2008 host China has mixed history of sports

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Mao, the center of these quarrels, was a sports lover himself, famous for his widely reported plunges into the Yangtze river in the 1950s where it was said, but not confirmed, that he broke the world’s record for floating downstream on his back.

Mao’s death in 1976 marked the end of nationwide bloodshed and the rise of the diminutive Deng Xiaoping, whose only passion was bridge. A man of great wit and modesty, he let others have the titles but ran the show. He opened up China to the outside world, introduced the free market and allowed limited democracy and controlled capitalism.

During the 1980s and 1990s, when Deng shook up China, mass sports had their golden age. The women’s volleyball team made the breakthrough in 1981: It defeated Japan for the first time to win a world championship, then after grabbing five consecutive world titles won an Olympic gold.

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Before that, during the nationalist republican era, China competed in three Olympic games but never won a medal. Since Deng’s day, it has won hundreds. In the 2004 Athens Olympics it took 23 golds, only three behind the leader, the United States.

Bitterly disappointed to lose its bid for the 2000 games, the Chinese government publicly and stridently declared they were “a human right of the Chinese people.”

It was an unfortunate phrase, one that recalled recent failures, despite remarkable progress since 1949, to grant freedom to protest by some of its citizens.

Human Rights Watch, which monitors denial of freedoms worldwide, has already given notice it will pay special attention to the 2008 Games.

China’s present rulers have yet to fully carry out Deng’s plan to grant wider political and personal freedoms to match the enormous economic breakthrough which put China on its present path to unparalleled economic prosperity.

An object of astonished admiration for achieving eight to 10 percent annual growth, China sees the Beijing games as a boost to that process. Hundreds of stores have already begun to stock their shelves with Olympic-related products. It similarly expects enormous returns in Olympic-inspired tourism, travel and trade.

But more than anything else, it yearns to collect what no money can buy: the goodwill and esteem of its neighbors and the prestige it enjoyed in ancient days as the illustrious Middle Kingdom.

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