Global audiences will turn their eyes to Beijing when the 2022 Winter Olympic Games begin on February 4, thirteen and a half years after China hosted the summer games for the first time.

Despite its recent growth slowdown, China’s economy has changed markedly in the intervening years. Today’s China is four times richer than it was in 2008. Back then, its per capita gross domestic product put it behind countries like Iraq and El Salvador; in 2021, it ranked above Russia and Malaysia.

Yet while China has also advanced on “hard power” measures like military spending and infrastructure, it is now viewed more unfavorably around the world than at any point this century. More than 80 heads of state traveled to Beijing in 2008 for the Olympics; in 2022, ten countries have announced diplomatic boycotts against the Games. 

This week, The Wire takes stock of how China has changed between the Olympic Games in 2008 and 2022.

AN OLYMPIC BUILD

The 2008 Olympics catalyzed a massive boom in construction in and around Beijing. The capital city inaugurated two new subway lines less than a month before the games began, including a new airport express train linking the city center to a newly completed terminal at Beijing Capital International Airport. 

The Beijing subway network of 2008 now looks somewhat quaint. The city has since added 16 new lines and extended several more, including one to an entirely new international airport. 

The demands of the 2008 Games also turbocharged the development of high speed rail. China opened the Beijing-Tianjin intercity railway eight days before the Games’ opening ceremony in 2008. The 100-mile railway line was celebrated as the country’s first to operate at speeds above 300 kilometers per hour. 

Today, 23,500 miles of high speed rail — almost enough to circumnavigate the globe — crisscross mainland China, servicing three quarters of Chinese cities with a population of half a million or more, as well as the winter Olympic sites of Zhangjiakou and Yanqing.

The irony of inaugurating so much infrastructure centered around the Games is that few people will get to use it at this Olympics. About 382,000 overseas tourists descended on Beijing during the 2008 Olympics; thanks to China’s zero Covid strategy, none will in 2022. Designed to absorb huge waves of arrivals, Beijing Capital International Airport’s passenger throughput this month was a quarter of what it was leading up to the 2008 Games.

The Chinese public won’t get to see the Games up close either — organizers announced last week that no tickets would be sold to the public, after a case of the Omicron variant was found in the capital city.

HARD POWER, SOFT POWER?

Historians see the 2008 Olympics as a symbolic “coming out” to the world for China. But it marked a tangible economic coming out too, as outward foreign direct investment more than doubled that year. Then-Chinese president Hu Jintao promoted his signature ideology of a “harmonious society” to visiting world leaders, but that same year Beijing also sharply increased its military spending. On measures of hard power China has seen significant increases in spending from 2008 to today: 

On “soft power” measures, China has struggled to make similar headway. Despite the country’s economic heft, Chinese brands still struggle with international recognition. Among the top domestic corporate sponsors of the 2022 Games, all but one, Anta Sports, is a state-owned enterprise. 

In the run-up to the 2008 Olympics, much like today, China faced a swell of international criticism for its human rights record. But the country nonetheless saw improvement to its global reputation after the 2008 games, according to annual polls by the Pew Research Center. This time around, amid growing awareness about atrocities in Xinjiang, the Hong Kong protests, and the Covid pandemic, positive sentiment towards China has plunged to record lows.

OLYMPIC PROWESS

Beijing has sought to impress at home and abroad through its performance at the Games themselves. In 2008, Chinese athletes took home an unprecedented 100 medals, including 48 golds.¹The original medal tally included 51 gold medals, but 3 were later rescinded for doping.

China’s track record in the Winter Olympics is spottier. The country’s best showing at a winter games was in 2010, when athletes took home 11 medals, including 5 golds. It has failed to match that record at subsequent events. 

China’s bid to host this year’s Games catalyzed an influx of investment into winter sports training, but it will likely take time for China to become a dominant force in winter events. 

“The public is used to [Chinese] domination in the summer Olympics. That’s just not the case in the winter games. So they’re looking for other ways to show that they’ve been successful,” says Mark Dreyer, the author of Sporting Superpower: An Insider’s View on China’s Quest to be the Best. “If [the Chinese delegation] can say we’ve got like 150 [athletes]… that in itself will be something that they can hold up and say ‘look at the progress we’ve made.’”

WINTER WONDER

China’s hosting of the winter games has already proven a boon for the Chinese winter sports economy. 

“We haven’t really seen in recent memory an Olympics going into both such a large market and one in such infancy when it comes to winter sports tradition,” says Jacob Cooke, co-founder and CEO of WPIC, an e-commerce and digital marketing consultancy in Beijing. He notes that the value of China’s ice and snow industry has doubled since 2017, from $62 billion to an estimated $126 billion today. 

Here’s how China’s winter sports industry has grown in the last decade and a half:

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