This time around, the atmosphere will be a little colder in the Bird’s Nest. The stadium built to stage Beijing’s 2008 opening ceremony is about to welcome an unprecedented second spectacle for the Winter Games, but the welcome will not be warm or wide. In accordance with pandemic recommendations, the stadium where the opening ceremony will be staged on Friday will be closed to foreign spectators and open to the elements, with temperatures likely below freezing at the moment of the starting countdown. Where 105 heads of state attended in 2008, many will be conspicuously absent in 2022, following a series of diplomatic boycotts. The seats for the international Games will be filled with a strictly local Beijing crowd, waiting to see what filmmaker Zhang Yimou, also the master of ceremonies 14 years ago, will offer his fellow citizens as a sequel.
The bar to clear is impossibly high. Zhang’s 2008 opening ceremony transcended the genre of the Olympic pageant to become a genuinely historic event. With a budget of $300 million and a volunteer corps of 15,000 performers, the show reached an estimated television audience of 2 billion people. It’s a feat that still boggles the mind: The biggest live audience in human history tuned in, not for a moon landing, a political declaration, or even a sporting event, but for a four-hour piece of performance art.
As the most widely watched piece of political theater ever produced, the 2008 ceremony is also one of the most widely misunderstood. In the days following the show, commentators in the West repeatedly compared the coordinated choreography of 2,008 fou drummers and tai chi masters to military processions, drawing upon old images of the purpose stadiums have served in communist and fascist states. The Economist recognized the ceremony as “spectacular, but with touches of the authoritarian,” exhibiting “an uncomfortable martial tone” and “a nation marching in lockstep.” Similarly awestruck, Roger Ebert remarked that these “thousands of painstakingly drilled performers” reminded him of nothing more than Leni Riefenstahl’s Nazi propaganda film Triumph of the Will. (Not even her Olympia.) Before long, ESPN was reporting that performers, training 16 hours a day for three months, had in fact been living in army barracks.
Even in the moment, NBC’s live commentators could not help describing the event as “both awe-inspiring and perhaps a little intimidating.” On the same network a few years later, the refrain became a joke, when Michael Sheen appeared on 30 Rock and quipped, “I can’t suffer through the London Olympics. … Did you see the Beijing opening ceremonies? We don’t have control over our people like that.”
In hindsight, this interpretation—of the 2008 opening ceremony as an impressive, but somewhat terrifying, representation of China’s mobilization under authoritarian rule—is hard to shake. Part of what made the 2008 Olympics so historic is that they were overseen by a rising star in the Chinese Communist Party, who, in the course of managing the Games, went from provincial chairman to national vice president and heir apparent: Xi Jinping. Whereas the International Olympic Committee and Chinese ministers under Hu Jintao assured the world that the 2008 Olympics would improve the country’s human rights record, there is no pretense, now, under Xi’s permanent presidency, that the Olympics will do anything to instill democratic norms. China’s trajectory since 2008—both as the economic victor of the Great Recession, with a sphere of influence reaching to Africa and Latin America, and as an autocracy infamous internationally for its platform of repression in Hong Kong and Xinjiang—confirms the narrative that Beijing’s 2008 opening ceremony announced the arrival of a new superpower and a new Cold War. The spectacle, by this logic, was not a “coming-out party” but the prelude to a party crackdown.
But the prehistory of the ceremony complicates this narrative: Beijing organizers wanted more than just shock and awe. As historian Susan Brownell has documented, there was a time when the explicit propaganda of state speeches and mass calisthenics filled stadiums in China, but that was before the CCP took part in the Olympics. The first Games attended by Chinese athletes and dignitaries were in 1984 in Los Angeles, where they witnessed what remains one of the most garishly designed and overtly corporate Olympics ever. This sparked an enduring public debate back in the homeland about whether to continue the tradition of propagandistic National Games or adapt to global, commercial sporting culture. In this context, the 2008 Beijing ceremony, which combined mass choreography with pop performances, marked a transition to something new, capable of answering several different directives. At one moment, soldiers from the People’s Liberation Army might goose-step to the podium to raise the Chinese flag; at another, pop stars from China and Britain would sing a bilingual theme song, as a promotional stunt, under smiley face fireworks.
Facing national expectations and international crowds, Zhang Yimou’s show needed to take on separate meanings for internal and external audiences. He planned this from the beginning, when an enormous, white LED screen, representing a blank scroll, rolled out at midfield to mark the beginning of the artistic section. The theme of paper was Zhang’s initial concept for the entire ceremony: China’s Olympic documentary The Everlasting Flame shows him (in no doubt carefully considered footage) insisting on this “highlight” over the protestations of both local officials and foreign consultants. On one hand, the theme of paper allowed Zhang to play with benign sources of national pride that were politically neutral or even anti-Communist, including the four great inventions of ancient China (paper, printing, the compass, and gunpowder), shan shui landscape painting, and Confucius’ Analects. On the other hand, the scroll at the center of the stadium gave the spectacle one subtle but recognizable reference to Maoism: The blank page was one of the chairman’s most famous metaphors for his new Chinese state. Depending on where you were sitting, the white screen represented either the possibility of an open future or an affirmation of established slogans. The audience, same as the director, could project any number of ideas onto that blank surface.
In the night’s most memorable moment, Zhang went further, concealing and revealing his multiple messages inside 897 intricate Chinese boxes. When the painted page was raised to make way for China’s next great invention, movable type, giant printing blocks rose and fell to form the character for hé, or “harmony,” in three different scripts. Recitations from Confucius suggested international harmony between peoples (“friends coming from afar,” from the very beginning of the Analects), but to local spectators, the character evoked Hu Jintao’s doctrine of “Harmonious Society”: a code of internal order widely associated with political censorship. A few moments later, even this debate was rendered moot when the blocks opened to reveal, rather than technological wizardry, nearly a thousand human operators. This was the kind of moment critics would remember when they wrote about the show’s militaristic discipline, but the real thesis here was economic. The machinery of Chinese industry and global commerce was laid bare, revealing the scale of human labor that made it possible. “How did they do it?” Bob Costas asked. “They did it with people.”
If there is a single lesson to take from this shifting, multifarious show, it is in the story of how Zhang came to be its solitary director-in-chief. Judging by his early career, he was not an obvious choice. The son of a Kuomintang officer from Chiang Kai-shek’s defeated Nationalist army, Zhang started his life on the wrong side of the People’s Republic, growing up in poverty, working as a rural laborer under the Cultural Revolution, and donating blood to buy his first camera. His early films, including Ju Dou and Raise the Red Lantern, received major awards abroad but were banned at home. After deceiving censors with a false screenplay for To Live—crafting, instead, a tragic and critical account of the Chinese Civil War, the Great Leap Forward, and their aftermath—Zhang was prohibited from making films in China with foreign funds for five years.
Zhang’s standing at home changed around the year 2000, when the rebel outlaw finally made peace with the state. This was more or less the plot of his 2002 blockbuster wuxia film Hero, a lavish martial arts epic in which Jet Li gives up on an assassination mission so that China can be united under its first emperor. The politics of Zhang’s films were now markedly different, and so was the political response: Chinese authorities, who had previously tried to pull his name from the Academy Awards, now promoted him for the same prize. The Chinese public still mistrusted Zhang as a director who pandered to international tastes, but now that this style could be put in the service of national myths, the government considered him an asset—under the right circumstances. That’s how, in 2005, Zhang won the bid competition to direct Beijing’s opening ceremony.
Even then, there seemed to be a chance that Zhang would go rogue, when he joined an improbable team of international collaborators. The core design for the national stadium was furnished by Ai Weiwei, an iconoclast in conceptual art, most famous in these years for photographing himself smashing a Han dynasty urn and raising a middle finger to Tiananmen Square. For the ceremonies themselves, Zhang recruited Taiwanese director Ang Lee, whose recent Oscar for Brokeback Mountain had divided Chinese censors and authorities, and Steven Spielberg, who had just completed Munich, a film that opens on the Olympics’ darkest hour. As plans for the Games got underway, Zhang seemed both prepared to welcome real artistic risks and somehow able to bring Chinese organizers along with him.
But as the opening ceremony approached, the international coalition fell apart. In February of 2008, having been “put on notice” by Mia and Ronan Farrow over China’s political ties to the Darfur genocide, Spielberg resigned as creative consultant. In May, the Sichuan earthquake turned Ai irrevocably against the government and the Games; he devoted his next major artwork to a citizen investigation into child casualties. Lee continued to be credited as part of Beijing’s artistic team, but when the Games began, no specific scenes in the opening ceremony bore his name. The growing anticipation around the ceremony narrowed into focused attention. As far as commentators and spectators were concerned, this was now a one-man show.
In the final moments before 8 o’clock on 8/8/08, as the seats in the stadium filled, Costas remarked, “We’re about to see what happens when an artist gets nearly unlimited resources.” The better question to ask was this: What happens when an artist faces nearly unprecedented scrutiny? Zhang was not just managing 15,000 performers; he was managing the expectations of an international audience that had once praised him as a thoughtful critic of China’s history, and of a national audience that would rally behind him only if he continued on his new patriotic path. Heads of state were present from both crowds, and the television audience for each side was about a billion strong. As Zhang himself described it, “no other artistic activity has had this many layers, and such a high-level review.”
Zhang’s artistic associates disagreed about which side he chose. Nominating Zhang as Time’s Person of the Year, Spielberg welcomed the idealist and internationalist interpretation of hé, arguing that the “grandest spectacle of the new millennium” expressed at its core a “prevalent theme of harmony and peace.” Ai dissented, citing the “fake smile for the foreigners” that the drummers put on in their final rehearsals, and indicting Zhang’s ceremonies as monumental propaganda devoid of humanity.
Each, in his own way, confined to a singular interpretation, made the same error as the reviewers above. They describe two different shows, and Zhang had made both.
What distinguishes a stadium crowd from a movie theater audience is that it is divided into sections, rooting for different teams. Zhang—whose directing career had taken him from European film festivals to the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, and whose ceremonies had drawn support from international collaborators before turning to national committees—was singularly well prepared to put on a double act for this double audience. Perhaps, in the critical commentary that followed, he was more successful with the home crowd than with the visitors, but for at least four hours he produced a crossover hit.
In 2022, the challengers have changed sides. Where Zhang once faced an international stadium crowd and won over his national critics, he will now face a national stadium crowd and see if he can win over international skeptics. This last hurdle is one Zhang has consistently struggled to clear: Recent films like The Flowers of War and The Great Wall, cast with major Hollywood actors and packed with big-budget effects, performed reasonably well in China but bombed abroad. For Beijing’s Winter Olympics, Zhang has promised something very different from either these films or his previous ceremony. The show on Friday will be smaller in scale, focused on the future instead of the past, drawing on the talents of ordinary people, and globally rather than nationally minded.
We already know, in many ways, how the Games of Beijing 2022 will play out. The arrival of the Olympic torch will not reform China any more than it reformed Germany in the 1930s, or Mexico in the 1960s. The diplomatic boycotts led by the U.S. will not free the victims of genocide any more than Spielberg’s artistic boycott did 14 years ago. These are symbolic gestures. What is left for us to interpret are the symbolic gestures that the host offers in return, during the hundred minutes of Zhang’s sequel ceremony. Be wary of singular readings, and be on watch for second meanings.
