Beijing 2008 Olympic Games

This book focuses on the processes of documenting the Beijing Olympics – ranging from the visual (television and film) to radio and the written word – and the meanings generated by such representations. What were the ‘key’ stories and how were they chosen? What was dramatised? Who were the heroes? Which ‘clashes’ were highlighted and how? What sorts of stories did the notion of ‘human interest’ generate? Did politics take a backseat or was the topic highlighted repeatedly? Thus, the focus was not on the success or failure of this event, but on the ways in which the Olympics Games, as international and historic events, are memorialised by observers. The key question that this book addresses is: How far would the Olympic coverage fall into the patterns of representation that have come to dominate Olympic reporting and what would China, as a discursive subject, bring to these patterns? This book was previously published as a special issue of Sport in Society.

"A major contribution to the study of global events in times of global media. Owning the Olympics tests the possibilities and limits of the concept of 'media events' by analyzing the mega-event of the information age: the Beijing Olympics. . . . A good read from cover to cover." —Guobin Yang, Associate Professor, Asian/Middle Eastern Cultures & Sociology, Barnard College, Columbia University From the moment they were announced, the Beijing Games were a major media event and the focus of intense scrutiny and speculation. In contrast to earlier such events, however, the Beijing Games are also unfolding in a newly volatile global media environment that is no longer monopolized by broadcast media. The dramatic expansion of media outlets and the growth of mobile communications technology have changed the nature of media events, making it significantly more difficult to regulate them or control their meaning. This volatility is reflected in the multiple, well-publicized controversies characterizing the run-up to Beijing 2008. According to many Western commentators, the People's Republic of China seized the Olympics as an opportunity to reinvent itself as the "New China"---a global leader in economics, technology, and environmental issues, with an improving human-rights record. But China's maneuverings have also been hotly contested by diverse global voices, including prominent human-rights advocates, all seeking to displace the official story of the Games. Bringing together a distinguished group of scholars from Chinese studies, human rights, media studies, law, and other fields, Owning the Olympics reveals how multiple entities---including the Chinese Communist Party itself---seek to influence and control the narratives through which the Beijing Games will be understood. digitalculturebooks is an imprint of the University of Michigan Press and the Scholarly Publishing Office of the University of Michigan Library dedicated to publishing innovative and accessible work exploring new media and their impact on society, culture, and scholarly communication. Visit the website at www.digitalculture.org.

Encoding the Olympics assembles a uniquely representative international team of media experts to provide a comprehensive review of the global impact of media and cultural communications associated with the Beijing 2008 Olympics. Commissioned by the IOC, this pioneering comparative study – the largest in Olympic Games research –provides a ground-breaking, panoramic, cross-cultural perspective on media responses to the leading sports event of the modern world. The representative team that undertook the study includes media commentators and political analysts, sport and media journalists, Sinologists and observers of the Asian Pacific Rim, academics in Olympic Studies and media and communication studies, scholars of the cultural and sociology studies of sport and festival and events managers. Encoding the Olympics provides a unique, encyclopaedic study that will serve as a versatile resource at several levels – as a textbook or source reference for academic institutions, media public relations agencies that facilitate the work of inter-cultural exchange organisations, and international communication departments of multinational enterprises and international NGOs. This volume analyses global media responses to a mega-sport event on a scale never before attempted. This book was previously published as a special issue of the International Journal of the History of Sport.

The Beijing 2008 Olympic ceremonies were spectacular performances and technological accomplishments by the People’s Republic of China. However, the audience in Beijing was only the most overt element of a global audience receiving the message of the Games. For this global audience, the Beijing performances were a harbinger of wider regional and international ambitions; a message of intent that pointed to a larger Chinese plan to a degree not seen since the Ming dynasty. New Chinese ambitions embrace both soft power and hard power. The actor in this political drama of international scope is the Chinese state and its political ambitions on the world stage. The Beijing Olympics can be seen as its opening act, and the audience as global. Rather than the kind of "morality" play that is typically used in China to educate the people in politics, this new production – a production on many levels – was one aimed at audiences all around the world, and one that was a calculated expression of realpolitik. This book was previously published as a special issue of the International Journal of the History of Sport.

This report aims to analyse the projects implemented by the city of Beijing to incorporate environmental sustainability into the 2008 Olympic Games and fulfil the environmental commitments made during the candidature phase. Beijing set ambitious environmental goals to show the world its commitment to sustainable development. The project areas range from addressing air and water quality and waste management to including environmental considerations in new infrastructure development.

The 2008 Olympic Games will be held in Beijing but many human rights activists support a boycott. They liken the circumstances to previous governments that used the games to glorify their regimes - most notoriously the Nazis in 1936. What has led to this perception and is it fair? Sport, Revolution and the Beijing Olympics is a cultural history of sport in China and challenges many such ingrained Western assumptions. The authors unpick the relationship of sport to imperialism and revolution, and examine its significance in both China and Taiwan at governmental and everyday levels. In the process, they successfully debunk harmful myths, such as the prevalence of drugs in Chinese sport among women athletes, and present a balanced view that is a much-needed corrective to popular understanding.