The Beijing Olympics: complicit consumerism and the re-invention of citizenship

Debates around the cultural significance of the Beijing Olympics have tended to focus on the role of the Games as a demonstration of 'soft power'; as a means of announcing the arrival of the China on a global economic and cultural stage. But this argument may camouflage a more profound sociological change that was engendered by the Games: namely, its role in hastening the emergence of a consumer society in China. The argument here is that although, of course, the Games allowed the Chinese Communist Party to present an externally facing image of China as a country at the forefront of globalisation, it is perhaps the internal audience that is of greater consequence. For the people of China, the message underpinning the Games was one centred around the hegemony of the consumer. Although it can be argued that fundamentally the Games had a limited impact upon the everyday realities of city life in Beijing itself, in fact, the more profound impact was perhaps an ideological one, providing an impetus for a new way of belonging and identity to be defined through consumption. As such, the Beijing Olympics represents a genuine shift in Olympic history insofar as they not only said something about where China stood internationally, but they also had a genuine effect in legitimising a new kind of being in China. The 2008 Olympics Games played a key role in advancing a new kind of consumer-driven citizenship with which Chinese citizens it is suggested were complicitly engaged.