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BEIJING — When they gaze down at the 7,000 choreographed performers in the closing ceremony of the Beijing Olympics tomorrow, China's Communist rulers will allow themselves a quiet moment of satisfaction.
The bureaucratic men of the Politburo, who will oversee the dazzling martial-arts displays and opera singers from their air-conditioned seats at the Bird's Nest stadium, will know that their gamble paid off. The triumphs of the past two weeks have boosted their domestic power - and global influence - to greater heights than almost anyone had expected.
The Beijing Games were primarily designed as a spectacle for television - the smartest way to communicate the government's carefully shaped message of peace and power to a massive domestic and global audience. And it succeeded. These Olympics were the biggest broadcast event in world history, with a global television audience of at least 1.2 billion at its peak, according to the latest estimates this week.
The vast majority of the television coverage was glowingly positive. Record audiences kept sponsors happy around the world. "Can the Olympics get any better than this?" asked SportsBusiness Journal, a trade publication. "Ever again?"
China's national flag is raised during the opening ceremony of the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games at the National Stadium, August 8, 2008. The stadium is also known as the Bird's Nest. (Jerry Lampen/Reuters)
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This month, after the demise of a long-ruling party in Paraguay, the Chinese Communist Party became the most successful political party in the world today. It has dominated China for every moment of the past 59 years - longer than any other government in the world. (Even the totalitarian regime in North Korea was forced out of Pyongyang briefly during the Korean War.) After the overwhelming popularity of these Olympics among the 1.3 billion Chinese, there will be no loosening of the party's grip in the foreseeable future. The gold-medal bonanza and the overpowering mood of patriotism has swept everything before it.
"The Chinese leadership's popularity has certainly been enhanced," says Joseph Cheng, a political scientist at City University of Hong Kong who specializes in Chinese politics.
"The vast majority of Chinese people accepted that this was a very important chance to improve national solidarity and to show China's progress to the world. These goals have been reinforced, and the Chinese government has been quite successful at it."
President Hu Jintao and his Politburo colleagues knew that any number of potential disasters - terrorism, uncontrollable protests, suffocating smog or political boycotts - could have ruined their message. None of those fears were realized, largely due to relentless planning, heavy-handed police controls, some well-timed doses of good fortune (especially the smog-dispersing weather) and the media's predictable focus on feel-good athletic stories.
These have been the Potemkin Olympics, with China's social and political problems hidden behind a façade of spectacular architecture, cheerful volunteers and enthusiastic crowds.
In the end, the government's calculations were correct. There would be no serious repercussions for its crackdown on dissent. The world's politicians still beat a path to Beijing's door. None of the brief protests during the Games had any serious impact on the media. And thanks to massive state resources and centralized sports planning, China dominated the gold-medal table, crushing the United States and providing a daily diet of joyous news for its domestic audience.
One of the engineers of China's triumph was the filmmaker Zhang Yimou. Once the darling of the Western art-house crowd for his subtle portraits of Chinese peasants, he is now the master of the state-approved big-budget epic, often with patriotic pro-China messages. The famed filmmaker was the man chosen to orchestrate the glittering performances at the opening and closing ceremonies. He was candid in his explanation of Beijing's preference for vast spectacle - even at a human price that most other countries could not afford.
"I have conducted operas in the West, and it was so troublesome," he said in an interview with Southern Weekend, a Chinese newspaper. "They only work four-and-a-half days each week. Every day there are two coffee breaks. There cannot be any discomfort, because of human rights. ... We do not have that. We can work very hard, we can withstand lots of bitterness. We can achieve in one week what they can achieve in one month. Other than North Korea, no other country in the world can achieve this."
Mr. Zhang acknowledged that the Beijing Olympic ceremonies were inspired by North Korea's socialist tradition of mass gymnastics, where thousands of performers are synchronized in every tiny detail. "Their performances can be so uniform!" he said. "This kind of uniformity brings beauty. We Chinese can do it too."
This spirit of sacrifice and uniformity, he said, was hitched to one of China's greatest strengths: its ultramodern technology. And the rehearsals were supervised almost constantly by the Central Committee of the Communist Party. Dozens of senior party officials watched the rehearsals to approve every detail, Mr. Zhang said. "Our program had the highest level of political review since the founding of the People's Republic of China. Basically all reviews were from the Central Committee."
Political control, advanced technology, a spirit of sacrifice and solidarity, attention to the smallest detail - these were the ingredients of Beijing's Olympic triumph. They produced an astonishing 47 gold medals for China (with two days of competition still remaining), and they produced a show that captivated audiences around the world. It left little space for anyone who wanted to protest.
One of the very few Olympians who tried to protest against China's policies in Tibet was a Polish weightlifter named Szymon Kolecki. After winning a silver medal in his event, he shaved his head as a gesture of solidarity with Tibet's Buddhist monks. But because of strictly enforced rules that prohibit athletes from making political gestures, he was unable to tell anyone publicly about the reasons for his shaved head.
"I can't directly say why I did it," he told a Polish magazine. "But I will say that it's symbolic."
More than 40 Olympic athletes downloaded Songs for Tibet - an album containing songs that protested against China's handling of Tibet. But none of the Olympians could publicly disclose their names, because they could be expelled from the Olympics under the rules of the International Olympic Committee. Shortly after the downloading incident, China blocked access to Apple's iTunes website, where the album was available.
While the Olympic athletes had to stay silent on human-rights issues, a series of pro-Tibet demonstrations were held in Beijing by foreign activists who called for greater rights for Tibet. These protests, too, went largely unnoticed in China. The police swiftly broke up the protests, and the Chinese media did not report them.
With the protesters mostly silenced or censored, the enduring memory of the Beijing Olympics will be the deafening noise of China's flag-waving fans, screaming at victories and singing loudly to the national anthem. It has been an impressive display of patriotism and pride, and it helps rally the nation around the Communist Party's leadership.
One key question is how the party will choose to use this nationalism. What will it do with this massive pride in China's gold medals, this sense of victory for the party itself? Will it become a more self-confident and secure government, willing to relax and compromise and reform on some issues? Or will the Olympic victory be interpreted as proof of the correctness of the Chinese government's policies, proof that the status quo should be entrenched?
Mr. Cheng said that the Olympics is unlikely to lead to any significant reforms in China. "We don't see any sign by the Chinese leadership that it wants to establish genuine political reform. It's obvious that the party has no intention of accepting any diminution of its monopoly on power."
On the global stage, the Olympics is a huge breakthrough for China's prestige and national power. Some commentators are even calling it "the first moment of the post-American era."
But for many Chinese, the goal of the Olympics is simply to demonstrate China's rise to superpower status. For them, the gloating has already begun. "Soon the world will accept that China is a rich and strong country," said one Chinese blogger. "Foreigners will say, 'China is amazingly rich. It can afford things that even the developed countries cannot afford.' "
