "lian" or

"face" refers to one's dignity, self-respect, feeling of social concern, and ability to fill social obligations in front of other people. It is a social product accorded by others. Although gain and loss of lian is impacted by one's own conduct, eventually it is determined and judged by other people. Diu lian entails the feeling of not having lived up to standards or values.

It seems out of the scope of Hill & Knowlton's role as communications consultants to address these gaps of understanding between cultures. I encountered an example of Hill & Knowlton's communications advice that worked across cultural boundaries in a story that broke months before the Games opened. News of two workers who had died on the construction site of the Bird's Nest, the central venue of the Games, quickly spread on the Internet. During an Olympic press

68 conference, Western journalists aggressively asked about the total number of deaths and injuries during the construction phase. Looking uncomfortable, the

Chinese representative declared that a total of six workers had died during construction on all the Games' venues, one had been seriously injured and three had received light injuries. Then Frances Sun took the BOCOG team behind closed doors. Together, they re-emerged with more precise information: "The six deaths had occurred - over the past five years - over all Olympic venues." Sun summed it up:

We think that was a good example of our strategy. Not only did we give the accurate figure of deaths, we also gave it for all Olympic venues, not just the Bird's Nest. BOCOG did change their press release after that. I was very proud of that.

(Note: During the construction of the 2004 Games in Athens a total of fourteen workers had been killed on the Olympic site [New York Times 2008]. That number was believed to be higher, as no official records were kept. The fact barely made it into the international media.)

On June 15, 2008,1 witnessed a pre-press conference briefing by Hill &

Knowlton for the Chinese officials before they were to address Western reporters about a delay in the opening of a subway line for the Games. Frances Sun briefed the BOCOG officials about a BBC report that had revealed false information and figures on the alleged cost and opening date of the subway line and coached them on how to respond to reporters: "Be assertive. Tell them that the BBC got it wrong.

Provide the right numbers. But don't make a big deal out of it."

69 Another task for Hill & Knowlton was to overcome the old-style Chinese rhetoric that the West considered antiquated, like this published commentary:

"Some so-called 'human rights activists' play along with [this] evil scheme of the

Dalai splittists. They hide behind the Olympics, where they preach their heresies on human rights, and violate sporting principles. The practice will lead to their undoing, and be condemned by those who cherish the Olympic Spirit" (People's

Daily Online 2008).

The Chinese government engaged Hill & Knowlton to replace the older model of propaganda with the production of soft-sell messages for international consumption. A key element in Hill & Knowlton's strategy was to have the

Chinese government invite foreign journalists to visit Beijing so they could "see for themselves," rather than concealing any facts from them. This public relations technique of "see for themselves" was meant to project a more open face to the international media, including Chinese officials holding "Getting to know you" sessions with foreign reporters. During my research trips to Beijing in the pre-

Games period, I was invited to take part in two separate journalist tours. In each case, a group of eight to ten foreign reporters from Western countries were invited to Beijing for a period of five days, with all expenses paid, and guided to a series of press conferences, personal meetings, three meals a day, and cultural events like a performance of the Chinese Opera in the evening. During question and answer periods with Chinese officials, I experienced that many questions asked by the invited journalists were highly critical:

70 • "Why weren't we allowed inside the Bird's Nest Stadium?" • "Is it true that there have been death threats towards Western journalists?" • "Why does your government use violence against its own minorities?" • "Amnesty International says China leads the world in the amount of executions. What about the brutal suppression of the Uygurs?" • "What will opening up to the world mean to your own society?" • "Your international torch relay turned out to be a disaster. Don't you get better PR advice?"

This line of questioning would have been unimaginable for Chinese journalists. Participating Western journalists had mixed responses to their line of questioning and the responses they received, as Andrew Potter of the Ottawa Sun and a MacLean 's Magazine columnist reported:

I am frankly surprised that it wasn't a straight propaganda tour, but I felt an actual sense of enthusiasm by the Chinese hosts. Of course we are being spun and they made sure that they got their message across, but didn't expect us to write their point of view. Things are more complicated. They just want us to tell us their part of the story. Chinese say the Olympics are non-political and we all know is that it is lie. For the Chinese the Games are a reward, a carrot, for opening up to the West. They are going about it a bit ham- handed, but I am sympathetic, so I will cut them some slack. Let's face it, embedded journalists in Canada are spun as well. As a Canadian I wonder if journalists arriving for the 1976 Olympics just wanted to talk about the FLQ crisis. It would drive me crazy. The situation in Montreal 1970 wasn't that simple.

Brendan O'Neill, a British blogger and columnist (www.spiked-online.com), took a more provocative stance:

I wonder why the Chinese are considered more evil spinners than others. All governments are image driven. The Chinese are not different than other nations. Some journalists that come here are judging the host too fast. There are double standards, and it is called "China bashing." Our journalists need to grow up. Some of them on

71 this trip are very distruSFTul of China. The West tends to demonize the Chinese; in the past it was their poverty, now it is their wealth. The Games are political. The Nazis used them for their own gains. But so do Dream for Darfur and Students for a Free Tibet. But there are political ends, nevertheless. It is also the power of celebrity politics that I consider dangerous: Mia Farrow and the Dalai Lama, who are both celebrity networkers. They are reducing complexity to sound bites, and it smacks of colonialism. Why not boycott 2012 London? Great Britain has troops in Iraq. The Chinese want to be more open, but they don't know how. They have their PR problem.

According to Frances Sun, the number of news reports about Beijing in the

foreign media increased drastically after Hill & Knowlton's strategy was implemented, including hosting foreign journalists in the country to allow those

"to see for themselves," resulting in more positive reporting. The strategy to divert

all questions concerning human rights away from BOCOG, as well as using more effective communications techniques in the construction of China's image,

allowed the Chinese government to carry its own narrative.

In the next chapter I will document a chronological order of key events in the

approach to the 2008 Games, starting with an op-ed piece written by Mia Farrow and her son Ronan in March of 2007, almost one and a half years before the

Opening ceremonies. "The Genocide Olympics" immediately became a dominant narrative of the 2008 Olympics, only to be replaced when a natural disaster struck a year later, and according Dick Pound, the Canadian IOC representative, "saved" the 2008 Olympics when it then became referred to as the "Earthquake Olympics."

72 3.1 Countdown: From the "Genocide Olympics"

to the "Earthquake Olympics"

"The State Administration of Radio, Film and Television's Propaganda

Administration Department announced a ban on, among other topics, discussing whether the media should be free. Franz Kafka would have smiled at this stunning act of auto-censorship, which means that Chinese citizens now can't even publicly argue in favor of a controlled press.

- Sophie Richardson, Wall Street Journal, 2008

Western actors challenged the official narrative of the Beijing Olympics in

Western media long before the Games themselves had entered the Western public mind. In fact, for many in the West, the introduction of the Beijing Games was triggered by reports about the looming controversies surrounding them. Mia

Farrow's declared goal was to have the image of a Darfuri refugee child become the iconic image of the 2008 Beijing Games:

Source: http://www.guernicamag.com/mterviews/367/powerful_acts/

73 March 28, 2007: Op-ed piece by Mia and Ronan Farrow published

Hollywood actress Mia Farrow and her son Ronan wrote an op-ed piece for the Wall Street Journal about the 2008 Beijing Olympics. In the piece, they confronted the film director Steven Spielberg, who was then artistic advisor of the

Games' opening ceremony, for collaborating with a regime that "was underwriting a genocide." By comparing the Jewish film director and the Shoah Foundation to

Leni Riefenstahl, Hitler's own cinematic propagandist, the Farrows drew a direct and highly visual line from 2008 to 1936, and personalized the Genocide Olympics narrative. In the process they coined the phrase "Genocide Olympics":

Key collaborators like Mr. Spielberg should be put on notice. For there is another slogan afoot, one that is fast becoming viral amongst advocacy groups: rather than "One World, One Dream," people are beginning to speak of the coming "Genocide Olympics." Does Mr. Spielberg really want to go down in history as the Leni Riefenstahl of the Beijing Games? Do the various television sponsors around the world want to share in that shame? Because they will. Unless, of course, all of them add their singularly well-positioned voices to the growing calls for Chinese action to end the slaughter in Darfur. (Farrow 2007)

The term "Genocide Olympics" was historically unsupportable, but it stuck in the public's mind and conjured up the worst possible set of associations. It fit on a T-shirt and was both evocative and emotive at a visceral level. The term

"Genocide Olympics" had entered the public discourse about the Games. The

Farrows triggered what the PR industry calls "a chorus of voices." One single person applying an incendiary phrase cannot create headlines, but an expanding group of celebrities, politicians, activists, and editorial writers using that phrase

74 can. In the long term, the "Genocide Olympics" will likely be imprinted on the public consciousness as a brilliant piece of propaganda, unsubtle and effective. It proved to have staying power, accumulating discontent, anxiety, and suspicion about China. And it had a direct effect: Spielberg responded to the call by the

Farrows by personally appealing to Chinese President Hu Jintao by condemning the killings in Darfur and asking the Chinese government to use its influence in the region "to bring an end to the human suffering there" (Spielberg, 2008).

Re-branding the Beijing Games into the Genocide Olympics can also be considered asymmetrical image warfare. The approach was once again reminiscent of Guy Debord (1995) and the Situationist movement's postulation that to transform the structure of society people need only to change their perception of the world. The idea was to construct situations that were disruptive to social norms. Situationists created the idea of the "detoumement," a redirection of images and events to alter their message. As methods of undermining consumer society

(and constructed spectacles like the Olympics), they encouraged vandalism and sabotage, seeing them as creative acts. Subverting Olympic slogans and mottos is in that realm, like re-labelling the Beijing Games as the "Genocide Olympics."

It was rhetorical strategy that combined two opposing terms, which was a brilliant play on the deep concerns and fears about China held in the Western world.

75 August 8, 2007: The one-year countdown begins

Source http //www studentsforafreetibet org/section php?id=68

On August 8, 2007, China launched the "One Year to the Games" celebration to welcome the world. But the official celebration was upstaged by

Free Tibet activists who descended the Great Wall and unfolded a 450-square- meter banner, bearing the slogan ONE WORLD, ONE DREAM, FREE TIBET

2008. Some selected international journalists had been given advanced notice of the event and invited to attend the site of the unveiling so they could record the event for maximum international exposure. The action provided the foreign media with an image that suggested a narrative not just for the Beijing Olympics themselves but also for the battle over the hearts and minds of the global audience that would take place in the period leading up to August 2008.

76 12 February 2008: Steven Spielberg resigns as artistic advisor

Source http //backseatcuddler com/category/steven-spielberg/

After ongoing pressure from advocacy groups in the wake of the Farrows' op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal, Steven Spielberg announced that he was resigning from his role as artistic advisor of the 2008 opening ceremonies. The news went viral. Suddenly, the dynamic between the Olympic organizers and corporate sponsors changed. The "Spielberg effect" was clear and immediate: companies decided to meet with Dream for Darfur where before they had ignored the group. Jill Savitt of DFD recalls that "Steven Spielberg's resignation put us on the map. We suddenly got meetings with people who would not talk to us." The group claimed that it got very close to securing a "strongly worded letter" from top

Olympic sponsors to the UN Security Council calling for deployment of peacekeepers in Darfur before the start of the Games. In Beijing, Hill & Knowlton was faced with a dilemma, one that Frances Sun put into a Chinese perspective:

There [was] a fundamental lack of understanding. Sometimes events occur and you need to respond immediately. It is not the Chinese way. When Steven Spielberg declared his resignation from being artistic director of the opening ceremonies, the Chinese just wanted to remain silent. They said Spielberg couldn't resign from anything since he

77 never signed any contract. The Chinese wanted to keep face, and say nothing. We told them that they needed to respond, however subtle.

Hill & Knowlton's advice was credited for the restrained response from the

Chinese government to Spielberg's resignation (conversation with Francis Sun,

2008). In a press release, the Beijing Organizing Committee described Spielberg's decision as "regrettable" and emphasized that politics and sport should be separated. As well, the Chinese government appointed a Special Envoy for Darfur,

Liu Guijin, who took several trips to the region. It seemed that the pressure created by Spielberg's resignation forced the Chinese government to take additional and public diplomatic steps. Special Envoy Liu made a major diplomatic trip to raise the issue of Darfur in London, Paris, Khartoum, and the United States, and worded its strongest public criticisms of Sudan during this period, when he encouraged the

Sudanese regime to be more "flexible" and to cooperate with the international community on Darfur. Again, it caused a public relations problem for the host and their consultants. Frances Sun: "Mr. Liu complain[ed] to me: 'Everything Mia

Farrow says is printed in Western newspapers. She is a star and attractive. But I make an announcement, [and] the Western media don't hear us or report on us.' So

I told Mr. Liu to be more angry and emotional."

I asked Sun if she would advise Liu to embrace a Western strategy: "So did you ask Mr. Liu to speak in sound bites?" She replied: "No, not in sound bites."

78 Using a popular Internet search engine like Google as a sufficient way of data collection is now recognized in the academic discourse (Kozinets 2010).

During the eight months prior to the Games opening, I conducted my own media survey by setting up a "Google News Alert" using the keywords "Beijing

Olympics" and "boycott." The result was a pool of more than 2,000 collected articles published on the World Wide Web that included both search terms. I chose the combination of "Beijing Olympics" and "boycott" because these terms filtered out all references that were purely sports related and concentrated on what became the dramatic and very real possibility in a political context: Should the world boycott the Beijing Games?

The use of a boycott of the Olympics as a way to exert pressure has a long tradition. The Netherlands, Spain, and Switzerland withdrew from Melbourne in

1956 to protest against the Soviet Union's military intervention in Hungary. Egypt,

Iraq, and Lebanon stayed away because of the Suez crisis. China itself boycotted the Melbourne Games because Taiwan was participating under the name Formosa.

More than twenty African countries boycotted the 1976 Montreal Olympics after

New Zealand was allowed to compete even though it had ignored a boycott of

Apartheid South Africa by sending their rugby team to the apartheid state. More than sixty nations, again including China, refused to compete four years later in

Moscow to protest against the Soviet Union's invasion of Afghanistan. In retaliation, the Soviet Union and its Eastern Bloc satellite states refused to compete in the Los Angeles Olympics in 1984. In 1988, North Korea, Cuba, and Ethiopia

79 pulled out of the Seoul Games. It was expected that a number of NGO's competing for platform of the 2008 Games would make use of the "'boycott" weapon.

I examined and tabulated the data according to the overall tone of the article, regardless of the specific content, whether it was showing some bias either towards (positive) or against (negative) China as the Olympic host. With this simplified method I was able to track changes in the attitude shown by Western media towards China in the months leading up to the Games.

Table 3.1: Media tracking after Spielberg's resignation

2008 January February March April May June July August (until 7th)

Total hits 84 209 305 298 187 143 299 65

Positive 25 60 104 138 72 45 132 23

Negative 53 97 160 142 79 132 43

March 14, 2008: Lhasa uprising

Souice htlp//quahtal unblog ti/2008/03

80 "We had prepared a crisis plan and predicted the trouble spots. We prepared for the activists activities. We monitor[ed] their websites and international media for the emergence of relevant stories so that threats [could] be addressed and so that opportunities [could be] leveraged. But we weren't prepared for the Tibet uprising."

- Frances Sun, Hill & Knowlton

The 2008 Tibetan unrest took place in the Tibetan capital and in the

Buddhist monasteries outside Tibet. Using the annual observance of the 1959 uprising, peaceful street protests by monks turned into rioting, burning, looting, and killing of ethnic Han who had settled in Tibet by ethnic Tibetans. Police intervened to prevent the conflict from further escalation, killing Tibetans in return. In response, protests in support of Tibetans erupted in cities across North

America and Europe. Chinese embassies and consulates were attacked. The

Chinese government claimed that the unrest was deliberately linked to the Olympic

Games orchestrated by the "splittist" Dalai Lama. The effect on the world media reporting on the Olympics was quite visible, with a surge in both the total number of positive and negative reporting.

Alison Reynolds, the director of the International Tibet Support Network, suddenly had calls for advice from unexpected sources: "We've spoken to a number of risk-analysis companies who have contacted us, who refuse to reveal their clients, but have strongly indicated they are concerned. The risk-analysis

81 companies are wondering what Tibetans were planning next, and were hoping to appease protesters" (New York Times 2008).

Despite the appearance of the protests being organized and coordinated, there was no public relations company that could be credited for coordinating public support for the Tibetan groups in the West. Dream for Darfur had been running a significant PR campaign with the "Genocide Olympics" for over a year with the help of their PR consultants the SJR group, but their message had suddenly been overwhelmed by the Tibet issue during the March uprising. I asked the Students for a Free Tibet representatives if that created friction between competing actors in the attempt to capture and hold the Olympic platform? Kate

Woznow, SFT coordinator, replied:

That our campaign stole the momentum from the Darfur activists is a sad fact. There is no room for both in the headlines. And it is always a race to occupy that platform. People want simplicity, one issue at a time. So you are competing for the spotlight. That's the fickle nature of media. You need to understand that. You need to use the attention you receive strategically.

I posed the same question to Jill Savitt of Dream for Darfur:

There was a sort of competition with the Tibet activists. Our campaign [was] more complicated. Darfur is halfway around the Globe from China, not within the country, like Tibet. We could not build on a large Darfuri immigrant population like the Tibetans [could].

82 Savitt's colleague, Ellen Freudenheim, a communications consultants for DFD, recognized the 2008 Olympics early on as "issues rich," with many actors competing for the platform:

It was important not just to attack the opponent, China, but to keep a distance to other groups wanting to occupy the Olympic platform. We made an early decision not to join forces with other anti-China groups as we needed to stick our story: Darfur is genocide! It is like a children's book. You got to tell your story! You give them a narrative.

The Chinese response to the PR offensive by Western civil society was swift, but it did not come from the Chinese government, BOCOG, or Hill & Knowlton; it came from a growing demographic group of "cyberwarriors." An "anti-CNN" website was launched in response to the perceived bias in the Western media's coverage of the uprising in Tibet. The website was established by Rao Jin, a twenty-three-year-old Chinese student, because of "the lies and distortions of facts from the Western media." During my visit with Rao, he showed me several images of bloodied Tibetan monks, which in Western media had been captioned as depicting violence by Chinese police against Tibetans inside China. In fact some of the images had been taken in other countries, like Nepal and India, and some had been cropped to erase evidence that these acts of violence had been committed by

Tibetans themselves.

83 Source: http ://www.nocaptionneeded.com/index.php?s=tiananmen

The image above was used to illustrate Chinese violence on Tibetans. In fact, it was taken in Nepal. The image below shows the original framing on the left, including Tibetan protestors throwing rocks at Chinese army trucks, and the cropped version that appeared in most Western media:

Rao told me that he had established the anti-CNN site "to expose the facts, to make the facts publicized to as many people as possible. We have about 500,000 visits per day, 40 per cent of which are from outside of China." The website became the leading forum for Chinese cyber-nationalism. It eventually organized

84 staged demonstrations at Western-owned stores and called for retaliations against

Western commercial interests in China. It eventually led to a much publicized boycott of the French supermarket chain Carefour. Rao and the millions of cyber- nationalists did not trust that either their government or its Western PR consultants would be successful in winning the battle for the visual narrative of the 2008

Games in China. Their success became another challenge for BOCOG, as the

Western media and the public reacted nervously to the expressive Chinese nationalism, as it seemed to confirm existing images of Chinese national pride.

The government finally shut down the English site of anti.cnn. The Mandarin language site still exists to this day.

April 2008: The international torch relay

Source: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-557566

In Paris, London, and San Francisco, the traditional torch relay was met by a variety of civil society actors, including Dream for Darfur and Students for a Free

Tibet, which resulted in violent confrontations. The events led to a re-routing of the torch relay on a number of occasions. Several times the torch was extinguished.

85 The Chinese government condemned the attacks as "despicable and deliberate disruptions by elements who gave no thought to the Olympic spirit and tarnished the lofty Olympic spirit" (Reuters 2008). In other countries, like Australia, Japan, and South Korea, large-scale counter-protests by Chinese nationals outnumbered the number of protesters. Still, Western media coverage of the torch relay emphasized the variety and number of protest groups, almost without critical questioning of their legitimacy, while China's intentions were routinely put in doubt. In the New York Times, Edward Rothstein drew a connection between the origin of the torch in the 1936 Olympics and the Games in Beijing, mirroring Mia

Farrow's successful genocide narrative (Rothstein 2008).

Frances Sun from the Beijing office of Hill & Knowlton travelled with the torch to the various Western cities as her company had anticipated conflicts. Its primary role shifted from communications to crisis management. Hill & Knowlton had devised a crisis communications plan in advance, so as to provide a strategy and action outline for crisis communications as they had anticipated that the torch relay would be a fix point for opposing groups. The communications plan served as the guiding map for BOCOG's "internal and external communication, including communications strategic objectives, messages, audiences, media, responsibility assignments, measurements and evaluation" (Hill & Knowlton 2008). Frances Sun repeated their mission statement: "The overall purpose of organizational communication is to support BOCOG in continuing its mission by providing - in a credible, compelling, and consistent way - the vital information and two-way

86 communication that people need [in order] to play their role effectively in support of its objectives to protect itself from reputational risks."

The torch relay turned out to be a major public relations problem for various actors, including Students for a Free Tibet, and BOCOG. BOCOG's vice-director for communications told a group of Western journalists that they had "felt let down by the British and French authorities" as BOCOG had been assured in advance that the "torch would be safe." The opposite turned out to be true.

Source. http://torchrelav.bemng2008 cn/en/iourney/pans/news/n214297268 shtml

On April 7, 2008, Jin Jing, a wheelchair athlete, carried the torch through Paris when a Tibet activist attacked the torch and nearly threw her off her wheelchair.

BOCOG took advantage of this image and spun the attempt to hijack the Olympic platform into its own narrative:

Carrying the torch along the Seine River, Jin demonstrated great valor when a pro-Tibet independence activist lunged toward her. Without concern for her own safety, Jin did her best to protect the flame, her face exhibiting courage and pride in spite of the chaotic situation. In that moment, it was easy to see why her friends call her the "smiling angel in a wheelchair." (BOCOG 2008)

87 This image captured the contesting actors, the symbol they fought over, and the resulting public relations narrative. Jin Jing will be mythologized in China for generations to come. The responses in Western media in the reporting of the relay brought up a similar pattern as discussed in chapter 2.2 about the way the "Free Tibet" group depicted a deep-rooted antagonism towards the Chinese people. It arose in response to the presence of fifteen Chinese security personnel dressed in blue tracksuits running alongside the Olympic flame during the international relay. Their presence triggered an extreme response in Western reporting, which applied terms such as "vile," "horrible," "robotic," "mysterious," and "retarded goons" who exported their nation's "alien way," echoing established historical prejudice about a "Chinese invasion" of the civilized West:

The most shocking aspect of the farcical progress of the Olympic torch through London and Paris was the presence and behaviour of the squad of Chinese goons who were just following orders, having no doubt been told their organs will be harvested if they let protesters run off with the torch. (Daily Mail 2008)

How did a small number of unarmed Chinese officials jogging through

Western cities evolve into a prejudicial idea that China was "evil"? This sentiment seemed to unite civil society, human rights NGOs, and the anti-Communist right in the West. Once again, there are historical precedents. The West has had a tradition of nightmares about a "Chinese invasion." In the late 1800s, when Chinese immigrants moved to America they were seen as "racial, social and physical pollutants" who might cause "the demise of Western civilization" (quoted in

88 O'Neill, Spiked 2008). In 1886, the Australian magazine The Bulletin wrote that

Australians should resist "the Chinese invasion," as due to his "utter lack of ennobling purpose and elevating ideal," the average Chinese is "necessarily a sensual brute." Today, this overt racism is no longer politically acceptable, but the description of the Chinese Olympic torchbearers as "invading, unfeeling brutes" did echo this Western fear of a Chinese invasion. And, as in the past, one can speculate that "the driving force behind this outbreak of anti-China sentiment might be a perception that the West is in political and social decline, and the East threatens our civilization" (O'Neill, Spiked 2008). Do a dozen men in tracksuits who give rise to a prejudicial debate reveal more about contemporary Western fears than it adds to a serious discourse relating to the Chinese? I posed this question to Jill Savitt from DFD: "Yes, we also got some politically questionable allies. So far, FOX TV has been most interested in our campaign. It feeds into their anti-Communist, anti-China bias."

As a result of the derailed torch relays in Paris, London, and San Francisco, the IOC cancelled future international torch relays all together. Meanwhile, during the aftermath of the failed torch relay in Paris and London, calls for country leaders to boycott the opening ceremony were growing louder. Surprisingly, in my media survey, reports on the Olympics and a boycott declined slightly in both the total and negative reporting, while China-positive reporting continued to grow

(Table 3.1). The Western reporting and response to the torch relay made me ask,

Who are the games for? Spectators? Athletes? Global TV audiences? Can the

89 Olympics be both a television and a people's festival? Why was television interested in the communal gathering close to the classic roots of the Olympics?

Because of its symbolic character and quasi-mythological status, the torch relay was elevated as it evolved into a participatory rite of diverging actors.

May 12, 2008: The Sichuan earthquake

Source' http7/www postcrossmg.com/blog/tag/sichuan

On May 12, 2008, at 14:28, an earthquake hit the Sichuan Province in

China, killing more than 68,000 Chinese and leaving 4.8 million people homeless.

In a tragic turn of events, a natural disaster that shattered millions of lives facilitated the creation of a unified Utopian Chinese Olympics narrative that swept aside all other approaches: the term "Earthquake Olympics" was coined. The monumental calamities changed national moods, international perceptions, and entire dramatic narratives, similar to what the U.S. had experienced on September

11,2001.

Now, the Sichuan Province tragedy found a similar phenomenon playing out in China. Relief efforts from the international community brought forward a

90 common humanity, challenging the continuing outpouring of Chinese nationalism that had been the response to the attacks on the international torch relay in France,

Great Britain, and the U.S. The dominant image of China immediately changed from controversy to redemption, solidarity, and sympathy (data collection newsreporting by the author). In the face of the catastrophe, the story of China reverted to one of struggle. The counter-narrative of the "Genocide Olympics" had finally been replaced. As images of the earthquake's devastation reached global audiences, the efforts by Dream for Darfur to link China to the genocide in Darfur suddenly became mute and ineffective. Jill Savitt commented:

Our tone of advocacy had to change because of the earthquake. It would have really been unwise strategically to continue to pound on China and not to realize that there have been hundreds of thousands of people who have been killed and wounded. It would have been foolhardy.

Dream for Darfur delayed and then severely downplayed the release of their satirical animation video Gengen Genocide, which featured a cartoon figure reminiscent of the official Olympic symbol. It could have been an effective counter-image that subverted the mascot of the Games by transforming it into representations of coercion, abuse, and murder. The creation of a coherent and compelling set of Olympics symbols was an integral part of the successful Games the Chinese hoped to host, thus for actors like DFD to rework them into their own

Games narrative could damage the Olympic vision, just as the successful coining of the "Genocide Olympics" by the Farrows in March 2007 had had negative repercussions. Once again, that approach was reminiscent of Guy Debord's (1995)

91 analysis that symbols can be subverted for a different purpose. But the two-minute earthquake on May 12 rendered all these efforts meaningless.

Sources: BOCOG and http://hellonearth wordpress.com/2008/07/09/china-oil-and-gengen-

genocide/

Once the Olympics became inextricably linked to the earthquake, the debate over China's human rights record was effectively silenced. The earthquake had managed to accomplish for the Chinese what the public diplomacy goals of the torch relay failed to do. BOCOG carefully continued to maintain the connection between spectacle and tragedy as the earthquake effectively reframed China in the

Western media. The earthquake completely silenced voices that had called for an outright boycott of the Games. Dick Pound, Canadian member of the International

Olympic Committee, told the IOC general assembly that the earthquake in Sichuan had affected public sympathy and that the threat of a boycott had dissipated:

"This came very close to becoming a disaster. The risks were obvious and should have been assessed a little more carefully. The result is there was a crisis affecting the Games" (Pound 2008).

92 There was a significant drop of articles related to the Olympic boycott in the Western media; they had been replaced by reports on the earthquake (Table

3.1).

June 18, 2008: Blackwater

Source: www.redgreenandblue.org

The ability of NGOs like Dream for Darfur to associate the Olympic

Games with genocide in the public imagination and to put pressure on China for being "guilty by association" turned on the civil society group itself, when Mia

Farrow as DFD's spokesperson approached Blackwater, the infamous U.S. private security company, to explore the possibility of assisting peace keeping efforts in

Darfur after the deployment of a United Nations peacekeeping force had been stalled once again. On June 18, 2008, the Financial Times broke the story that

Farrow had approached Erik Prince, Blackwater's owner, to "discuss whether a military role by Blackwater in Darfur was either feasible or desirable." Even though Farrow recognized that many people might have reservations about

Blackwater - the company had a negative public image based on its involvement

93 with the U.S. military in Iraq - she felt the continuous threat of violence to refugees meant all options had to be explored: "The people in the camps would say

'we don't care whether it's Blackwater, any water,' as long as they help us"

(Financial Times 2008).

Farrow's daring publicity move from March 2007 that had linked China to the genocide in Darfur was now working against DFD because she had linked her own name with that of a mercenary group. Irritated letters from supporters of DFD were posted almost immediately. In a strategy session at DFD's offices the following week that I attended, Group SJR, the PR company working with DFD, downplayed the impact of linking the humanitarian group with a mercenary outfit.

Jonathan Freedman from Group SJR said, "Blackwater is still an attention getter, it gets us into the news, and the Darfur issue. Yes, it is a dirty word because of Iraq.

But it remains a great story - man bites dog."

In the end, the potential credibility crisis for DFD because of Blackwater never materialized because the group was able to contain the response to the article in the Financial Times. More importantly, the Sichuan earthquake had already rendered the genocide campaign no longer useful. The Olympics were now only weeks away. Still, critical reporting in Western media on non-sport-related issues increased considerably as the opening day moved closer, as the earthquake effect seemed to wear off, and as the debate in the West shifted from a downright boycott by athletes to a demonstrative no-attendance of state leaders for the opening ceremonies.

94 August 8, 2008: The opening ceremony

Source: www.shanghaiist.com

"We begin here with something highly symbolic: a blank sheet of paper, expressing the wish of the Chinese for people around the world as they look at this country over the next seventeen days to fill a blank sheet of paper with new images and maybe to replace images that the Chinese themselves are, in many cases, eager to leave behind."

- Josuah Ramo, NBC Guest Commentator for the 2008 Opening Ceremony

It is estimated that on August 8, 2008, 4.7 billion people - 70 per cent of the global population - watched the Beijing Olympics opening ceremony on television. Featuring over 15,000 performers, it was the most extravagant in

Olympic history (the two weeks of competition itself became the most watched event in American television history). As a television event, the Beijing opening ceremony is considered an unqualified success. The absence of the Mao years from the opening ceremony is an example of how the Party revised Chinese history to project a more positive image of China. "Self-invention" contained both the new

95 China reaching out to the world and the sense of urgency the country felt about liberating itself from the confining legacies of the past.

The images, symbols, and moments from the opening ceremony constructed China as an ancient yet technologically modern civilization, as open and receptive to outsiders yet fiercely strong in body and mind, as environmentally friendly yet repeatedly emphasizing values such as harmony, unity, and the reconciling of opposites. In terms of brand, China's performance was a representation of an "unstoppable dynamo managing every aspect of their brand with great dexterity" (Ramo on NBC 2008). One young survivor from the Sichuan earthquake entered the stadium beside the official flag bearer, basketball star Yao

Ming, reproducing an image of China as "victim." For the Chinese people, it did preserve the narrative of victimization even in the midst of the spectacle. The boy carried a small flag that was even held upside down, an international nautical symbol for distress. Whether he had done so deliberately or by accident, he had created a significant image.

Several Western media progressively discredited the opening ceremony.

Once again, NBC commentators invoked the specter of "Asiatic hordes" as they remarked that Chinese drummers banging on traditional instruments had an

"intimidating" effect. USA Today failed to recognize the merits of China's cultural understanding of the collective, but instead stressed the drumming portion of the show: "Few moments that came across as sort of Albert Speer meets Star Wars. As memorable and impressive as that opening, pounding,

96 screaming drum corps may have been, it was also the least welcoming

'welcome' ever recorded. And the drummers smile during it just made it seem odder and chilling" (USA Today 2008).

Another example from the opening ceremony reinforced the importance of image and representation of the Games and its reception in the Western media.

Chinese Party leaders had instructed that "for the national interest the child on camera singing the 'Ode to the Motherland' should be flawless in image, and with a voice of internal feeling and expression." So gap-toothed and chubby faced Yang

Peiyi sang the Chinese anthem but remained backstage, while camera-friendly Lin

Miaoke lip-synched onstage. The technique of lip-synching, which is quite familiar to the Western entertainment business, was seized upon by China's critics as proof that the country "cannot be trusted" (New York Times 2008).

There was another reminder of the multi-sited and complex identity politics that characterized the production of the visual narrative surrounding the Beijing

Olympics. As the television audience watched the fireworks during the opening ceremony, they perceived it as being a live event. The next day, Chinese sources revealed that some of those fireworks were computer graphics that had been created by a group of visual-effects artists in the year leading up to the Games.

Their aim was to create a digital illusion, even factoring in a "camera-shake" to make it appear as if the video images had been taken from a helicopter.

It does invite the speculation whether the live Olympic spectacle - or the live spectators - of the future will be necessary at all, and furthermore, whether the

97 Olympic Games themselves will evolve from a live event into a mediated digital production that exists only on and for the television or computer monitor As official (hosts, sponsors, broadcasters) stakeholders battle with unofficial stake­ holders (civil society, ambush marketers, social media), the sports competition itself might increasingly become nothing more than a vehicle to reach a global audience, which itself will become a contested territory I will elaborate on this thought in the concluding section of this thesis For now I shall return to the assessment of the 2008 Games

During the Beijing Games, civil society actors attempted to restart their counter-narrative campaigns, but without success Mia Farrow from DFD travelled to Darfur and hosted a webcast of an alternative Olympics for the opening week of the Games However, the spectacle of the ceremonies and the triumphs of athletes captured the imagination of audiences worldwide, subduing the influence of such a counter-narrative This was compounded by the fact that there were no major acts of subversion during the Games, such as mass protests or dramatic publicity stunts by Western activists Various guerilla actions by the Students for a Free Tibet - such as the unfurling of the banner, the projection of Tibetan symbols into the

Bejing night sky or onto buildings, or the shouting of Free Tibet m downtown

Beijing - were shut down withm seconds by the police Even though some images made it into the Western media, they could no longer compete with the drama being created by the athletic competitions

98 Front-page stories and images during the Olympics focused mostly on the actual sports and the athletes. Themes that formerly dominated Olympic reporting such as politics, security, and other related issues were now mostly ignored by

Western media. Data collected by the Salzburg Media Centre showed that the majority of the front-pages headlines and leads focused on the Olympic matches, scores, wins, and losses and occupied more than half of all worldwide Olympic reporting. The opening ceremony captured 21 per cent of lead stories and specific athletes captured another 12 per cent of the total number of reports. When it came to general topics about China, based on my media sampling for that month, over half (54 per cent) of all stories related to China were positive and more than one- third (35 per cent) were neutral. Only 11 per cent of the stories were negative.

There was not much difference when these results were compared in media markets across world regions, like Europe and Africa (Salzburg Global Seminar

2008).

During the first weeks after the Games, the Dow Jones Insight website analyzed a total of 3,800 mentions in social and traditional media sources on issues relating to human rights, the environment, Tibet, and media freedom. Human rights as a leading issue declined from 255 mentions to about 80 in the two weeks following the Games, and mentions of media freedom were cut in half, down from a total of 131 to 67 from August 26 to September 5 (Appendix E).

The influence of NGOs and civil society organizations in the pre-opening months (Spielberg, the Tibet uprising) were pivotal in influencing how Western

99 audiences were framing the Games (Appendices A, B, C). In the next chapter, I will pose the question of whether NGOs and civil society groups like DFD or SFT had, deliberately or inadvertently, given new power to questionable but yet familiar narratives of framing China.

100 3.2 "Mission Accomplished" - A Post-Games Assessment

So which of the various actors achieved their goal to occupy the Olympic platform for a sustained time in order to carry its narrative and provide the iconic image of the Beijing Olympics? The answer depends on whom you ask. BOCOG president Liu Qi declared at the closing ceremony while the world was watching:

"One World, One Dream. The Beijing Olympic Games is a testimony of the fact that the world's trust rested upon China. Owing to the Games, people have been united as one Olympic family, regardless of their nationalities, ethnic origins and cultural backgrounds. Their understanding has been deepened and their friendship renewed" (Liu Qi 2008). Albeit predictable in its official endorsement, Liu's statement was reflected in the celebration of the Games by the Chinese public as a success for the country, beyond topping the metal table over their athletic rival, the

United States.

In its own post-Games media analysis, having surveyed more than 14,500

English-language press articles from 2006 to 2008 that mentioned both the

Olympics and at least one of its sponsors and partner brands, Hill & Knowlton concluded that "negative coverage of political issues only gained a 16% share of voice in all coverage," with the issue of Darfur not even making it into the "top eight" (Appendices A, B, C). The company acted as the communications consultants not only for BOCOG but also for a number of primary Olympic sponsors. Both client groups had similar interests - to prevent unauthorized actors

101 from occupying the Olympic platform:

Hill & Knowlton media survey reveals [the] true winners of the Olympic marketing race, providing a positive return on investment for official sponsors. Commercial sponsors had largely positive coverage across international media. The survey revealed that sponsors achieved three times as many positive media articles than negative during the Games period. (Hill & Knowlton 2008a)

In stark contrast, Group SJR, the public relations consultants for Mia

Farrow's Dream for Darfur, claimed that their Genocide Olympic campaign

"moved the issue into the world's spotlight, leveraging the media to pressure China to stop the genocide" (DFD 2008). Their report lists all mentions of Darfur as

"total hits" in print media and "total broadcast impressions" (e.g., 29,787,661) to determine a "Total Publicity Value" (e.g., $1,348,487.04 for radio), calculated by an industry-accepted proprietary methodology:

The Dream for Darfur campaign achieved major success generating media attention and shaping the debate on Darfur. At the organization's inception, the public did not know about the China/Darfur connection. In just 15 months, the campaign transformed the issue, moving it into the spotlight of the international press and leveraging the media to pressure China and other stakeholders to increase their efforts to stop the genocide. Overall, we rate the outcomes of our activities as highly successful. (DFD 2008)

Similarly, in their "Commemorative Olympic Newsletter" (Winter

2008/2009), Students for a Free Tibet (SFT) declared their own Olympic victory as well:

Strategic actions helped thrust Tibet to the forefront of the growing controversy over China's hosting of the Olympic Games. SFT members led the charge against the international torch relay, organizing mass convergences and direct action protests including a daring banner hang

102 action on the Golden Gate Bridge, a breathtaking image that landed on the front page of the New York Times. 70 SFT members successfully staged 8 high-profile peaceful protests in Beijing. Through these inspiring nonviolent direct actions, SFT was able to keep Tibet in the global spotlight and show China's current and future leaders that the Tibet issue must be resolved before China will ever be truly a player on the world stage. (SFT Winter 2008/2009)

Examining these seemingly contradictory claims might provide answers beyond the obvious subjective assessment driven by self-interest by each actor. All four stakeholders (BOCOG, Olympic sponsors, DFD, SFT) and their image consultants (Hill & Knowlton, Group SJR) claimed victory in the competition to occupy the Olympic platform. Are the various post-Olympic assessments simply an act of self-legitimization and in itself a public relations spin that fails to display any self-critical stance?

I will argue that there weren't four (or six) winners in the race for the

Olympic platform, but none. Returning to the communication model as described in the introductory paragraph, this thesis has explored the first two, sender and message. But how can one analyze if and how the myriad of encoded messages arrived at the intended audience, and to which effect they are decoded? As the PR battle took place mainly in the international theatre of mass media, mainly television and newsprint, reader and viewer surveys remain a useful way to measure audience responses. The comprehensive data analysis provided by Pamela

Rutledge from Fielding University supports my assumption that the battle for the

Olympic platform produced no clear winners. Her study (2009) examined core beliefs from the pre- to the post-Olympic period in Western audiences' attitudes

103 towards China and concluded that there were no significant changes. Of the respondents in the post-Olympic sample, 84 per cent believed the Olympic Games had not changed their opinion about China. However, even though Rutledge's analysis revealed no significant difference in core beliefs or media use between the pre- and post-Olympic period, perceptions of "China as the enemy" rose significantly during that time period. This could possibly be due to the take that successfully staging the games legitimized China as a world power and that as a world power equal to that of the West, it was therefore to be feared.

In a similar study done less than six months after the Games, a BBC World

Service survey of public opinion in twenty-one countries found that "China's positive ratings fell six points over the year to 39% and its negative ratings rose from 33% to 40%. Europeans had become more negative toward China and a majority of Americans remained negative, with views essentially unchanged at 52 per cent" (BBC 2009). The results suggest that China's foray into a Western-style public relations strategy to win the hearts and minds of the Western public did not work as "a successful Olympic Games were not enough to offset other concerns that people have." As a central component of "China's Charm Offensive"

(Kurlantzick 2007), the Beijing Olympic Games appear to have failed.

Despite its improved skills and techniques in the construction of China's images abroad, BOCOG's decision to reject any discussion of human rights turned out to be unsuccessful. While Western media coverage of the pre-Olympic phase put significant emphasis on human rights, BOCOG deliberately avoided direct

104 involvement in the human rights debate, as "the Games are about sports, and not politics" and focused largely on its efforts to host the Games. The government had applied advertising and public relations skills and techniques, including market research and seeking advice from international PR companies like Hill &

Knowlton. But despite that level of consultancy, the pressure from the outside would have demanded a more radical change of strategy to address concerns by civil society actors in the West.

Why did the Chinese government not achieve its goal to engage and convince the foreign non-Chinese world of its own narrative? From my own observations, Western public relations approaches and Asian cultural codes were so different from each other that the rift was impossible to overcome. PR guidelines dictate that for any stakeholder to respond to a crisis situation with silence is a mistake, as silence in the eyes and ears of the public is considered guilt at worse, indifference at best. But a central concept in Chinese culture is "saving face," the social norm to stay silent even in the face of great crisis. For example, even a carefully worded statement by a sponsor about Darfur would have been seen as disrespectful to the Chinese government - one simply does not challenge a host publicly (Sun, conversation with author, 2008). To "save face" in China was and remains of paramount importance. It would seem neither side in this "battle for the hearts and minds" of the world's community properly understood the motivations of the other or the important cultural differences between them. Hill &

Knowlton's task to bridge that rift might have been too great of a challenge.

105 The mantra "sport and politics don't mix" might have protected the Games' organizers BOCOG from dealing with sensitive issues like Tibet or Darfur by simply referring all questions to its Foreign Ministry. However, Western audiences didn't appreciate the differences between government institutions, but saw China as a unified "other."

The scope of the global Olympics' audience and the constant rejection of human rights as a "suitable topic" of discussion and consideration throughout the preparation of the Games did reduce the effect that a successful PR campaign could have had. James B. Heimowitz, CEO of Hill & Knowlton Asia, commented:

"Our area of influence on Olympic messages remained limited, as BOCOG was not empowered to comment on Chinese government policy."

In the continuous international debate on human rights, reflecting culturally different perspectives concerning their interpretation, China insisted upon the particular uniqueness of an Asian understanding of human rights as giving priority to the economic, social, and cultural rights of the collective whole, like the fundamentals of human development: "Enough food on the plate and a roof over the head." While criticizing Western posturing on human rights as self-serving and alien, Western critics dismissed the Chinese approach to human rights as relativist.

The gap in the understanding of these fundamental concepts remained. As

Economy and Segal (2008) point out, "Chinese leaders simply saw no relationship between the pageantry of the Olympics and Tibet, Sudan, or broader human rights concerns, and they never figured out how to engage and disarm those who did".

106 One possible explanation would be that China never had the serious intention to make use of the Olympics to send a geopolitical message to the world, and it never could have put into place a public relations strategy for seriously dealing with the human rights issue that would have been found acceptable by

Western audiences. If that is indeed the case, it would allow for the possible conclusion that the main audience for the 2008 Olympics was not an international one, but a domestic one: that is, China's own one billion plus Chinese citizens that include an increasing number of Taiwanese and residents of Hong Kong who now consider themselves "Chinese" (Mathew 2000). Even though projected into the world, I suggest that the intended audience for the "Beijing Games as message" was the domestic audience - the Chinese people - in order to demonstrate that the newly confident China, led by the Communist Party, was capable of hosting the world's largest and most prestigious festival. Similar conclusions have been drawn by other authors (Macartney, 2008; Ni, 2008, Hagan, 2008), but have also been disputed (Brownell, 2009). Brownell contends that the Game's primary international audience was oriented toward imagining China taking its place in the international community, taking precedence over 'patriotic education' (Brownell,

2009), but offers mainly incidental conversations as evidence.

A successful staging of the Games legitimized a leadership torn between socialist principles and state-capitalist realities. Was the Chinese leadership aware that the battle for the world's opinion was a lost cause before the competition even started? Can one singular event over ten days ever have eradicated centuries of

107 prejudice and misconception?

On the opposite end of the spectrum, Tibet was still not free by the end of the Games, and to this day there are no peacekeepers on the ground in Darfur. Did

Dream for Darfur and Students for a Free Tibet therefore fail in their missions to use the Olympics? Or worse, did these groups and other civil society actors facilitate Olympics-related Western cultural imperialism, deliberately or not?

Humphreys and Finlay (2008) argue that while China's overt and too-transparent image control efforts hindered any soft-power gains during the Games,

the hostility and suspicion by the Chinese that followed even the smallest controversies was also in due to the agenda setting effects of Western NGOs and civil society groups. These actors made little attempt to differentiate their causes and messaging from the existing wave of anti-China sentiment in the West. Instead, these groups allowed their messaging to be co-opted by this existing media frame and thus it became increasingly difficult to distinguish fear-induced anti-China tirades from the legitimate concerns raised by civil society groups. Further, existing divides were accentuated in the West through linking, perhaps inadvertently, anti-Beijing Olympics media to existing Western anti-China narratives. (284f)

The 'Tear of China" narrative is one example of a prominent feature of contemporary discourse (Glassner 1999). Fear is a basic human emotion, an aversive affect triggered by perceptions of significant and personally relevant threat (Ortony and Turner 1990). Fear appeals are persuasive messages that arouse fear by targeting these perceptions of personal risk (Witte 1998). It raises concerns about the continual reinforcement of fear in the media and in politics, particularly in light of information about neural sensitivity to fear that has emerged in recent

108 years as in the events surrounding 9/11 (Kandel 2006; Wexler 2006) that reinforce perceptions that the world is a dangerous place. Using age-old stereotypes of the

"otherness" of China during the coverage of the 2008 Olympic Games, perceptions of China as the enemy rose. Is this the result of our need to reinforce previous beliefs? If an audience's predisposition towards conflict is operating at the fundamental level, media and the choice of message become a way of confirming affiliations and beliefs, not the other way around.

The roots of China's image problem lay on both sides of the Pacific and can be traced to historical misperceptions, stereotypes, and racist "otherizing" discourses that were manifest between China and Euro-America, at least as far back as a century (Brownell 2008; Wang 2008). Historically, the creation and dispersion of images of China have been based on journalistic interpretations of out-dated stereotypes (Roberts 1999).

In my view, for Olympic audiences, China remained geographically distant and diametrically different from the West in her culture, language, history, philosophy, politics, and economics - nearly every frame of reference that might facilitate Western understanding. This physical and cultural distance continued to make China an easy target for stereotyping and "othering" in news and political rhetoric, despite the "One Dream, One World" motto of the Games. The challenge continues to be to create messages through mass media and public relations that will actually break through the walls that people build to feel secure.

109 This possible conclusion could have implications for the development of media and message content as well as genuine recognition and understanding of the "public" in public relations. It could raise important issues about content choices that the public makes and the function of these choices in relation to identity and the core beliefs that predispose individuals to otherness.

110 3.3 Conclusion: "The Games Did Not Take Place"

- The Olympics as Simulacra?

In this thesis, I explored the effect of public relations culture on the Beijing

Olympic Games as applied by various stakeholders. I applied the observation of image-making and its contextual analysis to the examination of international media reports. I also used research interviews with various representatives to supplement my methodology. Taking into account my interdisciplinary approach, I will speculate on a possible future for the Olympic Games where the event exists only in cyberspace, but no longer in a physical venue, in front of a live audience.

The "live" audience of the Olympic opening ceremony is about 80,000, but its television audience amounts to nearly 4 billion viewers. By comparison, the stadium audience with its immediate spatial and temporal connection to the event is rendered increasingly insignificant. The "fake" fireworks at the opening of the

Beijing Olympics were created for that audience numbering 4 billion, not for the

80,000. That shift has become a reality for all stakeholders with official or unofficial Olympic narratives. It does invite the speculation of whether or not the live Olympic spectator of the future will be necessary at all. Digital technology is already in a position to inject a "live atmosphere" and to simulate a live event even though it isn't taking place in front of a live audience (technology in which

Hollywood's movie studios are leading the way). Furthermore, it is to be

111 questioned whether or not the Olympic Games themselves will cease to exist as we know them in real time.

Baudrillard's essay "The Gulf War Will/Does/Did Not Take Place" questions the notion of reality itself, categorizing a problem of signs and symbols. First order signs are characterized by a "reality disguised by appearance." Second order signs are "appearances [that] create their illusion of reality." Simulation marks the third order, where "images invent reality." In this final stage, "the real is not only what can be reproduced but which is always being reproduced - the hyperreal"

(Baudrillard 1995, 2). He went further, negating the concept of reality as we understand it. He argued that today there is no such thing as reality, because it has been replaced by the "simulacra." Just as television has changed and now somewhat controls the Olympic Games, I predict that the revolution in digital media will have an impact on the presentation of the Olympic Games of the future.

Reflecting on the usage of pre-recorded voices and CGI images for the 2008

Olympic opening ceremonies, leads me to predict that the Olympic Games of the future "will not take place," while its platform, which will be in the sphere of the hyperreal by then, will continue to be contested territory between various actors.

In the final analysis, I am confirmed in my belief that people's ways of seeing and experiencing their world is the extension of their cultural milieu, of a commonly held way of seeing and experiencing reality - common fictions, the habit of our eyes, organized around a series of stereotypes, mutually shared mental templates that in advance give shape and meaning to experiences people have and

112 how they visualize them. Objective understanding is unattainable. We define first, and then we see.

But if there were any gold metals awarded for occupying the Olympic platform, the one for 2008 should have gone to Mia Farrow, for re-branding the

Beijing Games as the "Genocide Olympics." It turned out to be a very effective way of countering the official Games' narrative of "One World, One Dream." That

PR attack on the dominant narrative was eventually upstaged by the agenda of another stakeholder within civil society, the Free Tibet movement. An "Act of

God," an earthquake, ended the competition for occupying the Olympic platform in a tragic way.

The drama of who would dominate the prevailing representation of China as Olympic host nation raises questions of legitimacy for future research: Who constructs Olympic platforms? Who controls access to them? And considering the hierarchical structure of mass media, are the attacks made by civil society groups in their efforts to seize control of the Olympic platform signifying their growing importance on the global stage, or evidence of the their reduced importance, requiring other means of trying to control the agenda?

And my personal choice for the iconic image for the 2008 Beijing Olympic

Games? It is the image below, from the torch relay in Paris.

113 Source http //torchrelay bemng2008 cn/en/iournev/pans/news/n214297268 shtml

114 Interviews conducted by the author for the purpose of this thesis:

Toronto, ON Andrew Jennings, journalist and writer, during an academic conference on Olympic Issues at the University of Toronto, May 12, 2009

Vancouver, BC Christopher Shaw, spokesperson for "No-2010 Coalition" and scientist at UBC, November 1,2007

New York, NY Jill Savitt, coordinator, "Save Darfur Coalition," June 3, 2008 (also Chicago, II., April 28, 2008)

Ellen Freudenheim, research director, "Save Darfur Coalition," June 3, 2008

Lhadon Tethong, executive director, "Students for a Free Tibet," June 3, 2008

Kate Wosznow, SFT deputy director, June 3, 2008

Jonathan Freedman, project manager, Group SJR, June 3, 2008

Mitch Stoller, founding partner, Group SJR, June 3, 2008

Beijing

Scott Kronick, president, Ogilvy & Mather China, April 14, 2008

James Heimowitz, president, Hill & Knowlton North Asia, April 17, 2008

William Moss, creative director, Burson & Marsteller China, February 15, 2008 Frances Sun, senior vice-president, Hill & Knowlton, February 12, April 13, and June 7, 2008

David Liu, managing director, Weber Shandwick - China, June 8, 2008

Sun Weide, spokesperson, BOCOG Olympic Organizing Committee, April 14, 2008

Jeff Ruffalo, international liaison, BOCOG Organizing Committee for 2008 Olympics, April 13, 15, and June 5, 6, 7, 2008

115 Eliot Cutler, senior counsel, Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld, Beijing, April 14,2008

Brendan O'Neil, journalist, Spiked online, June 8, 9, 2008

Andrew Potter, journalist, Maclean's Magazine, April 14, 15, 2008

116 Appendices

A

Issue Share of Voice-US Sources Sub|©cls All subjects ffori Al SuDfeci G Issues Selected BSLCS Date rap so 25 Jul 2&D8 to 10 Aug 2008

Human Rights 1 Environment Tbet Madia Freed Athlete Hca Doping Froo Spoach

*t '*

••••*

Source Dow Jones Insight Olympics Media Pulse, New York, September 2008

B

Issue Share of Votce-non-US Sources Subjects All subjects from Al* SubfC&t Groups issues Selected issues Date range 28 Jul 2i>D8 to 10 Aug ^008

Human Rights S Enwrorsmenl Media Treed Tbet Athlete Hea Doping Free Speech

Source Dow Jones Insight Olympics Media Pulse, New York, September 2008

117 c MfWiMtkpftkiP .j- . - ^ J .«. t **" !>.*.>^ ^W *,* rf".>.i? "!'» «< V *\!^¥J f%r •P' ' ^ 3l s* ^f « ,- *

^ ^ ^ 8*** f s****-^

Source Dow Jones Insight Olympics Media Pulse, New York, September 2008

D Final Grades Olympic Sponsor Grade Adidas c AnheuserB usch F Atos Origin F BHP Billiton F Coca Cola D Eastman Kodak F General Electric c+ Johnson & Johnson D Lenovo Group Limited F Manulife F McDonald's C Microsoft F Panasonic F Samsung F Staples F Swatch F UPS D Visa F Volkswagen F Source "And Now . Not a WordWo from Our Sponsors," Dream for Darfur, New York 2008

118 E

*»*•> Utfe^XttsMrjutttui ?i i» *i s r }: -ill uynonk:

/

Source: Dow Jones Insight Olympics Media Pulse, New York, September 2008

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