The Olympic Games Return to China, in a Changed World

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

News, Storytelling, New, Society & Culture, Yorker, Wnyc, Books, Remnick, Politics, Arts, David

4.2 • 6.2K Ratings

🗓️ 21 January 2022

⏱️ 22 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Much has changed since China last hosted the Olympics, during the 2008 Summer Games. Those Games were widely seen as greatly improving China’s international reputation. But the 2022 Winter Games have put a spotlight instead on its human-rights abuses, most notably the genocide taking place against Uyghurs and Kazakhs. Peter Hessler, for many years The New Yorker’s China correspondent, asks David Remnick, “When an athlete says something about the internment camps in Xinjiang, and the oppression of Muslim people in China, what is the Chinese response going to be? The I.O.C. has really left them out there.” The sports reporter Louisa Thomas notes that these Games may garner little American support or attention, with few big-name American athletes for NBC to promote. “I even have a lot of friends who have no idea there’s about to be an Olympics,” Thomas says. Plus, at the Beijing pizzeria Pie Squared, the owner, Asher Gillespie, glumly assesses the Olympics boom that isn’t coming. With ticket sales halted and the events in a bubble, he says, “We're going to be watching from TV just like everybody else.”

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.
0:11.1	Welcome to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. The Lunar New Year is on February 1st,
0:17.1	and three days later, the Winter Olympics kick off in Beijing.
0:25.8	And with China maintaining strict COVID protocols, ticket sales have been halted,
0:29.0	and the mood in the capital there is tense.
0:34.5	Asher Gillespie has lived in Beijing for many years, and he owns a pizzeria there.
0:37.3	Its English name is Pye Square. Farm pie pizza. I grew up in Michigan, so it's a
0:42.2	Detroit-style pizza place in Beijing. Are you all going to eat Hawaii or do you want to do half?
0:48.1	Yeah, we do have to be half of. You order at the counter, and then you go sit down. I've got
0:53.1	six taps of different beers there.
1:01.8	In 2000, Gillespie went to China to study as an undergraduate for a year.
1:07.8	And actually, in that time, they, that's when they announced that Beijing had gotten the rights to the 2008 Olympics, the summer Olympics.
1:16.7	So that was one of the reasons that China seemed so exciting at the time.
1:22.4	You could tell a boom was kind of coming.
1:24.5	And I just figured there'd be a lot of job opportunities coming.
1:28.4	In the era that I was here, so 2000 onwards, there was slowly a growing restaurant community.
1:37.0	So you could find barbecue.
1:39.6	Eventually some Mexican places came into town.
1:42.0	You could find kind of each and every type of food.
1:45.4	And actually that kind of went all the way through the 2008 Olympics.
1:50.0	And you got it by by just kind of having that style of food.
1:55.5	And then kind of during and after the Olympics, people came in over the top
	...

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