SPORT IN SOCIETY, 2015http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17430437.2015.1067775

© 2015 Taylor & Francis

Ye Shiwen, collective memory, and the 2012 London Olympic games: notes on the production and consumption of national victimhood

Haozhou Pu and Michael D. Giardina

Department of Sport Management, Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL, USA

ProemChinese swimmer Ye Shiwen walked out of the locker room doorway in the London Aquatic Center. She waved to the camera with a bashful smile and rushed to the white pool deck for warm-ups. The NBC anchor apparently had some problems pronouncing her name: the sim-ilar sounding pronunciation of ‘yeah she win’ sets the tone for the teenage athlete’s stunning accomplishments that evening. Ye took a deep breath and stepped up to the platform. ‘Take your mark’. Beep. Ye dove into the pool. It began with a splash, but the ripples never ended.

Ye Shiwen was the first one to touch the wall. She successfully knocked five seconds off her personal best in the 400-m medley, breaking the world record in the process. More astonishing, her final 50-m sprint time was even faster than the winner of the men’s equivalent, Ryan Lochte of the United States. ‘The Swimming Prodigy’, as many media headlines exclaimed immediately following the race, won her second gold medal days later, this time in the 200-m medley. Her record-breaking performances shocked the world, and she was immediately celebrated as a new national hero in her motherland. However,

ABSTRACTThe idea of ‘collective victimhood’, as a cultural and political identity, has long been cultivated by the state within the construction of Chinese nationalism. Through a case study analysis of Chinese swimmer Ye Shiwen, this study examines the cultural pedagogy behind the national production and consumption of such ‘victimhood’. We argue that the allegations of Ye Shiwen’s doping by Western media in 2012 London Olympics animates a deep sense of victim mentality in the Chinese public sphere. Here, the Olympic stage is performing both an image of the ‘victor’ for national pride and an autonomous ‘victim’ profile for state legitimation. This study therefore explores the pedagogical normalization of victim identity in Chinese society exercised through the ‘victimization’ efforts oriented around Chinese athletes. It also examines the function of collective memory in (re)shaping and transforming such victimhood into a delicately nuanced and productive collective victimhood intersecting with China’s future political dynamics.

CONTACT Haozhou Pu ph10c@my.fsu.edu

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the compliments and admirations were quickly replaced by all-too-familiar allegations of doping. Writing for USA Today, Auerbach (2012) questioned Ye’s innocence by recalling the tainted past of Chinese swimming (specifically, its recurring doping scandals in the 1990s).1 The head of the American Swimming Coaches Association, John Leonard, further described Ye’s performance as ‘disturbing’ and ‘suspicious’, comments which subsequently appeared in most of the major North American news reports on Ye Shiwen (see Bull 2012). Still another prominent media figure, news anchor Clare Balding of the BBC, also questioned Ye’s performance during the public broadcaster’s Olympic coverage from the Aquatic Centre.2

In response to these allegations, Chinese state media angrily defended Shiwen. People’s Daily, the official mouthpiece of the Communist Party, condemned the allegations in the following manner: ‘It’s not the first time we see Western media’s groundless suspicions on Chinese athletes. Entrenched prejudice and bias have led them into blindness’ (Zong 2012). Importantly for this article, Ye Shiwen was cast in a multiplicity of media portrayals as another victim suffering from an all-too-easy ‘China-bashing’ discourse promulgated by ‘the West’. Recalling the anti-China protests in the global torch relay before the 2008 Beijing Olympic games, the allegations made against Ye Shiwen, we argue, articulates a deep sense of victim mentality in the public against the backdrop of China’s avid revival from its ‘Century of Humiliation’3 – a victimhood that is embedded in a wider range of empathy engendered by popular victimhood narratives currently circulating in popular discourse about China.

More specifically, we suggest that in a national sport system characterized by overwhelm-ing political overtones that often function as catalysts of the formation of national identity and nationalism, the importance of the Olympic Games to China is no longer limited to performing an image of ‘victor’ to the world: it paradoxically also functions to portray an autonomous ‘victim’ profile to Chinese citizens, which in turn facilitates the legitimization of the Communist regime. Recognizing the intimate connection between sports and nation-alism, in this article, we thus explore the pedagogical normalization of victim identity in Chinese society as read through the ‘victimization’ of Ye Shiwen during and after the 2012 Olympic games. We also examine the function of collective memory in (re)shaping and (trans)forming such a victimhood into a delicately constructed ‘Victimhood Nationalism’, and how such victim narratives coalesce in China’s future political dynamics as a rising power. To do this, we examine the cultural contingencies at play in the active construction of victimhood. And, drawing from official Chinese press offerings, we analyse the media framing at work in such construction, as well as the implications such framing might have on broader understandings of ‘China’ in the historical present, both internal and external to the country. In this way, our inquiry follows Fairclough’s (1989) critical discourse analysis approach in exploring the latent political and social dominations reproduced in the popular narratives on national humiliation and aimed to investigate the powerful agenda-setting role in legitimizing national victimhood particularly from official state-run media.

Constructing victimhoodThe term ‘victim’ primarily refers to people who suffer from the actions of others, whether directly or indirectly. In general, the suffering that results from the formulation of vic-tim identity is exercised physically (i.e. physical pain) and/or mentally (i.e. psychologi-cal trauma). Victim mentality, as an acquired identification trait, is attributed not only to individual experience in reality, but also to a collective cognition process in response to particular historical and social contexts (Ryan 1971; Sykes 1992; Zur 1994). Victim identity

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can be further categorized into two themes: real victim and imagined victim. Real victims are the ones who suffer directly or indirectly from some form of harm. In contrast, imagined victims demonstrate a symbolic victim-as-self image, which results from either sympathy to real victims or is nurtured through social and political pedagogy corresponding to the formation of shared – or collective – identity.

At the individual level, victimhood is generally studied from a psychological perspective, with a particular interest on post-trauma therapeutic efforts (such as how to heal and coun-sel the victims of child abuse, rape, natural disasters, etc.). In the realm of nationalism and national identity, victimhood is particularly related to cultural memory, of how (the people of) a nation state suffers from past and present traumas like holocaust, genocide, war or colonization. Cultural studies research on victimhood generally disengages its traits from natural psychological mechanisms, perceiving it as an unnatural, non-necessary articulation in culture and politics (see, e.g. Hall 1990). However, by acknowledging the complexity of nationalism, there have been growing efforts in connecting the cultural meanings of victimhood with (social) psychological ‘victimization’ processes. For example, Callahan (2004) suggested that ‘humiliation as an irrational emotion needs to be cured, through (social) psychology, to a social practice related to political and historical narratives’ (201). Moisi (2009), in his book Geopolitics of Emotion, further asserted the recurring discourse of humiliation in Arab–Islamic history constituted a negative emotion in structuring ‘victim politics’. Previous studies (see, e.g. Wang 2008; Zerubavel 1995, 2003) have also examined the collective experience of national suffering in the organic formation of nationalism – par-ticularly among post-war and post-colonial nations – and how it impacts cultural mentality and policy-making across different regions in the world. However, few studies so far have explored the active construction and preservation of popular victimhood consciousness in terms of state-level politics.

In the context of China in the historical present, we view victimhood as specific to the collective identity/consciousness shared within social groups. Rather than examine the psychological attributions of individual victim mentality, we focus here on the cultural institutionalization of ‘the victim’ in Chinese (political) society and how it is incorporated into the formation of contemporary nationalism (through sport, media, entertainment and so on). Simultaneously, since nationalism generally facilitates the coherence of identifiable individuals, we acknowledge the function of political psychology in processing information and knowledge in articulating the self-schema of ‘victim’ within a larger set of group mem-bers (Kelman 1997). As such, we posit that victimhood in Chinese nationalism is perceived as a form of embedded empathy in the national consciousness, which is constructed and sustained with both psychological and social forces including collective memory, media narratives, social cognition and particularly political expression. We also acknowledge the role this atypical ‘victim’ identity serves for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) as a source of unity and political legitimacy for the state (at the same time remaining cognizant that the manifestation of negative sentiment or emotion could ironically be detrimental to the authoritarian stability it has served to support).

Collective memory and nationalismNo memory, no identity; no identity, no nation – Anthony Smith (1996)

Gellner (1983), in his classic remarks on nation and nationalism, asserted that nationalism was not the awakening and assertion of the natural ordering of political life but rather ‘the

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consequence of a new form of social organization based on deeply internalized, educa-tion-dependent high cultures’ (48). The consciousness of a nation is hence typically devel-oped as the result of deliberate efforts to homogenize common memories and experiences as ideological force and to mobilize people around them (Kelman 1997). The experiences can also be engendered either individually or collectively; either in literal or imagined identities. Anderson (2006), for example, characterized the nation state as a community shared and imagined with people who identified themselves as members of a group who would never actually meet each other. Comparably, victim identity might be learned without experi-encing sufferings personally or directly while being shared collectively as an embodiment of particular memory on the past and present. Halbwachs (1980), for instance, defined the characteristics of memory as discursive and shareable, asserting that most of our feelings and thoughts arise in social situations even though they might go ‘unperceived’ by us (35). In similar fashion, Nora (1989) argued that there was no milieu de memoire to contain ‘real memory’ as memory was ‘unconscious of its successive deformations, vulnerable to manipulation’ (8).

Consequently, individual memory, often called autobiographical memory, is never really personal. Halbwachs’ view of memory challenged the psychological presumption of memory originating from individual experience or brain mechanisms. Instead, he emphasized the exchange and co-construction of memory between various facets of social structures in a public sphere. Rather than complying with an accurate reflection of the pasts, Halbwachs was more interested in how people retrieved the ‘usable pasts’ from memory and utilized such pasts in the present (Wertsche 2002). Bodnar (1994) went one step further, discussing the idea of a ‘public memory’ in which the major focus of the ‘communicative and cognitive process (of public memory) is not the past, however, but serious matters in the present such as the nature of power and the question of loyalty to both official and vernacular cultures’ (15). In line with Gellner’s statement that nationalism is primarily a political principle, Bordnar’s assertion revealed that either ‘collective memory’ or ‘public memory’ functioned in creating usable pasts for political and identity needs in the present, attempted by the state, which together serve the purpose of deploying what Confino (1997) called memory politics.

When thinking about how collective memory is elaborated, we generally categorize its origins into two parts: interactive cognition process and official narratives (see next section). According to Halbwachs and Coser (1992), ‘It is in society that people normally acquire their memories. It is also in society that they recall, recognize, and localize their memories’ (38). Based on Habwachs’ theory, the formation of collective memory is an interactive cog-nition process within group memberships. It is also the group memberships that provide the materials for the formulation of particular memory and guide individuals into recalling particular events and into forgetting others. Collective memory, according to Halbwachs, is specified to the partial, selective and usable pasts retrieved from a particular group’s social framework and functions in the construction of social identity. Olnick (1999) observed similar phenomenon as in many cases groups could even produce memories in individuals of events that they never experienced in any direct sense, which corresponds with previous discussion on the formation of ‘imagined victim’ (in a sporting context, think also of the way some fans ‘remember’ being present at or witnessing historical games and events even though they were not actually present or even watching on television).

For purposes of this article, we thus perceive collective memory as a primary source of constructing a form of ‘victimhood nationalism’ in China, which entails narratives of

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historical moments serving identity construction purposes. Wertsch (2002), for one, has argued that narrative is widely recognized as playing a central role in human consciousness and functioning as a cultural tool to mediate collective memory. He introduced the notion of schematic narrative templates within which different narratives possessed similar func-tions and roles. Collective memory thus might lead to different narratives of history for different individuals while maintaining a common function and role as long as it is within a common schematic template. For years, victimhood has evolved as a schematic narrative template in Chinese nationalism, as the narratives organizing the ‘century of humiliation’ have fostered a victim identity deep rooted within the public sphere, which in turn con-solidates the schematic template based on narratives on victimhood during the same time.

Victimhood as an official narrativeUp to this point, we have discussed the instrumental role of narrative in constructing par-ticular collective memories; here, we are concerned with how collective memory elaborates, reorganizes, and omits the details of the past – a process that entails broader issues of identity formation and the cultivation of nationalism. We observe that in the particular context of China, the formation of collective memory is consciously sculpted under official narratives conveyed through state-run media and the propaganda department. Anderson (2006) con-tended that media production (e.g. printed news media) under systematic organization was crucial in ‘making’ nation. In this vein, Wertsch (2002) analysed the function of the state production of official historical narratives in legitimating authoritarian power and nurturing nationalism in the former Soviet Union. He argued that collective remembering ‘typically provides an essential basis for the creation and maintenance of groups-specifically, imagined communities’ (67). In a similar fashion, official narratives in China have long cultivated a collective memory predicated on the elaboration of the nation’s ‘sufferings’ in modern his-tory and portraying a self-as-victim image in public sphere. In this case, collective memory primarily entails two major themes in constructing a victimhood mentality: the unsettled issues surrounded the ‘century of humiliation’, and the external threats layered against China’s current rise. As an atypical regime, internal resistance and external critics have long challenged the legitimation of the CCP (Gries 2004). In response, the Party strategically employs nationalism as one of its major sources of maintaining the communist regime in China (see, e.g. its use of the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing). The official narratives on China’s past and present sufferings, therefore, function towards institutionalizing a particular national identity characterized by victimhood consciousness.

Official narratives regarding victimhood nationalism in China are primarily promulgated through education, propaganda, and the media. The multi-dimensional narratives guided by a shared political agenda effectively normalize the collective (homogenized) memory in the public for the political ends. For example, the anti-Japanese war during WWII has been a dominant discourse in state-led ‘patriotic education’ (Vickers 2009; Wang 2012). The idea of China as a ‘victim’ suffering from Japan’s invasion during WWII has penetrated into national consciousness via multiple channels, including school curriculum and memorial museums. Anti-Japan sentiment has also become a recurring theme of the narrative and the collective memory of past suffering is evoked when is desired by political ends (i.e. the disputes on Diaoyu island).

Callahan (2004), for one, observed that the narratives surrounding China’s ‘national humiliation’ were focused on the discourses of ‘public histories, textbooks, museums, mass

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movements, romance novels, prose poems, feature films, and national holidays’ (214). Renwick and Cao (1999) also categorized the origins in constituting a contemporary sense of victimhood into the narratives embodied in history (the recounting of humiliating sto-ries), symbolic art (statues of national heroes, museums, novels, music, poetry and paint-ings) and legendary heroes. It is with respect to this last example that we will expand the discourse to sport, particularly in relation to high-profile mega-events like the Olympic games. The ‘missed’ calls by referees and a presumed ‘unfair treatment’ experienced by Chinese athletes often evoke a sense of victimhood to the ‘suffering’ groups. On the world stage of the Olympic Games, where athletes are idealized as symbols of the nation, such a victim mentality could be easily extended and exaggerated to a broader range of political ends, especially when fuelled by recurring narratives on sufferings.

The official narrative for its goal of serving for political ends understates the accuracy of reflecting the truth, for it functions as an integral part in constructing the ideological foundation of nation and nationalism. As Smith contended (1999), ‘what gives nationalism its power are myths, memories, traditions, and symbols of ethnic heritage and the way in which a popular living past has been, and can be, rediscovered and reinterpreted by modern nationalist intelligentsias’ (9). Against such a backdrop, the memory of particular events through narratives constructed by political elites is further portrayed as national ‘myths’, which He (2003) claimed could become the dominant power in shaping the national collective memory as well as the core ideas of national identity. Simultaneously, such ‘myths’ always seem to symbolize the merits and achievements of the ‘mythmakers’ and are gen-erally interpreted in a heroic fashion embodied on the mythological figures (i.e. athletes).

Victor and victim: the duality of nationalism in ChinaSmith (1996) characterized collective memory as a crucial facet in forming nationalism together with the parentage and cultural continuity of nation. In the case of China, the inherited pride of a 5000-year ‘civilization’, the shame of a ‘century of humiliation’ and the state-led propagandistic and pedagogical as tied together constitute a uniquely popular nationalism. With respect to history, China’s nationalism has developed in the context of anti-imperialist revolution, civil war, cold war and recent rise since the nineteenth century, which is intertwined not only with modern China but also modernity. The CCP is now increasingly dependent upon its patriotic credentials to sovereignty. As Holbig and Gilley (2010) observed: ‘regime legitimacy in China are reduced to two main factors: economic growth and nationalism’ (396). Simultaneously, the prevalent atheism (due to the CCP’s ‘purification’ efforts) further vacuum considerable space for the cultivation of nationalism as a form of spiritual sustenance (much like Gries (2004) argued, nationalism ‘fill[s] the unnatural religious void modernization creates in the hearts of the people’.4)

The Chinese government has been dedicated to retaining its regime through a perfor-mance-based legitimacy and communist ideologies. The constant economic growth and increasing international status both contribute to the assertive promises made by the CCP seeking to salvage China’s lost glories under its regime. However, the direct attribution to its market-oriented economic reform fundamentally undermines the ideological significance, as the influx of Western values – particularly institutionalized democratic ideas – severely ‘threatens’ the mass support to the CCP (see, e.g. Buckley 2013). Against such a backdrop, a particular form of nationalism has been deployed to substitute for the declining Communist ideology as a ‘mental injection’ to maintain its sovereignty.

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Sport, particular high-profile international competitions such as the Olympic Games or FIFA World Cup, provides a populist symbolic framework in cultivating and demonstrating nationalism (Bainer 2001). For example, the expulsion of Germany in Olympic games after World War I symbolized Germany’s defeat and international isolation. (Ironically, the Nazi regime tactfully utilized the 1936 Olympic games for mobilizing a particular representation of Aryan superiority in the face of past defeats.) Likewise, Magdalinski (1999) argued that sports in East German ‘illustrate the cultural production of a mass historical consciousness, a precursor for national identification’ (539). Related to our project, Xu (2008) illustrated in his book Olympic Dreams: China and Sports 1895–2008, that China’s failure in bidding for the 2000 Olympics triggered massive outrage in the Chinese body politic, with many Chinese blaming the lost bid on a ‘Western’ plot to contain China. He further suggested the success of the 2008 Olympic games bidding later gave extraordinary political capital to the CCP’s legitimacy for ‘wiping out’ the ‘humiliation’ in previous defeat. In many countries, athletes who compete internationally as members of the national team often function as embodiments of nationalism (Lovell 2008). A perception of unfair treatment of athletes (e.g. controversial referee judgment or match fixing allegations) therefore similarly contributes to a certain level of ‘suffering’; and such ‘suffering’ is not only experienced by the athletes – it is experienced by fans and, we argue, the collective consciousness of the nation.

Nationalism as a form of ‘cultural performance’ is tightly associated with China’s per-formance-based legitimacy (Guss 2000). The strong performance in economic and polit-ical dimensions, accompanied by a deep-rooted cultural narcissism, facilitates a rampant expression of patriotism symbolized most especially by ‘victor’ profiles. In sports, one of the primary missions of China’s state-run sports system is to actively nurture nationalism. Such sporting nationalism was first operationalized through nationwide promotion of phys-ical education to discipline the individual body (see Brownell 1995). Physical Education, mixed with militarized content, is still used extensively for ‘patriotic education’. Even though education reform engaged in due to drastic internal and external social changes has diluted its political complexity, sport still functions as an important source of promoting self- surveillance and a resultant obedience. In addition to such physical education programs, nationalism is well cultivated with the performance of Chinese athletes on the international stage, particularly the Olympic Games. The medals in the international competitions are weighted as credits to the legitimacy of the Communist government, which is in keep with several studies that have revealed how hosting mega-events like the 1990 Asian Games and 2008 Olympic games successfully stimulated the prevalence of nationalism and collective self-esteem among the general public (Xu 2006; Zhao 2008).

Contemporary nationalism in China is constructed through multiple factors and per-formed by different characters. According to Kedourie (1985), nationalism is in fact “one’s self-view, of one’s estimation of oneself and one’s place in the world” (141). Anderson’s (2006) ‘imagined community’, discussed above, gives us further insight into the rationale of the emergence of ‘the nation’, which positions individuals in a group with shared iden-tity and interest. Based on Anderson’s observation, the nation as a socially and historically constructed product is serving for the maintenance of community interest and identity. Nationalism thus emerges to primarily protect the nation identity, which is formulated with the ‘narratives of the past’ and interrelated with the reservation of common interests (Hall 1990).

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Although spatial limitations prohibit us from detailing every major up and down in China’s ‘past’, such highs and lows could be classified into two main themes that might serve for the origins of contemporary nationalism – pride and shame. Traditional Chinese culture is widely defined as ‘Past-Oriented’, which emphasizes the importance of previous experience and events in suggesting both present and future directions (Kluckhohn 1953). This contemporary form of nationalism therefore primarily originates from the collective memory on past moments. The ‘pride’ here is largely attributed to its rich and long-stand-ing culture and honoured national power in the past, which corresponds with the deep-rooted self-appreciation evolved with the constitution of national identity. Consequently, the engagement in building up a ‘Victor’ profile by the government tactfully corresponds with the entrenched ‘pride’ in its population with an effort of ‘rejuvenating the national glory of past’, which is officially propagandized by the CCP (Wang 2008).

The ‘Rejuvenation’, however, is not only an effort aimed at seeking back any such lost glories; it is also a process of regaining self-esteem, greatly damaged due to the ‘Century of Humiliation’. According to Callahan (2004), humiliation is a common and recurring theme in Chinese domestic and international politics and has been invoked far and wide in a ‘diverse set of circumstances’ (199). Humiliation is interconnected the popular men-talities of guilt, victimhood, and apology, and institutionalized the individual feelings as public consciousness. Over the last few decades, the CCP has tacitly promoted a victimhood mentality, which has become part of China’s collective memory, and thus one that is easily mobilized in periods of external ruptures. The official narrative of the Chinese nation- as-victim weaves together the imperialist aggression of Western powers in the nineteenth century, the cruelties inflicted on China by Japan during the Sino-Japanese war, NATO’s bombing of the Chinese embassy in Yugoslavia, and Western countries’ hostility towards China’s rise into an endless chain of humiliations.

Interestingly, based on traditional Confucian philosophy widely understood through-out China, humiliation should first evoke sentiments like self-loathing or the desire to be punished (Callahan 2004). However, what we have seen in China is the legitimation of vic-timhood as a form of official identity. This victimhood identity is performed as a common and recurring theme in Chinese public culture, with both active and passive efforts falling under the banner of official narratives. As we have discussed above, collective memory is not formed in a given or ‘value-free’ historical discourse – it usually manifests the political culture and behaviours with selective narratives that serve specific political ends. When we evaluate the role of collective memory in constructing a particular identity, we cannot ignore its destructive role in reflecting the presents and pasts. Simultaneously, the simplification of collective memory facilitates a dichotomous judgment of historical events (either right or wrong) and draws clear boundaries between self and other/domestic and foreign. The victimization of ‘self ’ further promotes the efforts of ‘Othering’ others, which underpins the solidification of nation state as well as stability of national identity.

Due to the tight control of media and education by the CCP in China, there appears to be a unitary voice that functions to portray a collective memory of victimhood in China. However, this unitary voice resonates with the CCP’s One-Party ruling ideology in an effort to influence public opinion; just as the long-term injection of Marxism–Leninism and Maoist ideology into education, propaganda, and media, the cultivation of victimhood identity has been idealized and legitimized as a key character of Chinese modernity (see Renwick and Cao 1999). This unitary voice further constitutes a ‘disciplinary power’, which

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as Foucault (1977) indicates, normalizes the victim identity as public consciousness and together consist a ‘nation of victims’. In the following section, we analyse the recent case of Ye Shewin at the 2012 London Olympic Games to illustrate how sport functions to perpet-uate the victimization manoeuvre in constructing China’s contemporary nationalism and the new changes embodied on this mega-event.

Victimized bodies and the (re)shaping of collective memory at the London Olympics5

The People’s Republic of China. One-fifth of the world’s population. With an economy growing at the rate of about 10% a year, every economic power, including the United States, wants to tap into that huge potential market. But, of course, there are problems with human rights, copyright disputes, the threat posed to Taiwan. And within the Olympics, while they have excelled, they were fourth in the medal standings in Barcelona with 54 medals, 16 of them gold, this after a 30 year absence which ended in 1984, they’ve excelled athletically, they’re building into a power, but amid suspicions, Dick (Enberg), especially concerning their track athletes and their female swimmers, possibly using performance enhancing drugs. None caught in Barcelona, but since those Olympics in 1992, several have been caught.6

-Bob Costas(Opening Ceremony of the 1996 Atlanta Olympic Games)

I use that word (unbelievable) in its precise meaning. At this point it (Ye Shiwen’s performance) is not believable to many people

-John Leonard7

(Executive Director of the American Swimming Coaches Association)In the 2012 London Olympic Games, 16-year-old Chinese swimmer Ye Shiwen captured two gold medals and knocked seconds off the world record in the 400-m individual medley. Ye’s remarkable achievements made her another sports sensation in China, and she was widely celebrated by both the government and the public at large. A rising star with prom-ising talent at a young age, pride and expectations lifted this young Mandarin meridian to become a new national hero, until murmurs emerged in the Western media that questioned her results. Beyond even the overwhelming mainstream media coverage, the prestigious scientific journal Nature even hit hard on Ye’s suspicions in an article it published titled, ‘Why great Olympic feats raise suspicions’.8 Though the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) and London 2012 organizers insisted on Ye’s innocence, stats, charts, and well as many other ‘scientific predictions’ were widely cited to ‘prove’ how ‘suspicious’ Ye’s performance could be without using performance-enhanced drugs.

In China, the suffering imposed on Ye Shiwen was perceived and narrated as another ‘arrogant’ abuse to China (also see, the formal state interview with Ye’s father.9) The Global Times stated:

Negative comments about her and Chinese athletes come from deep bias and reluctance from the Western press to see Chinese people making breakthroughs. If Ye were an American, the tone would be different in Western media. Michael Phelps won eight gold medals in the 2008 Games. Nobody seems to question the authenticity of his results, most probably because he is American. Sports talents emerge in every Olympic Games, but few have experienced the same thing as Ye. The abnormal media reaction should be questioned more than Ye’s new record. It shows that the unfriendliness of the West to China is spreading (see endnote 4).

The defence of Ye Shiwen quickly evolved into a campaign rivaling more mainstream ‘China-bashing’ from the West far beyond the individual athlete was concerned. The ‘unfair’

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judgment imposed on Chinese athletes in London further facilitated the cultivation of victimhood nationalism, which has been proficiently employed by the Communist gov-ernment in recent years.

Importantly, Ye Shiwen was not the single case in the London Olympic games; Chinese men’s gymnast Chen Yibing, who lost the gold medal due to what many observers views as controversial judge scoring, also ‘outraged’ the public. Quotes from his coach along the lines of ‘this is the darkest day in gymnastic history’ and ‘it’s blatantly robbing’ frequently appeared in Chinese media news headlines and further amplified such victimized suffer-ings.10 Moreover, when the Chinese women’s cycling team was disqualified for a rule vio-lation and stripped of its gold medal, one popular newspaper located in Guangzhou Yang Cheng Evening News called the London Games ‘one full of wretches and shamelessness’. It angrily accused the judge’s ‘ridiculous’ decision to strip the gold medal based on untenable excuses and refuse to investigate the appeals from Chinese cycling team.11 On the official television arm, China Central Television (CCTV), viewers were presented with discussion that such a decision was clearly ‘bias targeting Chinese cycling team’.12 And, when two Chinese badminton players (along with those of six other nationalities) were disqualified from women’s doubles for deliberately losing their matches in order to have better draws in later rounds, People’s Daily again questioned the ‘selective blindness’ towards Chinese athletes. People’s Daily further argued that Western media had long boasted its ‘in-depth’ and ‘balanced’ journalistic ethics and that it was questionable for their incentives to treat Chinese athletes unfairly (Xue 2012).

Sport, with its sophisticated symbolism intertwined with the construction and reproduc-tion of nationalism, offers a vehicle to achieve related political ends for politicians (Bairner 2001). The wide variety of sports serves the multiple goals of nationalism in the formation of national identity, consolidation of state authority, solidarity of ethnicity and integrity of territory (Bairner 2001; Miller et al. 2001; Tomlinson and Young 2006). Mega-events like the Olympic games further produce the sporting spectacular consist of competences in national power and ideologies and create a pedagogical experience of nationalism for its mass popularity. China has a long history of utilizing the Olympic games for political achievements (e.g. the 2008 Beijing Olympics). It gets used to shape a perception of ‘victor’ realized through the collection of gold medals as a participant and creation of extravagant spectacle as a host.

However, besides the self-absorbed ‘victor’ primarily attributed to its impressive economic growth, the strands of ‘victimization’ due to the unforgettable sufferings in modern history are also frequently interwoven into the narratives of sporting nationalism. In the above examples, the Chinese athletes were identified as ‘victims’, not only by themselves, but also an empathy claimed by numerous people in China (for more on this trend in other areas of daily life, see Hughs 2006). In the London Olympics, the ‘sufferings’ of Chinese athletes resulted from ‘biased’ media reports and ‘unfair’ referee judgment perform another version of ‘scar-ification’ due to the imagined Western prejudice against China. Fuelled by the media, the eruption of emotional outrage on the sufferings on Ye Shiwen and her companions quickly reconnected the discontinuous memories of the presents and pasts on national humiliation. When the emotions and memories joined together, a form of victimhood nationalism was created and transformed into another mythological salvation on the ‘victims (athletes)’.

Regarding the case of Ye Shiwen, this victimhood nationalism in China is primarily conceptualized as a by-product of collective memory accumulated through a series of (dis)

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continuous events and initially activated when the allegations against Ye Shiwen in Western media reached the Chinese public. The narratives of this incident through various media forms first constituted a ‘victimized’ individual profile of Chinese athletes. However, the construction of this victim identity presented a continuous work, as each activation of emotion recalled and reconnected the collective memory on the pasts and it strengthened the collective consensus on the presents into memory of the future. For example, Gries (2004) described a protest against the French supermarket Carrefour because of French government’s support on Tibet riot and possible boycott against Beijing Olympic games. As Gries wrote ‘a man held up a placard (outside Carrefour) that read: Say NO to Carrefour!!! Say NO to French Imperialism!!! Strongly protest the 1860 Anglo-French invasion of China; Strongly protest the 2008 slander of Our Olympics’ (224). For the London Olympic games, China News Week indicated that the ‘China-bashing’ discourse surrounding the London Olympic games was not a new event but rather a small-scale recurrence of the anti-China protests that took place four years previous in the run up to the Beijing Olympic Games, with the ‘unfair’ treatment to Chinese athletes again embarrassing and infuriating the Chinese public (Zeng 2012). Here, we suggest that the cultivation of victimhood nationalism is an accumulative process rather than disarticulated actions, that its, it is reinforced and reshaped through consistent practices.

In the context of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, the recurring anti-China protests that targeted the official torch relay in Paris, London and San Francisco shocked and embarrassed the whole country. The ‘biased’ and ‘fabricated’ reports surrounding other China-specific events (i.e. CNN’s report on Tibet)13 further led to a nationwide rethinking of previous perception on western liberal democracy. As Zhao (2008) observed, ‘many of the most educated Chinese people sided with the authoritarian government and harboured a sense of wounded national pride in response to foreign criticism’ (48). The discursive attack on the Beijing Olympic games resulted in a bizarre forfeiture on the trustworthiness of a Western media form that is increasingly being viewed as hypocritical (e.g. the creation of www.anti-cnn.com). It further mobilized public support for the legitimacy of the state regime to protect its pride and counter national humiliation. The backlash against Western media during and after the Beijing Olympic games ironically perpetuated the victimhood as a significant component in China’s populist nationalism. In Ye’s case in 2012 London Olympics, sport as a popular and symbolic component in public life was again favoured by the state in moderating public victim identity.

The Beijing Olympic games catalysed a dramatic reversion on the public memory in Western media and its function of rebuilding the collective memory further constitutes what He (2003) defined as the ‘self-whitening myth’ (which is ironically conducted in the fashion of ‘selective blindness’ in order to erase or reshape the collective memory of the particular incidents). The official narratives created with respect to suffering Chinese ath-letes regarding at the 2012 Olympics intentionally prevented displaying a full picture of its past(s) – particularly its stigmatized reputation due to years of doping scandals and its notorious training system. This again corresponds with the characteristics of collective memory as selective products that serve particular purposes. In Ye’s case, the suspicions raised with respect to potential doping were overwhelmingly reported as attacks on China due to political reasons, yet few if any reports in state-run media recalled China’s own embarrassing memory of doping.

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Consider: the Chinese swimming team, particularly women’s swimming, rose abruptly onto the global stage in the 1990s. In the 1994 World Aquatic Championships, Chinese women’s swimming stunned the world by collecting 12 of the 16 gold medals. Coaches from 18 Western nations therefore signed a petition demanding that the Federation Internationale de Natation (FINA) conduct more out-of-competition drug testing. During the 1994 Asian Games in Hiroshima, Japan, the Chinese swimming team dominated the competition yet again (winning 23 gold medals). However, drug testing revealed that 11 Chinese athletes, including seven swimmers (three of whom were world champions), tested positive for dihydrotestosterone, a banned anabolic steroid. Thus, it is fair to say that the 2012 allega-tions directed at Ye Shewin from Western media were partially based on such a memory of Chinese swimming athletes though the involvement of other factors remains (Wilson and Derse 2001; Yang and Leung 2006). However, such past narratives only partially func-tioned in strengthening the victimhood as the responses towards suspicions on Ye, which directed the public memory on its historical taints to the slanders of the others. Werstch (2002) recognized that collective memory was ‘impatient with ambiguity about motives and the interpretation of events’ (44). It usually starts with an ‘identity project’ in performing ‘heroism’ or ‘victimhood’ and willingly sacrifices evidence to preserve a narrative account about the past (Werstch and Roediger 2008). Ye Shiwen was thus presented as the (new) victim, with her case functioning (both collective and in isolation) as a public pedagogy in reshaping and rationalizing the past wrongdoings in Chinese swimming.

Stigmatized habitusTo a certain degree, such victimhood nationalism is desired as well as manipulated by the Chinese government; however, as an essentially negative ideology, its detrimental side effect should raise serious concerns for those in power. From a psychological perspective, victim mentality is generally manifested with negative, self-absorbed, as well as defensive symptoms. When it evolves into a cultural identity, victimhood is echoed by the ‘thera-peutic culture’, which has been perceived by some as an insidious and regulatory form of social control (Lasch 1980; Rose 1999). Nietzsche, for one, advanced theories on ‘suffering’ to ressentiment, in which he asserted the hostility harboured by victimized individuals or groups against another could eventually lead to ‘slave revolt in morality’ as a tremendous dysfunctional power (Nietzsche and Faber 1998). Nietzsche further warned against the psychological reliance on one’s suffering as ‘all passions have a phase when they are merely disastrous, when they drag down their victim with the weight of stupidity and a later, very much later phase when they wed the spirit, when they “spiritualize” themselves’ (1). When victimhood is associated with nationalism, it is almost always embodied in hostile emotions and colonization of social identity against opposite countries.

Although being the ‘victim’ may be perceived as a powerful psychological state, it works more like a double-edge sword. Victimhood nationalism in China has increasingly become a problematic challenge to the social stability. The conflicts on the international stage always seem to trigger the entrenched victimhood interconnected with the past sufferings. The disputes with Japan involving the East China Sea has become one of the major fuses in recent years, as reports indicated that millions of people joined the anti-Japan demonstra-tion in 2012 around the time of the anniversary of ‘Mukden Incident’ (also known as ‘Day of National Humiliation’).14 The demonstration was initially in response to the escalated tensions between China and Japan on Diaoyu Island, which quickly evolved into riots across

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hundreds cities in China. Although the government was at first acquiescent about demon-stration, it quickly became out of control as violence erupted everywhere; in response, state security agencies cracked down on the demonstrators and called for ‘rational patriotism’.15

Herein lies the crux of the matter. Gellner (1983) identified three components in consti-tuting modern nationalism: power, education and shared culture. To make official patriotic education more effective, the state’s mastery of utilizing markets for political ends creates another innovative way of nurturing nationalism. In a market-based contemporary China, the marketization of sports corresponds with the penetration of state-initiated education and propaganda of victimhood nationalism into popular culture. As the official guideline for patriotic education, ‘Make entertainment a medium of education’ (Wang 2012), sug-gest, the narratives about Ye Shiwen’s suffering are simultaneously appealing to consumers who are used to consume popular ‘victimhood’ culture. For example, the popular genre of dramas about the country’s battles with Japan during and before World War II took up a whopping 70% of drama on Chinese TV in 201316. The New York Times comments that ‘the surge in anti-Japanese entertainment is the result of business decisions based on the financial realities of dealing with state-run TV stations ... when the government acts as midwife in the marketing of nationalism as entertainment’ (Cunningham 2014). On screen, the bitter suffering of the war is portrayed as entertaining and spectacular incorporated with violence, sex, and mockery and victim identity is ‘re-glorified’ through the mythological depiction of heroic performance. Though many of the anti-Japan dramas nowadays have been accused both by the state for ‘not respecting the history’ and become an object of public mockery, its dominance in Chinese film industry reflects the large demands from the public on the consumption of ‘war victim memories’, which is sold to the public as a by-product of pop-ular culture. Besides the film industry, tourism becomes another medium in cultivating popular victimhood. In 2005, China National Tourism Administration published a list of 100 ‘Red Tourism’ scenic spots which featuring many ‘Patriotic Education Base’ like Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall and Mao Zedong’s birthplace (Wang 2012). By 2015, the Red Tourism is expected to attract 800 million visitors and generated 200 billion yuan ($32 billion) in spending (Roberts and Zhao 2014).

The series of pedagogical processes in constituting victimhood nationalism through multiple channels consequently leads to the habitus of claiming and being claimed as ‘victim’ in the public, which ‘becomes deposited in persons in the form of lasting dispositions, or trained capacities and structured propensities to think, feel and act in determinant ways and then guide them’ (Wacquant 2005, 316). The Chinese authoritarian government has long been promoting victimhood into the public consciousness through multiple chan-nels. Yet although Chinese nationalism has long been perceived as a ‘state-led’ product (Shirk 2007), or at least part of the nationalism is attributed to state-sponsored efforts (Gries 2004), the reactions in particular to the London Olympic Games have revealed the substantial risks associated with the formation of such a habitus. According to a report in The Economist (2013), the official propaganda department issued a guideline to the media regarding the reports on Ye Shiwen emphasizing the principle of ‘don’t complain, and rise above it’.17 Much like the dispersion of anti-Japanese protests in front of Japanese embassy, the government apparently wanted to play down Ye’s case this time, drawing from the les-sons from violet protests. However, overwhelming anti-West comments on Chinese social media and microblogs, which the state usually puts a heavy hand on, this time breached the state surprisingly in the name of ‘nationalism’ and prompted ‘countless profanity-filled

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tirades against her (Ye Shiwen) accusers on Sina Weibo’ (Jiang 2012). Such a victimhood mentality we might argue, which was created largely due to the efforts of government, has now become embedded into the public consciousness as a collective habitus – one that is rather difficult to disengage. Such a habitus is now no longer a state-led creation but a crystallization of multiple forces including media, education and popular culture, which together constitute and perpetuate the collective memory of ‘suffering’.

CodaRenan (1882) advocated that the nation was built on shared memories of joy and suffering and the impacts of defeats in wars were no less than victories. Besides traditionally spon-soring the common pleasure by performing an image of victor, it also implicitly nurtures a sense of victimhood in a way of constructing hegemonic narratives of collective memory in China’s participation in Olympic games. Shirk (2007), in her book China: Fragile Superpower, indicated that popular nationalism had intensified with the growth of China’s political and economic power. She also suggested that the upsurge of nationalism had forced the government to respond toughly against foreign countries to avoid the backfire of populist nationalism against government. From many aspects, the national victimhood has been made into a Pandora’s box: it is appealing since the Communist government believes it needs collective victimhood to counter the Western influences behind the democratic movement and to solidify its sovereignty legitimacy. Yet, as a double-edged sword, the impacts of victimhood nationalism could be disastrous especially in a country with mighty economic and military power while long haunted by the sufferings of the past.

To China, which is ambitious in its national ‘rejuvenation’, it cannot dream to be the strongest country yet be the biggest victim at the same time. We believe its engagement in the international world needs further de-victimization efforts as well as enlightened narra-tives to its history, which is particularly imperative in the context of intensifying political situation against its neighbours. Though the sophistication of victim mentality has posed a dilemma to Chinese government, the recurring calls for ‘rationale patriotism’ in recent years is laudable. However, and particularly in the case of Ye Shiwen, we observe that such victimhood nationalism, which was initiated by the state, has now become firmly embedded into the collective memory shared by generation(s). It now has also been dissembled from the state’s control and perpetuated through marketization efforts of popular culture, which posits further question on the role of ‘the market’ in producing victimhood nationalism.

Notes 1. Nicole Auerbach, Ye Shiwen: Another gold, another record, more suspicion (31 July 2012). 2. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/olympics/news/9437441/London-2012-Olympics-Clare-

Balding-questions-Ye-Shiwens-incredible-swim.html 3. Century of humiliation generally refers to the period of intervention and imperialism by

Western powers and Japan in China between Opium War and the foundation of People’s Republic of China.

4. Global Times’s editorial (1 August 2012). West being petty over Ye’s amazing speed. 5. For this section, we primarily drew from media reports on Ye Shiwen’s doping crisis

from several influential Chinese newspapers including China Daily, People’s Daily, Global Times, etc.

6. Cited from Brownell (2008). 7. http://www.theguardian.com/sport/2012/jul/30/ye-shiwen-world-record-olympics-2012

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8. Nature online article Why great Olympic feats raise suspicions ‘Performance profiling’ could help to dispel doubts. http://www.nature.com/news/why-great-olympic-feats-raise-suspicions-1.11109

9. 专访叶父：叶诗文精神状态差 西媒让她疲倦 http://2012.sina.com.cn/cn/aq/2012-08-01/190032317.shtml

10. Are Chinese Olympians Competing Against Colonialism? http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-08-08/are-chinese-olympians-competing-against-colonialism-.html

11. 要争金牌，更要争话事权—从伦敦奥运会的一系列无赖事件想到的. Yang Cheng Evening News (5 August 2012).

12. On August 6th, Xinwen Lianbo.13. CNN fabricated some reports on severe riots that took place in early March of 2013 in

southwest China’s Tibet Autonomous Region. The distorted reports triggered protests of netizens both at home and abroad. Netizens even established a website named anti-cnn.com that is aimed at opposing distorted reports from CNN.

14. Mukden Incident also called Manchurian Incident, (1931), seizure of the Manchurian city of Mukden (now Shenyang, Liaoning province, China) by Japanese troops, which was followed by the Japanese invasion of all of Manchuria (now Northeast China) and the establishment of the Japanese-dominated state of Manchukuo (Manzhouguo) in the area.

15. In response to recent mass nationalist demonstrations including 2008 Tibet riots and recurring violence in 2012 anti-Japan protests over Diaoyu Island dispute between China and Japan, state media represented by People’s Daily recurringly pledged for ‘rationale nationalism’ to the public.

16. See. Reuter’s report: China cracks down on over-the-top anti-Japan dramas. Retrieved from http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/05/17/entertainment-us-china-japan-television-idUSBRE94G03B20130517

17. See. China, Olympic victim? http://www.economist.com/node/21560569

Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

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