The Beijing Olympics materialized the new Cold War

With her three medals and her beautiful smile, freestyle skiing champion Eileen Gu, born in the United States and naturalized Chinese in 2019, was the bright face of the Beijing Winter Olympics. Perfectly bilingual, the 18-year-old young woman, of an American father and brought up by her Chinese mother, did her best not to fuel tensions between the two leading world powers. “When I’m in the United States, I’m American; and when I’m in China, I’m Chinese,” she dodged. But geopolitics caught up with it: communist propaganda wanted to make this choice the symbol of a modern, open and conquering China in the face of a declining West; while elected Americans accused him of having betrayed his country of birth.

Objects of a diplomatic boycott of the United States and several of their allies, these Olympic Games will perhaps go down in history as those which materialized this cold war of a new kind. “Except that the competition for influence is no longer played out only between China and the United States, but between groupings of countries”, observes Alice Ekman, head of Asia at the Institute for Security Studies of the European Union. On one side, the United States and the Western democracies; and on the other, China and its partners. Xi Jinping, the Chinese president, and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin thus took advantage of the event to stage, in a spectacular way, their rapprochement, and their desire to put an end to a world order dominated by the United States and Western values. In the midst of the Ukrainian crisis, Beijing supported the Kremlin’s demands in terms of security, opposing any enlargement of NATO.

The Chinese leader also met on the spot the twenty foreign leaders, mostly autocrats, who had made the trip. “China is struggling to unite in the West, where it is increasingly perceived as a threat and criticized for its human rights abuses, summarizes Alice Ekman. But it has managed to build a circle of friends faithful, first and foremost, Russia.” And this, thanks to a very active diplomacy since 2013, and by offering its infrastructures and technologies. So many privileged links with Africa, Central Asia or Latin America, which provide him with valuable support at the UN. The blocs are not, however, as rigid as they were during the Cold War era. Beijing is seeking to attract Western countries into its orbit, such as Argentina, which has just joined the Chinese New Silk Roads project, after Italy in 2019.

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This polarization, very visible at the Olympics, is likely to accelerate. “Hostilities began under Donald Trump, but it was with Joe Biden that Western countries began to better coordinate their messages and consolidate their political and even military alliance against Beijing,” observes Ming Xia, professor of political science at City University of New York. There is no doubt that in the future, Eileen Gu, who has never wanted to reveal whether she also has American nationality – which is prohibited by Chinese law – will have to choose her side more clearly.