Liu Minxia

mllmx@msn.com

WESTERN media outlets targeting China take every chance to smear the country and its people, even at the expense of their own credibility and journalism ethics.

One of the recent examples of that — a New York Times article titled “The Chinese Sports Machine’s Single Goal: The Most Golds, at Any Cost” — is an astonishing piece.

It is astonishing in the way the article deftly distorted facts to stigmatize China, citing the examples of two female weightlifters the author effectively (or probably purposely) misunderstood, and jumped to a subjective and groundless conclusion that China runs a “sports machine” with only one goal of churning out the most gold medals for political purposes by ruthlessly funneling young athletes into sports that are underfunded in Western countries, without consideration of whether they enjoy the sport or not.

It is astonishing considering the fact that the carefully organized piece was written by Hannah Beech, a veteran reporter who was stationed in China for years and can speak Mandarin (according to an introduction to her on the newspaper’s website) yet turned a blind eye to basic facts and discarded her common sense of culture differences.

As an example of her many laughable narratives, Beech, in her efforts to set the mood for the miserable life led by Chinese athletes, says that only the luckiest athletes can see their families a few times a year and that in lifter Liao Qiuyun’s case, it was a journalist from her home province who passed her a message from her parents. It’s unimaginable that someone who contributes to one of the world’s most prominent newspapers remains so old-fashioned to use such rhetoric in this era of 5G.

Another report, “‘Failed the Nation’: Chinese Olympians Facing Furious Backlash at Home” by BBC, depicted the Chinese people as fanatical nationalists who lost their heads over gold medals and accused athletes who failed to bring one home as being “unpatriotic.” The prejudiced article continued to cite Dr. Florian Schneider, director of the Netherlands’ Leiden Asia Center, as saying that “in that context, someone who fails at a competition against foreigners has let down or even betrayed the nation.”

Seeing for himself that the accusations are a departure from the real happenings, Chinese equestrian Alex Hua Tian refuted by sharing his experience.

“As a Chinese athlete [who] just returned from Tokyo, I find this coverage grossly out of proportion. I did not win a medal and have had nothing but support from fans on Chinese social media,” he wrote.

“Every nation represented at the Olympics will have fans whose support goes too far or have expectations unmanaged — this doesn’t excuse their behavior but it also doesn’t excuse unbalanced reporting.”

There are also media outlets that used other dirty tricks to mislead their readers, posting unsightly photos of Chinese Olympians to go with even celebratory news pieces, or simply employing wrong photos to support their wording of defamation. After 14-year-old Chinese diver Quan Hongchan, the youngest of the Chinese team in Tokyo, won a stunning gold in the women’s 10 meter platform Thursday, news.com.au claimed that Quan looked “devastated” after her perfect dive and “has not cracked a smile despite her impeccable performance.” Below the text, the Australian news website owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. conjured a photo of a self-composed Quan at the very moment of preparing to perform a dive.

Innocent and ill-informed readers were successfully fooled, with one under the account name of Strongopnion leaving a comment that read: “Chinese people have no soul.”

Although I disagree with the idea that only those who smile have a soul, Quan did smile and smiled a lot after the final score came out. Becoming an instant sensation in China not only because of her incomparable performance, but also her diligence, pure mind, and sincerity, Quan melts the heart of even the hardest.

Not just gold medalists like Quan have won the hearts of Chinese people. To some extent, almost each age group of Chinese spectators drew inspiration from the grit and grace demonstrated by the Olympians, not restricted to Chinese, nor restricted to top winners.

For men, including male athletes, Su Bingtian who made history to become the first Chinese sprinter to qualify for the Olympics men's 100m final is definitely a role model. Without bagging any medal, the 32-year-old was one of the most followed Chinese Olympians online in the past few days. He was also the flagbearer of the Chinese delegation at the closing ceremony of the Tokyo Olympics on Sunday.

For younger children, Quan’s fellow diver Chen Yuxi, who is also in her teens and won a silver in the women’s 10 meter platform, displayed valuable traits like modesty, cordiality and confidence, something their parents definitely hope for them to possess. Older students were inspired by college student Olympians including Tsinghua University’s Yang Qian, and Shenzhen University’s swimmers Tang Muhan and Yang Junxuan.

Beech, in her writing for The New York Times, described weightlifter Liao as a crying girl who couldn’t hold back her tears after obtaining a silver instead of a gold. Liao is a graduate student of China’s Southwest University. According to the lifter’s mentor Prof. Li Jingwen, Liao cried because she had the potential to win but lost the final match by a narrow margin of only 1 kilogram, not because she felt hopeless or languished in poor mental well-being as assumed and interpreted by Beech. Crying is such a common and complex reaction to match results among Olympians of all nationalities and genders that using it as a weapon to attack an athlete or a nation can only show the journalist’s failure to follow the basic journalism principle of objectivity.

For mothers, we’re on the one hand personally inspired by quite a number of mother athletes like Shenzhen’s Liu Hong who clinched a bronze medal in the women’s 20km race walk, and on the other so happy and grateful that our children were awed by so many legendary Olympians who are strong in both mind and body and began emulating them.

To echo this observation, a recent China Youth Daily survey of 1,693 Chinese people found 98.1 percent of the respondents have been inspired by the spirit of the Olympic athletes, while 99 percent said they would cheer for the athletes, regardless of their performance.

While labeling China as a sports machine craving for gold medals, The New York Time article has a telltale line the author carefully inserted in brackets: China’s “strategy had delivered, through midday Thursday, 14 gold medals, edging out the United States and Japan for the lead. ... (The sports in which China is dominant are clustered in the first week of the Games, while the United States’ strengths are spread out.)” Not coincidentally, in the introduction to Beech on the newspaper’s website, mentioned above, her experience of playing “table tennis with a Chinese Olympic gold medalist” was bragged about.

The newspaper’s unique way of displaying the medal tally has also become a worldwide laughing stock. To lift the United States to the top place, the paper ranked countries by the total medals won instead of gold medals, in contrast to the official and traditional way of arranging a medal awards table.

It is so natural, however, for any person to hope for his or her nation to win, and German psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer calls it an instinct of human beings in his “Gut Feelings: The Intelligence of the Unconscious.” “Team sports … are not about sports per se but exist to satisfy our community instinct,” he wrote.

Thus, we’re not different when we compete in, or pay attention to, international sports events out of our community instinct, even though the athletes may grow out of different selection or training mechanisms, just as we have different political systems. It’s also common sense that tradition and culture also play a role in which sports different nations are good at. It can be either mechanisms or sports; no one is superior to the others. It’s just the choice of history and the people.

With that being said, Western media’s hasty and hysterical accusations make it “easy to conjure up in our minds the stereotypical image of a U.S. high-school jock who likes to be ‘the best’ at everything and hates to lose,” as British writer and analyst Tom Fowdy put it in one of his articles.

Fowdy thinks this image is “undeniably a representation of the ‘collective psychology’ of American sporting culture,” but this habitual mentality is not restricted to sports in reality. It is a representation of the collective psychology of American politicians across the board. And that mentality is the root cause of U.S. media and its allies — in line with the government’s foreign policy — generating “anti-Chinese stories which seek to nitpick, discredit, and attack every single development within the country, often on utterly ridiculous premises.”

“Know thyself.” This time-honored quote of Socrates is something the United States shouldn’t take for granted. Stop the finger pointing and the blame game. Join us in building a community with a shared future for mankind.