It only took one day into the 2016 Olympic games for the first China-related

controversy to unfold.

Last Saturday, Australian swimmer Mack Horton called his Chinese opponent
Sun Yang a drug cheat, in reference to a 2014 doping suspension, shortly
before narrowly beating him for the 400-meter freestyle gold medal. After the
race, a tearful Sun accused Horton of playing mind games: On the
Olympicss competition stage, every athlete deserves to be respected and
there's no need to use these cheap tricks to affect each other.

The reaction from China was similarly swift. Commenters posted a flood of
angry remarks on Hortons social media accounts, and Chinese media
condemned the athlete. Chinas swim team manager invoked a frequently
used phrase for responding to foreign criticism, saying that Horton hurt the
feelings of the Chinese swimmers.

Such reactions to fairly standard trash talk may strike some as thin-skinned.
But to many Chinese people, slights like Hortons can evoke strong
connections to a historic humiliation narrative pushed in schools, museums,
and mediaone in which Westerners look down upon China, insult it, and
conspire to keep it down.

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The Olympics provide a particularly ripe venue for these incidents.

At the 2012 London games, an American commentator called a 16-year-old

Chinese swimmers world-record performance suspicious and disturbing
for how fast it was. Soon thereafter, an article in Chinas official Xinhua News
Agency quoted a sports official claiming that the Americans cannot accept
Chinas rise. Thats why they criticize Chinese athletes.
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At the same games, several upsets and disqualifications that cost Chinese
athletes gold medals were attributed to Western conspiraciessupposedly
borne out of a hysterical and paranoid fear of China, according to the
Communist Party mouthpiece, Peoples Daily. (These claims were never
substantiated).

Perhaps the most significant outpouring of indignation came in the run-up to

the 2008 Beijing games, when the worldwide Olympic torch relay was
disrupted by protesters in London, Paris, and San Francisco, and led to
boycotts of French companies in China. At one protest outside the French
retailer Carrefour in the city of Qingdao, protesters directly linked historic and
modern issues when they toted signs saying, Say No to Carrefour! Say No to
French Imperialists! Strongly Protest Britain and France Invading China in
1860! Strongly Protest [Britain and France] Slandering Our Olympics in
2008!

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The below video, made by a Chinese college student, went viral and captured
the mood at the time. Imperialism will never abandon its intention to destroy
us! it says over chilling music, adding that Chinas torch relay struggle is
just like the long march for [Chinas] rise from a semi-colony up to a modern
independent country.

To understand this enduring sentiment, one has to understand the Century

of Humiliation narrative that has become a cornerstone of Chinas national
identity. The narrative goes like this: China was once a great world power and
glorious peace-loving civilization, until foreign aggressors in Europe, the
United States, and Japanstarting with the British and the First Opium War in

1839brought the country to its knees through a century of brutal conquest

and forced territorial concessions.

Though a similar national humiliation grievance existed under Chinas

Kuomintang government in the 1920s and 1930s, it was abandoned by Mao
Zedong following his assumption of power in 1949 in favor of a story line that
stressed socialist triumphalism and proletarian internationalism. But the
Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 and the domino collapse of communist
states over the next few years illustrated that that approach had run out of
steam, so the Communist Party shifted its focus back to a nationalistic
victimhood narrative wherein it played the role of savior. According to this
narrative, it wasnt until the Japanese army was defeated in 1945 and the
Communist Party prevailed in Chinas civil war in 1949 that the country was
set on a path toward national rejuvenation.

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Olympic glory has been framedimplicitly and explicitlyas one important

indicator of this rejuvenation. As early as 1903, a sort of national insecurity
was already developing when Chinese scholar Chen Tianhua translated an
article written by a British man referring to China as the sick man of East
Asia. The article, intended as a political critique of the Qing governments
stagnation, was interpreted by Chen in part as an attack on the physical
weakness of Chinese people. Shame! Shame! Shame! Chen wrote in
response. This great China, which for many centuries was hailed as the
Celestial Empire by neighbors, is now reduced to a fourth rate nation! The
foreigners call us the sick man of East Asia, call us a barbaric, inferior race.

China only sent athletes to the Olympics four times up to 1952winning no

medalsand then went on a three-decade hiatus during the international
isolation of the Mao era. But after winning its first gold at the 1984 Los
Angeles games, the stage was set for the Olympics to symbolize something
much more to China than athletic competition.

At the turn of this century, this sentiment was formalized when a cabinetapproved government document called on different ministries and provincial
governments to cooperate for the purpose of winning honor at the 2004

and 2008 Olympics. In 2004, the website of the Beijing Organizing Committee
for the Olympic Games published an article titled From Sick man of East
Asia to Sports Big Power, which invoked a cartoon published in a foreign
newspaper that supposedly mocked Chinas early Olympic failures. This is a
humiliation and satire of the Chinese athletes but also indicates that the
disaster-ridden old China has no status in the world, it read.

In his book Never Forget National Humiliation, Professor Wang Zheng of Seton
Hall University explains how Beijing's extravagant hosting of the 2008
Olympics and its record medal haul (China bested the United States for the
first time ever) played into this narrative:

It is because of the lingering memory of national humiliation that the

Chinese government and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) elite can
legitimize their rule through sports. Gold medals in international sports have
been effectively used as the currency of CCP legitimacy. Comparing todays
achievements with that of old China, as in the article From Sick Man of East
Asia to Sports Big Power, has been a common method of the CCP
propaganda machine. It is a great achievement for China to go from just one
participant and no medals in 1932 to 100 medals and 51 golds in 2008. The
success of the CCP government and Chinas rejuvenation in power and wealth
can be illustrated by the world-leading count of 51 gold medals.

However, many international observers criticized Chinas human rights record

rather than stand in awe of the countrys progress and achievements, playing
directly into the historical narrative of arrogant Westerners conspiring to keep
China from its rightful place as a respected world power. Many Chinese took it
as a slap in the face. In a 2008 interview, Paul A. Cohen, a professor of history
emeritus at Wellesley College, described this as part of an uneasy
relationship in China today between pride and insecurity, so conspicuously
embodied in the importance many Chinese attached to the Olympics.

In many Chinese eyes, a national rejuvenation necessitated the validation

and approval of the very powers that had originally knocked the country off
its perch. Cohen described this as a quest almost a yearning for the
admiration and respect of the rest of the world, above all the Western world.
He added: If the approval isnt granted or is granted only with qualifications,
initial pride can suddenly morph into resentment, anger, and deepened

insecurity.

While comments like Mack Hortons would likely draw anger from any nation
whose athlete was subjected to such insult, this historical insecurity might
explain why grievances so frequently involve slights toward Chinese
competitors. These incidents once again play right into the idea that
Westerners look down on China and will do whatever they can to undermine
its achievements. In a 2008 interview with Asia Societys Orville Schell,
Chinese filmmaker Chen Shi-Zheng, whose work has explored psychological
dynamics between China and the West, put it this way:

We [Chinese] feel sensitive to any kind of slight and often have a very
sharp reaction to perceived unfair treatment or injustices. On an emotional
level we cannot help but associate treatment in the present with past injuries,
defeats, invasions, and occupations by foreigners. There is something almost
in our DNA that triggers autonomic, and sometimes extreme, responses to
foreign criticism or put-downs.