The Russian hosts "received some badly-needed support from China," according to Kathrin Hille of the FINANCIAL TIMES. Beijing officals said, "The West’s relentless disparagement of the Sochi Olympics has been all too familiar [as Sochi] suffered identical political finger-pointing as Beijing did six years ago." Indeed, "the unfavourable close-ups on Russia echo the exposure of China’s ugly underbelly" in the run-up to the 2008 Beijing Games.
Those parallels "are no coincidence." For both Beijing and Moscow, hosting the Games "was part of an attempt to overcome an image problem abroad and rally the population behind an authoritarian government at home."
Both the Chinese and the Russian governments "have struggled to deal with the spotlight thrown on them as a result." But the Olympics "are likely to produce very different legacies in these two large countries."
Many Chinese observers "feel it far-fetched to compare the Sochi Games to their own."
Chen Cheng, a Chinese businessman who has lived in Moscow since '92, said, "Our government was ready, but the Russians were not. In a way, that is indicative of the way China and Russia are run in general" (FT, 2/9). In London, Christopher Caldwell reported Western critics of Russia’s Sochi Winter Olympics "have picked up too much speed and risk skidding off piste." A justifiable attempt "to scrutinise the government of President Vladimir Putin has degenerated into an exercise in schadenfreude and ill will." Politicians who have decided to attend the Games (including China’s Xi Jinping, Japan’s Shinzo Abe and Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan) "have been level-headed." Those who have ostentatiously stayed away -- the U.K.’s David Cameron, Barack Obama of the U.S. and France’s François Hollande -- "are following what the critic Harold Rosenberg once called 'the herd of independent minds.'" Media interest "in the alleged corruption around Olympic construction has been obsessive." The Washington Post describes the various projects as "Stalinist excess." Sochi is not a "unique moral blot." The 2002 Salt Lake City Games "were marred by a major corruption scandal," and the 2008 Beijing Games "were a more appropriate venue for protests about human rights" (FT, 2/7). NEWS LIMITED's John Lehmann wrote many things may be changing in Putin’s Russia, but "greater freedoms to speak one’s mind isn’t one of them."
The so-called speaker’s corner only came into existence when the IOC "insisted the Russians lift a ban on protests at the Games."
The grandly named The 50 Years of Victory in the Great Patriotic War Park, which sits next to an elevated highway in Rosa Khutor, "was designated as a place of peaceful protest during the Olympics to keep the IOC happy." But only one permit "has been granted since the Games caravan moved into Sochi" -- to the local Communist Party branch, which staged a quiet rally last week for seven members (NEWS LIMITED, 2/10).
