At Olympic season, it feels awkward not to talk about the Olympics; but four years ago, in “Four Takes on the Olympics”, I already said more than enough, and for the moment I don’t particularly feel like rewriting anything.
As for the recent badminton match-fixing-through-passivity incident, I’ve said quite a lot about it on Weibo. First of all, this match was of course disgraceful; the question is whose disgrace it was. Obviously not the athletes’—the athletes were simply trying to adopt the best possible strategy for eventual victory, which is perfectly understandable. The first to be embarrassed is the International Badminton Federation’s bullshit rule: setting up such a weird rule is one thing, but then forcing the athletes to put everything on the line for the sake of showing the audience a match that, even if won, would only be worse—what is that, monkey business? Athletes come to the Olympics to compete for gold and silver, not to perform in a circus; why should they have to put on such a show for you? The second embarrassment is our country’s sports bureau leaders and Xinhua News Agency. At a critical moment, if you don’t stand up for the athletes, that’s one thing; but to make them take the blame, and not only to speak sarcastically but even to scold the athletes—taking credit for glory first and assigning fault to individuals first—this is simply outrageous!
The badminton incident and earlier incidents like weightlifting will all give rise to debate about the “举国体制” [the national system that mobilizes the whole country]. Every Olympics, of course, has to bring out criticism of the “举国体制.” Critics always say: what’s the use of winning so many gold medals? Can that improve the physical condition of the people? And those children are “sold” to the state from a very young age to undergo brutal training; in the end they are either eliminated or left with injuries all over their bodies—how miserable that is.
But here my position is a bit subtle: I not only support the Olympics—and in particular the commercialized, entertainment-driven, real-world Olympics—but in a certain sense I also support the “举国体制.”
Four years ago I already said that competing for medals and basic physical exercise are two different matters, and that personal honor and patriotism are not contradictory either.
Of course, on the one hand, human beings are animals; like any other animal, we need to eat our fill, to live in warmth, and to have a healthy body. These are the most basic needs. Human beings living together need to work collectively to create a living environment in which everyone can be well fed, warmly clothed, and healthy and vigorous. Of course, this is an arduous task. Human beings, like any animal, must constantly struggle against a changing nature; the competition for survival is endless. Even powerful human beings cannot once and for all eliminate the problem of survival. So if we say that we must forever devote ourselves to creating a basic living environment, does that mean we can only keep our heads down and labor at it forever? The special thing about human beings as human beings is precisely that we always also want to transcend ourselves; we always look up to the sky before we have fully seen the ground beneath us. Human transcendence is expressed in two ways—one is outward, political: people hope to display their own excellence to the public, to have the public remember their achievements, to leave their names in history, and to transcend their tribe and their era. The second way is inward, a way of self-challenge: immersing oneself in an endless undertaking, constantly breaking through one’s past, probing new possibilities, and creating new records that surpass oneself—this is the way of scientists, artists, or athletes. Of course, these two ways are in fact unified: only achievements that transcend the self can transcend the age.
The Olympics are not an activity devoted to solving the problem of basic physical exercise—though Coubertin indeed thought so—but rather an activity that carries people’s longing for “excellence” and “transcendence.”
Like any animal, human beings fight one another; the difference is that animals fight for mates or for food, whereas human beings can create for fighting a transcendent, pure stage. This transcendence does not mean that it has nothing to do with fame and profit; it means that it has nothing to do with survival.
It is precisely only when the Olympic training of the “举国体制” is unrelated to ordinary physical exercise that it becomes reasonable. Whether enough has been invested in the construction of sports facilities in primary and secondary schools, neighborhood streets, parks, civic gyms, and so on is one question. But whether the “举国体制” is reasonable or excessive is another question. If the “举国体制” is still too much, then even if basic sports infrastructure is built very well, too much is still too much. But nor does it mean that one cannot pursue a “举国体制” before basic infrastructure is sufficient.
Of course, if the investment in Olympic preparation and in physical exercise infrastructure is coordinated by the same department, then it is inevitable that one will be favored over the other; in that case these two indeed need to be weighed against each other. But solving this problem requires a clearer fiscal system and more free civil forces. Funding for Olympic preparation can be supported by privately initiated foundations or investors; it can also be weighed and balanced by local governments elected through public opinion. The balance between physical exercise and the Olympics is no more complex, and no simpler, than the balance between sports and medicine.
Another very strong reason for criticizing the “举国体制” is the injury of young people. Indeed, if children are “sold” to sports schools from a young age only to be treated like oxen or horses, with their cultural education completely ignored and their opportunities for other choices taken away, then such a system is of course cruel. But put another way, so long as children still have the opportunity to receive basic cultural education, and still have the chance to attend high school, vocational school, or even university, then there is nothing to object to. Of course, children’s training is hard, but what training is not hard? Nowadays parents have children practice calligraphy, piano, dance, and whatnot from a very young age—doesn’t that involve hardship? And besides, isn’t the exam-oriented education that crushes human nature itself also a huge oppression on children? The cruelty of exam-oriented education lies, in part, precisely in the situation of a thousand troops and ten thousand horses crossing a single-log bridge—if children want to stand out and accomplish something, it seems that the only road is “do well in math, physics, and chemistry.” But children each have their own talents, potentials, or preferences. The trend in our current education is to suppress these individualities, making children strive for nothing but the gaokao, producing children molded on an assembly line who tend toward mediocrity and mechanization. The competitive selection of Olympiad contestants under the “举国体制” is a mechanism that gives children an individualized path of growth, trying as hard as possible to develop the child’s own characteristics and enabling the child to find the path on which he can shine most brilliantly. This is unquestionably a good thing. If one is not fighting for the gaokao, but merely seeking the basic cultural education necessary for an ordinary modern citizen, then in fact it does not take much effort at all, and it can absolutely be completed alongside rigorous athletic training.
In other words, a good “举国体制” is not contradictory to individualism; on the contrary, it is one way of making growth more individualized. Thus the key issue of the “举国体制” lies in the condition of the “cannon fodder.” Of course, any pursuit inevitably has losers, all the more so in competitive sports that seek excellence and transcendence. Whether those who drop out halfway and those who are eliminated can be properly cared for is the most important issue.
One problem with the “举国体制” is that athletes are all cultivated from childhood; before a child understands free choice, the parents and sports school have already charted a path for him. Of course, this is true of any child. Before we are able to reflect on ourselves and choose again, it is impossible to step outside the space for development that our parents and social environment leave us. And the diversification of that space for development is not a bad thing. Children’s talents are never equal in the sense that everyone has the same ones, or rather, they are not evenly distributed. This does not mean that some people are born superior to others; it means that some people are born with greater potential than others in certain respects. If one measures a child’s growth using only a single dimension of ability—say, doing well in math, physics, and chemistry—then that is what produces greater inequality. A better situation is for multiple paths of growth to unfold at the same time, so that children with different talents can, as much as possible, choose the unique path suited to them. A responsible elder cannot let a child run completely wild; he must always make certain arrangements for the child. But after making those arrangements, he should still keep other possibilities as open as possible, and also stand behind the child as support, providing the necessary保障 [assurance and security].
One of the advantages of the “举国体制” is that it may be possible to use the organizational power of the whole society to provide such保障 [assurance and security]: on the one hand, to ensure that a child’s potential can be developed in the best possible environment; on the other hand, to ensure that if the child runs into setbacks or gives up, he can still find a fallback path. Without the “举国体制,” a child who chooses an alternative path but then fails can only rely on the shelter of the family, and that is highly risky. Moreover, bringing together children with special talents for systematic training not only provides more complete保障 [assurance and security] and better training, but also allows children to enter a growth environment that is more competitive and yet more lively and harmonious.
If a child who has talent in some area is thrown into an average ordinary class to go to school, then he may have his talent buried because of a lack of competition, and very possibly suffer mockery, jealousy, or exclusion because of his difference. The training camp system is not only more efficient for concentrating educational resources; it also has great significance for allowing every child to obtain the growth environment in which he can flourish most naturally.
Of course, we still have another concern, namely that the mechanized assembly-line education system we have now ultimately produces one brainless training machine after another. Of course, this is a problem, but not only a problem with sports schools; it is a problem that ordinary schools also have. Improving this problem requires humanistic education, requires reforming those pale language classes, those hypocritical history classes, and that brainwashing political instruction, replacing them with solid humanistic education. This has no direct relation to whether a training camp system exists or not. Sports schools can still set up sufficient humanistic education, and because the pressure of exam competition is reduced, humanistic education may in fact be able to proceed more freely.
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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