What the "involution" Olympics suggest about China's future

Among those in Beijing around the time of the 2008 Games was Orville Schell, who has written from China for The New Yorker and is the director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society. Looking back, Schell told me this week, those Games “raised all sorts of tantalizing possibilities of where China would go, whether it was going to open more, or close down. We didn’t know.” This time, Schell watched the Opening Ceremony from his home in California, and he was struck by how much larger Xi loomed over the event than his predecessors had. “I think this is really almost the coronation of the ‘new era’ of socialism with Chinese characteristics, with Xi Jinping standing up there all alone delivering his homily,” Schell said. “On the one hand, they so desperately want to be part of the world, and respected. But on the other hand, they’re so militantly opposed to making themselves soluble to the rest of the world. It’s a real contradiction. In effect, ‘We are worthy of your respect—and fear.’ ”

In political terms, these involuted Olympics are a preview of the main event on the Chinese calendar this year. At the Twentieth Party Congress, which will convene this fall, Xi will almost certainly embark on a third term in office, ending, once and for all, the experiment in term limits that began exactly four decades ago, in 1982, when Deng Xiaoping sought to prevent the personality cult that had prevailed, to tragic effect, under Mao. In Xi’s bid for power and control, he has adopted a zero-tolerance approach to a vast spectrum of threats, including disease, disorder, and dissent. But, in closing China off from the world, he risks creating a future that contains the very risks that have hobbled the nation in the past.