In international athletic competitions, the connection between winning medals and national pride has become deeply ingrained in the minds of athletes and sports fans. This is true in both the East and the West.
However, more developed democracies do not place such an emphasis on the connection between sports and national dignity and honor. Instead, they emphasize the universal values of sport such as fair competition, entertainment, health, fitness and encouragement of the human spirit.
Judging things in this light, we can see that Taiwanese sports lovers have managed to overcome the mindset that sport acts merely in the service of the glory and honor of a nation.
During the Olympic Games, Taiwanese baseball player Chang Tai-shan (張泰山) was banned from competing after testing positive in a drug test. This was a huge blow to the strength of Taiwan’s Olympic team. Chang later apologized in the media, saying the chemicals found in his system were leftover medicine taken to help conceive a child.
Before and after Chang made his apology, Taiwanese media did not say he had disgraced the nation and comforted him instead. In stark contrast, when China’s star track athlete Liu Xiang (劉翔) pulled out of a hurdles heat because of a leg injury, many people criticized him on the Internet, giving him nicknames like “Liu the quitter.”
The gold medal Liu could have won would have been very significant for China. Huge expectations were placed on his shoulders, most probably because athletes from Asian nations have never excelled in track and field events. For the Chinese, that gold medal would have meant a great deal in breaking Western hegemony and in erasing the shame the Chinese feel they have been subjected to as a nation.
The hate for Japan that Taiwanese were taught during the early days of the Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) authoritarian rule gradually waned as the nation’s democracy matured. Nationalistic ideas have weakened and many Taiwanese youth practically worship Japan and Japanese culture.
I have asked many of my students whether they would support Japan or South Korea in a baseball match. The answer from every single one was “Japan.” Even a senior sports commentator who was born in China and moved to Taiwan at a young age said on air: “I can handle Taiwan losing in baseball to Japan, but definitely not to South Korea.”
Now let us look at China. Chinese supporters wanted South Korea to defeat Japan in Olympic competitions because of a “Japanese hate complex” they developed over the experiences of World War II. In each event involving Japanese athletes, Chinese supporters cheered for Japan’s opponents and booed the Japanese team. Such behavior only serves to further ingrain feelings of national pride and past hostility between nations.
However, the Beijing Games also saw some Chinese leaving messages on the Internet that Liu should not be blamed for sports serving political ends. Volunteers at the Olympics said they were shocked and deeply moved by the Japanese team’s spirit when they witnessed Japan’s female soccer team bow to the crowd after losing, even after being booed.
Opinions that go against the grain in China are a rarity, even on the Internet, and if this type of independent thinking can develop further, it would prove to be the most precious return China would receive on the huge amount of money it invested in hosting the Games.
Chiang Wen-yu is an associate professor at the Graduate Institute of Linguistics at National Taiwan University.
TRANSLATED BY DREW CAMERON
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