The Olympic Games and Politics in Northeast Asia
Although Baron Pierre de Coubertin, the father of the modern Olympics, endeavored greatly to obscure the political nature of the games, it is said that in ancient Greek times, the Olympics were highly politicized events, where military power was put on full display. The same can be said for the Olympic Games of the 21st century, albeit with economic power replacing military power. The countries of Northeast Asia, in particular, have been active in using these mega-events to promote their respective agendas, with three Olympic events taking place over a span of five years in the region.
The most recent of the Olympic Games to have taken place in Northeast Asia was the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics, which was used to demonstrate to the global audience that China had emerged as a world superpower. Unfortunately, this also meant that the games became a stage of frigid geopolitical conflicts, as Jung Woo Lee of the University of Edinburgh argues in “Cold Geopolitics at the Winter Olympics in Beijing.” Amid the chaos of a global pandemic, the 2020 Tokyo Summer Olympics were held in 2021. Displaying Japan’s revival appears to have been the key agenda behind the hosting of the games, commonly held by all actors involved. Yasuhiro Sakaue of Hitotsubashi University, Japan, shows this in “Demonstrating to the World Japan’s Revived ‘Strong Economy’: The National Strategy for the Tokyo 2020 Olympic and Paralympic Games.” In 2018, the Winter Olympics were held in Gangwon-do Province, the most underdeveloped region in South Korea, at a time when there were high hopes for a defrosting of relations on the Korean Peninsula. The local and central governments’ agendas for hosting the games are relayed by Haenam Park of Seoul National University Asia Center in “Between Developmentalism and Nationalism: The 2018 Pyeongchang Winter Olympics.”
Ilhong Ko, HK Research Professor, Seoul National University Asia Center, mahari95@snu.ac.kr