This book focuses on the processes of documenting the Beijing Olympics – ranging from the visual (television and film) to radio and the written word – and the meanings generated by such representations. What were the ‘key’ stories and how were they chosen? What was dramatised? Who were the heroes? Which ‘clashes’ were highlighted and how? What sorts of stories did the notion of ‘human interest’ generate? Did politics take a backseat or was the topic highlighted repeatedly? Thus, the focus was not on the success or failure of this event, but on the ways in which the Olympics Games, as international and historic events, are memorialised by observers.
The key question that this book addresses is: How far would the Olympic coverage fall into the patterns of representation that have come to dominate Olympic reporting and what would China, as a discursive subject, bring to these patterns?
This book was previously published as a special issue of Sport in Society.
Documenting the Beijing Olympics:An Introduction D. P. Martinez, Dept. of Anthropology, SOAS
The Cultural Legacy of Olympic Posters John Hughson, International Football Institute, University of Central Lancashire
The ‘caged torch procession’: celebrities, protesters and the 2008 Olympic torch relay in London, Paris and San Francisco John Horne, University of Central Lancashire and Garray Whannel, University of Bedfordshire
‘Betwixt and Between’: Reflections on the Ritual Aspects of the Opening and Closing Ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics Jialing Luo, Dept. of Anthropology, Cambridge
Media representation of volunteers at the Beijing Olympic Games Charles Bladen, University of Greenwich Business School
China’s media viewed through the prism of the Beijing Olympics Kevin Latham, Dept. of Anthropology, SOAS
The Communication Gesture of the Beijing Olympic Games Chen Weixing, International Communication Studies Center, Communication University of China
Framing China and the world through the Olympic Opening Ceremonies, 1984-2008 Limin Liang, Northwestern University
A study of Guangdong TV’s Olympics coverage strategy Huang Yaohua, Guangdong Television, China
Personal, Popular and Information Portals Olympic news and the Use of Mobile Phones among Migrant Workers in Fuzhou LIU Jun, University of Copenhagen, Denmark, Fuzhou University and Fujian Normal University
Olympiad, A Place of Linguistic Struggle – The Discursive Constitution of ‘Human Rights’ in the 2008 Beijing Olympics Hwang Yihjye, Modern East Asia Research Centre, Leiden University
Public Diplomacy Games: A Comparative Study of American and Japanese Responses to the Interplay of Nationalism, Ideology and Chinese Soft Power Strategies around the 2008 Beijing Olympics Christopher J. Finlay, The Annenberg School for Communication, The University of Pennsylvania, and Xin Xin, Department of Journalism and Mass Communication of the University of Westminster
Human Rights and the Olympic Movement after Beijing Bruce Kidd, Faculty of Physical Education and Health, University of Toronto
The Tricolour in Beijing: Indian Sport, Olympism and Nationalism Boria Majumdar, Senior Research Fellow, University of Central Lancashire
Biography
D. P. Martinez is Reader in Anthropology with special reference to Japan at the department of Anthropology, SOAS.
Kevin Latham is a senior lecturer at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. His recent research has focused on Chinese media with particular attention to journalism, new media, the Beijing Olympics, consumption and consumerism.
