ABSTRACT
With the advent of the 2008 Beijing Olympics, all three editions of the Summer Olympic Games held in Asia, the 1964 Tokyo, 1988 Seoul and 2008 Beijing Games, were often referred to as the ‘East Asian Olympics.’ Several academics began to discuss how the East Asian Olympics emphasised the economical development of the host city and nation which then differentiated them from their western counterparts.1
If the East Asian Olympics as a group focused on economic development, this is in part because of the assumption that as late developers of global capitalism, they lagged behind their western counterparts. When East Asian Olympic hosts assert their image on the global stage, they are met with the uneven and unequal relationship with western forms of power and institutions that range from global capital to the Olympic Games themselves. The Olympic desires of these East Asian hosts are tied to the larger geo-politics, national political economy and cultural style of their time. From the West, these East Asian Olympics are ‘coming out parties’ in which the Olympic Games provided high-profile events for all three of these East Asian nations to demonstrate not only the ‘political reliability’ of these host cities to their international audiences but also specific cultural and national identities to their citizens.2 The East Asian Olympic Games are visual spectacles of the abstraction of the Olympic Movement made global. The East Asian Olympic discourses make ‘visible’ the grand historical narrative of the Olympic Movement as the natural progression of ‘Olympism’ throughout the world.3 Olympism promotes international
goodwill through sport and sport as a universal value. Without East Asian Olympic hosts, the Olympics remain a western phenomenon of developed nation-states. As such, East Asian Olympics prove not only that the Asian host city and nation has been accepted as an elite member of Olympic hosts, but they also legitimate the universality of the Olympic Games. The Olympic Games is presented as the harbinger of universal values that incorporates less developed or enlightened nationstates into the Olympic family as the inevitable unfolding of the universal Olympic values of fair play and good will through sport. As such, the East Asian Olympics are represented as ‘coming out parties’ in ways that other western host nations are not. The logic of incorporation according to terms defined by the West is never challenged.
