Susan Brownell
Shorenstein Reports on Contemporary East Asia
Number 9
October 1996
The 1996-7 Shorenstein Seminars on Contemporary East Asia presented a public lecture on the future of Hong Kong on Thursday, September 12th, 1996 at the Institute of East Asian Studies.
Susan Brownell was a nationally-ranked athlete in the United States before winning a gold medal for Beijing City in the 1986 Chinese National College Games. In 1987-88, she studied sport theory at the Beijing University of Physical Education. She was a consultant for numerous media organizations leading up to the 1996 Olympics, including Sports Illustrated, NBC-TV, a Discovery Channel production, and China Central TV. She also had access to the press and broadcasting centers in Atlanta. She is an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Missouri, St. Louis, and is the author of Training the Body for China: Sports in the Moral Order of the People's Republic (1995).
When the delegation from the People's Republic of China entered the stadium in the opening ceremonies of the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta, NBC commentator Bob Costas said:
The People's Republic of China. One-fifth of the world's population. With an economy growing at the rate of about 10% a year, every economic power, including the United States, wants to tap into that huge potential market. But, of course, there are problems with human rights, copyright disputes, the threat posed to Taiwan. And within the Olympics, while they have excelled, they were fourth in the medal standings in Barcelona with 54 medals, 16 of them gold, this after a 30 year absence which ended in 1984, they've excelled athletically, they're building into a power, but amid suspicions, Dick, especially concerning their track athletes and their female swimmers, possibly using performance enhancing drugs. None caught in Barcelona, but since those Olympics in 1992, several have been caught.
After the NBC telecast on July 14, the Chinese community in the United States, led by members of the Berkeley Chinese Students and Scholars Association, mobilized to protest Costas' comments. Thousands of signatures were collected, a letter of protest was sent to NBC, and tens of thousands of dollars were raised to purchase a full-page ad in the Washington Post and a quarter-page ad in the Sunday New York Times. Heated letters were exchanged on the internet, and mainstream newspapers editorialized about it. Jay Leno even interviewed Costas about it on his show.
Professor Brownell, who has been following American media coverage of Chinese sports for ten years, has felt that the image of Chinese sports that is presented is often slanted in a negative direction -- so negative, in fact, that Costas' comments in the opening ceremonies are mild by comparison with some other press and TV reports. And so there are three questions she addressed in her talk: Why is the coverage of Chinese sports so negative? Why did Bob Costas' comments comments incite such outrage? And, what can be done to avoid such conflicts in the future?
Professor Brownell has worked as a translator, consultant, and/or interviewed expert for NBC Television, "The Ultimate Athlete" (which aired on the Discovery Channel), Sports Illustrated, The Los Angeles Times, and others. In the reports in which she was involved, she saw that the directors and reporters often chose to ignore or de-emphasize the more positive or neutral information that she gave them, while highlighting the negative information that was given to them by other sources. For example, she does not believe that China has a centrally-administered system for drug use such as was found in East Germany; but, rather than quoting her opinions after interviewing her, reporters have found someone else who will say the opposite and quoted them. It is true that eleven Chinese women swimmers tested positive before and after the 1994 Asian Games, but there is no evidence that drug use permeates all sports, or that it continues today in swimming. Reports on the Chinese sports system commonly highlight three negative aspects: child abuse, systematic drug use, and brainwashing to produce athletes who want to "win glory for the nation." As the story goes, China has a former Soviet-style, Communist sports system in which children are removed from their parents, sent to government-supported sports boarding schools, given performance-enhancing drugs by a centrally-administered sports medicine system, and trained to win glory for the nation.
This story, Professor Brownell admits, does describe a "certain reality." This story is not contextualized, however, and is often sensationalized. For instance, it is true that the Chinese sports system is based on a state-supported system of schools and specialist training sessions, but this is understandable given the generally low standard of living in China, the lack of access to sports facilities, and the centrally planned economy. By themselves, she notes, individual households with children who are talented in sports "could not have even afforded the food for their children in hard training." Without government-sponsored programs, Professor Brownell emphasizes, "there would be no top-level sports at all in China."
Other media distortions are largely the result of an individual writer's or director's penchant for sensationalism and shoddy reporting practices. Take as an example a Sports Illustrated article published in August 1988. The author, Rick Reilly, worked together with Professor Brownell on a piece about a six-year-old gymnast, Liyin, who was training at the Western District Spare-Time Sports School in Beijing. The article began by describing Liyin on the balance beam, too terrified to perform a back flip. As a punishment, Liyin is forced to hang on the uneven bars as long as she can bear it. Her mother watches all this and comments, "It's too cruel." After several minutes, Liyin is escorted back to the beam, where she performs the flip. The article is titled "Here No One Is Spared."
There are several problems with this account. Most important, Liyin was not the person on the beam; she was too young to perform the back flip. The girl who was punished was an older girl, but Rick Reilly was unable to distinguish between them, as all of them were dressed in identical leotards. Moreover, the translation of the mother's words -- "it's too cruel" -- was "sheer fabrication." What the mother said, when asked her feelings about observing her daughter's training for the first time, was "it's a little cruel."
What explains these kinds of distortions? Do sports journalists have malicious intentions toward China? Professor Brownell thinks, rather, that journalists do their investigations of China with some "preconceived notions," many of which are negative. But where do these notions come from in the first place? Professor Brownell identifies several sources. For the most part, Professor Brownell argues, journalists get their impressions about China from other journalists, many of whom have had negative experiences in China. In addition, many interpret China through an analogy with the former Eastern Bloc sports system, where performance-enhancing drugs, for example, were centrally administered. This model is now "imposed upon China, even though it does not completely fit." Furthermore, bureaucrats in the Chinese Sports Commission do not seem to be helping the Chinese compete in the public relations battlefields. When American reporters go to China, the commission often receives them reluctantly. The commission has little experience with a Western-style press and does not know how to use the media to their advantage. Bureaucrats in the commission assume that if China wins many medals, China will automatically be rewarded with a glowing national reputation, which is not necessarily the case given the negative stereotypes that exist about the Chinese sports system. When China is criticized for its practices, the sports commission rarely understands or responds to the criticism. As a result, Western journalists receive little contextual information from the Chinese side, leading many to assume the worst.
The negative slant in reporting is also caused in part by lack of information about the Chinese sports system. Because few journalists were child athletes themselves, many of them are willing to believe that intensive training at a young age constitutes child abuse, and they "pick up on this theme wherever young athletes are found." Professor Brownell, however, as a child athlete herself, disagrees with the notion that intense training at a young age is a form of abuse. Most athletic children, she contends, "whether Chinese or American, love sports because they think they are fun." Moreover, it is wrong for journalists to assume that young Chinese athletes are being sacrificed at the altar of state glory: Chinese athletes compete for their own benefits, not only for national honor. Self-interested motives rarely come across in interviews, however, because the custom is for Chinese athletes to cite nationalistic motives and downplay personal ones. As a result, Western journalists get the impression that Chinese athletes are simply robots in the service of the state. Western journalists do not look favorably upon this strong sense of nationalism, for many cannot understand that its roots lie in a deep sense of national humiliation over the last century. This makes the Chinese sports system appear like a "Big Red Machine," reminiscent of the Cold War Soviet-bloc system.
The response to the comments Bob Costas made during the opening ceremony may in part be explained by different broadcast styles in China and the United States. In China, commentators consider the Olympic opening ceremony a "solemn event." Broadcasters' remarks thus rarely go beyond describing the basic facts of each team, such as where they are from, how many athletes are on the team, and the medals they hope to win. This sort of bare-bones commentary would not fly in the United States, where audiences demand embellishments, even if they are political and social and have little to do with sports.
In an interview with Professor Brownell, Bob Costas denied that he had consciously engaged in "China bashing" during the Olympics. He said,
Who in their right mind wants to insult countries? Or use the Olympics to make little political points? It would be stupid even if you were so inclined. It would be stupid to do. Because it would diminish your broadcast. It just wouldn't be appropriate. Now, inevitably, what your sensibilities are and your sense of what's dramatic or admirable or not gets into everything you do, but that's true of every report. And so the sense of what should be emphasized that someone from France has is different from someone from South Africa or someone from Canada or the United States. So in that sense, there probably is a political or personal judgment involved that I'm not aware of when I'm doing it. But in terms of overt political stuff, it would just be ridiculous to use the Olympics for some kind of a soapbox.
In conclusion, Professor Brownell suggests that it is not enough for Americans to try to understand the Chinese and vice versa. Since the media play such an important role in shaping popular conceptions of certain countries, academics need to try to "better understand the media." The media, for their part, should try harder to utilize multiple sources of information, not just journalistic sources. Professor Brownell's talk was intended to help promote more understanding between Americans and Chinese who participate in or follow the sports world.
Summarized by Neil Diamant.
