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Originally Posted by Muta
The Chinese dominance in these games is terrifying. Do they have athletic sweatshops back home or something? They seem to place well in every single event! I swear that government will do anything and fund anything to make sure the world feels their sporting dominance.... I'm sure it's all about image for them.
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Nationalist pride is an important political commodity, and manufacturing it through spending on athletics is probably a fantastic return on investment for communist countries. It's less about showing the rest of the world they're a dominant sporting power, more about giving their own country a tremendous source of pride, as well as evidence of the superiority of their hybrid communist/capitalist model.
I was reading an article about how China is trying to use its Olympics program as a way of re-asserting the importance of healthy lifestyles as part of Chinese culture; they've got one of the fastest-rising rates of obesity in the world, and they're aware of the serious hit to their health-care system that this may pose. (Not at the level of the US on a per-capita basis, but they have surpassed the US in total number of diabetics). The US has not been able to channel athletic success into really encouraging athletic participation; it's produced a culture of sports fans, as opposed to sporters. It'll be really interesting to see if China's able to reverse that trend in their own population, or whether they'll end up like the US.