作为文化表现的国家形象

作为文化表现的国家形象——西方媒体中所呈现的北京奥运

National Images as Cultural Performance——A Case Study of the Beijing Olympics as Represented in Western Media

Rui GAO

论文摘要：

本文作者以北京奥运在西方媒体中的呈现为例,试图从文化社会学理论视角对国家形象构建进行解析。笔者认为国家形象构建可以被理解为一种文化表现,它的成功与否取决于众多社会因素(包括构建主体、权力关系、符号生产工具、受众群体等等)以及它们之间纷繁复杂的互动,而这其中特别需要引起关注的是“受”众所扮演的关键性角色。在某种意义上,“受”众其实也是构建主体,因为只有当他们评判国家形象构建的文化表现是“真实的”“令人信服的”,国家形象才能被有效地构筑起来,因此‘受’众本身所具有的社会和文化特性在国家形象构建中发挥着不可忽视的作用。北京奥运作为一个大型国家形象构建运作,同时面对着全球不同的受众群体,本文着重关注作为特殊受众群体的西方媒体,试图对西方媒体中所呈现和解读的中国国家形象作一个比较初步和粗略的勾画。初步分析表明,政府(通常被泛指为国家)通过奥运的形象构建表现被判定为“虚假”、“不真实”、“不可信”的,相对负面的国家形象没有得到提升,反而有所巩固。与此同时,志愿者和普通中国人民也被西方媒体定义为国家形象构建的主体,前者的表现虽然受到一定程度的质疑,但总体上被认为“令人信服”,而后者的表现则获得了毫无保留的褒扬。显然,以奥运为平台,以西方媒体为“受”众的中国国家形象构建很难被简单地判断为成功或失败,而是呈现出一种有趣的多样性,这种多样性,如上所述,来自于多种因素,包括形象构建主体的认定,而其中受众本身所处的文化体系起到了非常关键的作用。笔者希望文化表现理论框架能够更加准确地传达国家形象构建的偶然性和复杂性。

As an essential component of the‘soft power’package of modern nation-states, national image plays an increasingly indispensable role in shaping the political and economic configuration of today’s international community.As a consequence, more and more research and studies in academia are being dedicated to examining and understanding the conceptualization of this newfield, and most of these works are conducted by scholars in mass communication and media studies with the primary focus put upon the relationship and interaction between national images and media(Latham 2000；de Burgh 2003；Zhang 2006；He et al.2007).As I focus on the case of China in this paper, my preliminary review over literature is limited to research conducted in China,and I found that most of these studies approach the issue through the perspective of the‘operationalization’of the image construction, or the‘manipulability’of the images.Iargue that there are several limitations intrinsic to this approach which may hinder our further understanding of the mechanism of how national images work.First, this approach defines the government or government agencies as the sole legitimate conveyor of national images, and endows them with undue autonomy and agencies in shaping the outcome of the construction.Second,it treats the audience of the national images,be they domestic or international, as a monolithic group of completely passive‘readers’or‘receivers’of the messages imposed on them.Third, in this approach, the national images are reified, whose production and consumption line seems to have been so meticulously programmed and firmly fixed in advance that it leaves little space for possible change.

A New Theoretical Framework

To transcend these limitations, I propose to approach the issue from a sociological point of view.In this paper, I use the case study of the Beijing Olympics to make an initial attempt to apply a lately developed theoretical framework in cultural sociology,‘Cultural Pragmatics of Social Performance’, to the studies of national images.My premise is that this theoretical tool may bring us new perspectives in understanding the relationship between national images and the audience, and lend more analytical leverage to the current conceptualization.

‘Cultural Pragmatics’was first proposed by renowned American social theorist Alexander, and has since been further developed and strengthened by numerous scholars who focus upon the confluence of“hermeneutic, post-structural, and pragmatic theories of meaning’s relation to social action”(Alexander& Mast 2004：7).In line with this perspective, meaningful social actions are understood as cultural performance, as“the social process by which actors, individually or in concert, display for others the meaning of their social situation”(Alexander 2004：529).And in order to achieve this effect, they must put on a convincing performance, one that makes their intended audience“accept their motives and explanations as a reasonable account”(Alexander 2004：529).According to Alexander, there are six basic elements that contribute to the effects of cultural performance：systems of collective representation, including background symbols and foreground scripts, actors, observers/audience, means of symbolic production, mise-en-scene, and social power.These elements compose a model of causality.Each of them plays a necessary part in determining whether and how the performance occurs, yet none of them could be the sufficient cause alone(Alexander 2004：529-533).

What defines the success of a performative action is“psychological identification and cultural extension”, or in other words, the fusion of all the basic elements which could create a‘flow’ (Alexander 2004：547).When the elements are fused, the social actors would appear to the audience,“straightforward, truthful and sincere”(Alexander 2004：548) their motives convincing, and their emotions compelling.A symbolic identification between the audience and the actors and the text would be established, and the cultural meaning effectively projected from the performance to the audience.In one word, the intended effect of the performance would have been successfully achieved.Conversely,unless all the six elements are re-fused, the actions of the actors would remain a faked performance in the negative sense, and the meanings they want to convey to the audience would not be accepted as credible, i.e.their performance would have been a failure.

In line with this perspective, national images, or image-building endeavors could be understood as cultural performances whose success is contingent upon a complicated process of negotiation and interaction between a plethora of social elements.Such an approach may help us to transcend some of the limitations of current conceptualization in the following ways.First, it points out that social agencies, including government, in their attempts to construct a certain version of national images may encounter failure,as the ultimate interpretation was not completely in their control and their messages may well be misread or miscomprehended.At the same time, social actors other than the government,may also participate in the construction process, whether they are endorsed by the government or not, regardless of their awareness or intentionality, as their voices or messages are taken as constituting and shaping the image of a nation.This sheds light to the possibility of multiple national image constructors and multiple versions of national images.

Second, as the success of a cultural performance is ultimately defined by‘a psychological identification and cultural extension’among the audience, audience in this approach could no longer be dismissed as mere passive viewers or readers.On the contrary, they play an active and indispensable role in the‘writing’or constructing process of the national images.This not only means that the audience is the ultimate judge of the performance, it also means that different groups of audiences, with their difference in social and cultural characters, may read and interpret one version of national image in totally different ways.Hence, when we talk about national images, we must first define the specific group of audience that is targeted, and take into full account the very social and cultural features that they possess.

Third, the defining character of the approach, the contingency of the performance illuminates that even when the social agencies of the national image construction and the audience are both set, the eventual outcome of the construction is still dependent upon the specific and intricate interaction of many elements.In other words, any one single element may or may not shift the trajectory of the entire process and change the eventual outcome.As I will show later, the one element that I find most relevant to the discussion in this paper is the background cultural representation system that may or may not be shared by both groups.This means that even with the same set of social agencies of image construction and audience, the images conveyed may be taken differently at different times, with different contexts, and may be partially success and partially failure, namely, the existence contingency means likelihood of change and variability.

Case Selection and Methodology

In my selection of cases, I attempt to choose the ones with the most relevant ramifications to China in the field of international communication.To this end, the Beijing Olympics makes a perfect case to examine national image construction as a cultural performance.First of all, as China intends to enhance its national image through hosting the Games, the Beijing Olympics could be deemed as a representative case of a government-driven project of national image construction；this makes the official social agency of the construction unambiguously the government.Second, while the Games brought China unprecedented opportunities to build its national image on a global stage, the constant and alert media attention from all over the world preceding and during the events also transfixed China under the scathing scrutiny of a political and social microscope, where the lens through which the society is observed determines the eventual representation of the image of the nation.This means there is a broad range of international audience, which facilitates not only the studies of the relationship between the image construction and the audience,but also the needs to understand the mechanism of international communication.

Western media was intentionally selected as the focus of this paper particularly because of its paradoxical role in the process of the national image construction of China in the international community.On the one hand, it composes the second-order audience, who must interpret and decode the images of China as constructed by the social agencies within the country.On the other hand, it must convey the images as they are interpreted to the third-order audience, namely the public in the West,and thereby also plays an indispensable role in the construction of the images of China abroad.At the same time, Western media also holds unsurpassable dominance in the international community, a role thar cannot be neglected.

My data was mainly drawn from the printed as well as electronic media in the U.S,including the five top-ranking newspapers in terms of circulation, and the website of CNN^[1].In terms of data-analysis, instead of taking a more quantitative content analysis method, I focused on an hermeneutical way of discourse analysis, which I believe would‘allow us to inquire into abstract formal structure of news reports as well as into their subtle underlying meanings’in a better and more compelling way(Van Dijk, 1988：x)^[2].

Case Analysis

On August 25, 2008, the 29th Summer Olympiads closed in Beijing with a triumphant rejoice of the nation as a whole.Obviously for most people in China, this was the once-in-a-lifetime chance for them to relish the unprecedented joy and pride that being a member of the Chinese nation has brought to them；it was the ultimate and perfect culmination of a dream that has been yearned for by the entire population for over a century.To make their pride in hosting the Games more rewarding, the Chinese athletes harvested the record amount of 51 gold medals.This is the most China has ever achieved in the history of modern Olympic Games.This was 15 ahead of the United States which ranked at second place.Obviously, for the Chinese citizens as the audience, the performance of the Games was a tremendous success.

The kind of appreciation of and applause to the success of the Games was shared by many others outside China and not the least by the International Olympic Committee, who seemed to be so impressed by the organization and operation of the Games that it was implied that the Beijing Olympics represent“the standard as perhaps the best-run in the history of the Olympic movement^[3]”.In fact, there seems to be a wide consensus in the international community that things were almost perfect in terms of the architecture, transportation, competition, organization, operation,and even the weather.Journalists from Western media exclaimed that the sports venues “combined gargantuan scale and striking architecture in a way no previous Olympic host could afford”(LATimes August 25), the opening and closing extravaganza were flawless, the operation was so smooth that the events“ran like clockwork”(WSJ August 25), and the athletic achievements were so superb that“World records fell almost by the day”(USAToday August 24).Words and expressions like“the biggest winner”,“triumph”,“a huge prestige bonanza”abound, and all seem to point to the direction that this was the‘greatest games’ever.

From the point of the view of the organizers, the Chinese government in this case, these comments and feedbacks are particularly reassuring because they seem to have fulfilled the very message they wanted to send to the world, that China is no longer the servile nation as it was one hundred years ago, and that it is capable of holding a perfect and perhaps the greatest Olympics for the entire world.Thus the perfect Olympics should be the facilitator of a new national image, which is characterized with positive features such as openness, friendliness,harmony,strength and progress.

But is this the case?Does the acknowledgement in Western media that the Games are organized in a perfect way indicate that the message or the image of the nation as conveyed were accepted by the Western media as true?Or in other words, does the success of the Games automatically contribute to the success of performance of the national image construction as a whole?

Hardly so,because for the Western media,there are other measures of success that are more important than merely“competition, architecture, transportation, and weather(USA Today August 24), and these criteria are of course related to the political issues that had been closely associated with the Beijing Olympics.A brief survey of the coverage on political issues before and during the games demonstrate that constant media attention had been given to topics as“rough handling of political dissidents”(NY Times August 23), the driving away of those who were deemed undesirable from Beijing by the government(LA Times, July 22；NYTimes August 7), tight control over domestic news outlets, censorship on Western journalists and denial of full access to the Internet(USA Today July 23).To add to this list, there were also concerns over China’s human rights records,its rule in Tibet and its role in Sudan’s Darfur civil war, as well as “its pollution levels,industrial arrogance, meddling in Africa, and lack of free speech”^[4].What was being illustrated by these focal points is the major set of measurements that the Western media used to gauge the performance of the Chinese government during the Games, which are less to do with the hosting and organization of the Games, than to do with promises of more political freedom and openness that goes along with the Olympic commitments.According to this set of measurements, the performance of the nation was deeply disappointing, as so explicitly expressed in the concluding editorial of New York Times on August 23：“To win the right to host these Games, China promised to honor the Olympic ideals of nonviolence, openness to the world and individual expression.Those promises were systematically broken.”In this discourse context, the performance of the nation(government)was deemed a failure because it was untrue to the original meanings that it attempted to project, which was taken as the promise of further political freedom, and whether the games were organized in a perfect way was rendered largely irrelevant.

While the Western media gauged the performance of the nation during the games with a different set of measurements and expectations from those held by the social agencies of the performance, what is peculiarly interesting and illuminating to this paper as well as to the understanding of the framework of cultural pragmatics, is that the performance of the nation was also very much evaluated with the language of‘performance’where the quality of‘credibility’and‘spontaneity’becomes the center of gravity.

It is not hard to notice how frequently words and expressions as‘spectacle’,‘show’, ‘performance’,‘stage’, and‘drama’, were being used to describe the Olympics, or the performance of the nation.Unfortunately, it seems that what was being emphasized here is the more negative sense of terms, namely, the theatricality of the situation, the strong sense of artificiality and‘fakeness’, and an indication of deceitfulness and untruthfulness.Indeed, throughout the duration of the games, much media attention has been drawn to the ‘incredibleness’of certain performances, and many questions have been raised on the ‘truthfulness’of certain information or behavior of individuals as well as organizations during the entire games.With the coverage of the three most notorious incidents, the lip-syncing performance that involved two school-age girls on the opening ceremony, the showing of the animated three-dimensional studio re-creation of the‘footprint’firework, and the alleged underage problem of Chinese women gymnasts, there seemed to emerge in the Western media a spiral storm of muckraking news practices, and the discourse of skepticism and doubt became the dominant motif in the news coverage.For instance,it was highlighted that all the flags on the pole were blown by‘faked wind’(LA Times, August 25),and that the unoccupied or unsold seats in the gym were being filled by volunteer workers to make the scene more cheerful(LA Times, August 14).Also it was revealed that‘the dozens of colorfully dressed children in the Olympics opening ceremony were not from the 55 minority groups they portrayed, but rather were from the dominant Han majority’(Wall Street Journal August 14；New York Times August 18).On a larger scale, the entire city of Beijing and China was portrayed as a“carefully stage-managed”show(New York Times August 10；LA Times July 22), where an extreme‘face-lift’was being conducted to hide undesirable scenes from the audience.The title of a news commentary printed in the LA Times on August 14 could perhaps best capture the entire spirit of skepticism, which read ‘So Far, Games have been Unbelievable’.

In this predominant discourse of‘incredibility’or‘fakeness’, even positive terms such as ‘spectacles’,‘extravaganza’, and adjectives such as‘near-perfect’,‘efficient’, and ‘triumphant’assume a negative connotation because put back into their contexts, they convey a latent message that reads‘lack of spontaneity’,‘stagecraft’,‘rehearsed nature’,‘fakeness’, ‘insincerity’, and‘untruthfulness’.In fact, many journalists seemed to claim that it was exactly the relentlessness with which the Chinese government was determined to make everything ‘appear’perfect that renders the entire performance a miserable failure, as there were so many incidents where things were faked to achieve immaculate records.One of the major components of almost all the concluding articles was a fairly elaborate reminder of how much‘fakeness’had been shown throughout the games.For instance, in the article titled‘Friendly and Efficient?Oh Yeah.But Spontaneous?’in New York Times on August 23, the author reminded the readers that in the“artificial opening ceremony”：

Chinese authorities faked a song, putting one young girl on stage and piping another young girl’s voice through the public address system.When the Chinese flag was raised in the Bird’s Nest, suffocatingly devoid of moving air that night,the flag suddenly snapped to attention, fluttering in a synthetic breeze created by air jets in the flag pole.

In other words, what was being articulated loudly by these comments is that the performance of the nation may appear perfect and remarkably efficient,but we, the Western people refused to be moved by or to believe in this excellent performance at all, because we recognized that after all it was‘soulless’,as a commentator for Washington Post remarked,and at best a faked show.

Therefore, under the surface of perfection, and behind all the spectacular stage performances, the Western media found an old,iron-handed authoritarian state machine relentlessly at work.The remarkable efficiency and the excellent performance were then interpreted as undeniable testimony to the repressive and controlling nature of the government.In the New York Times article that reflected the games on the closing day,the journalist claimed that“the strict control(has)left the Games feeling devoid of playfulness, passion and festive spirit”(August 23).In another article in the Wall Street Journal(August 25), the author complained that the cost of efficiency is“control that squeezed any spontaneity out of the events”and found the near-perfect spectacle‘chilly’because it“signaled the arrival of a new Soviet-style sporting and political colossus”.It is also recorded in this article that one of his interviewees, a professor of sports history from Germany, commented that“the perfection and control was not impressive,at least not to us；we had that 70 years ago in Berlin.”Obviously, here it was alluded to that the Chinese government is at least comparable to the Soviet regime and worse even, to Nazi Germany, and its‘near-perfect’performance is but a telling piece of evidence to this unfortunate resemblance.With images of ‘Soviet’regime and‘Nazi’Germany being vividly evoked, both of which are deeply entrenched and highly contaminating profane signifiers in the Western cultural representation system, the conventional images of China under the rule of an authoritarian government, that are associated with negative features as‘repressive’,‘deceitful’, or‘secret’, were being forcefully reinforced.

From the discussion above, we saw that there is a tremendous discrepancy between the projected meanings by China via the hosting of Olympic Games and the evaluation of the performance of China by the Western media.While China, or rather the Chinese government, as the main social agency, attempted to enhance the national image by a perfect performance in organizing the Games, the Western media read from the‘efficiency’and‘near-perfection’a sense of fakeness, lack of spontaneity and deceit,as well as darker signifiers such as‘repressiveness’, ‘strict control’and‘secrecy’.At the same time, the performance of the government outside the Games was given more priority and gravity in the weighting of evaluation by the Western media.As a consequence, the cultural performance of the national image construction, as facilitated by the government, was dismissed as a faked show by the Western media, who remained thoroughly unmoved.The negative images of China, with the government taken as the major representative, was not only not altered in any way, but confirmed and further strengthened.

Many elements contributed to such an outcome, and among them the background cultural representation systems that the Western media hold, that may or may not be shared by the Chinese or the Chinese government, undoubtedly play a vital role.Among these systems, the most salient and relevant cultural representation in this case seems to be the set of democratic and counterdemocratic codes that was at the center of the discourse of American civil society(Alexander and Smith 1993).As binary codes that inform people of the other actors and their actions, and distinguish the‘sacred’from the‘profane’, these codes put the authoritarian regimes, to which category China was traditionally assigned, to the profane side, and construct them as‘calculating’,‘deceitful’,‘secret’, and‘suspicious’, and the social actors under its rule were typically characterized as‘passive’,‘irrational’,‘hysterical’,‘passionate’, and‘mad’.We could see that this set of codes serve as the cognitive framework with which the Chinese government and China was being defined and categorized.It is also at work in the Western media’s representation of the volunteers as discussed in the later paragraphs.Other elements also contributed equally.One thing is the different expectations that the government and the Western media cherish respectively to the eventual outcome of the Games.Another element is that the ‘insincere’actions taken by the Chinese government, as represented by the three incidents of ‘fakeness’, were also held accountable.Both played their important roles in determining the trajectory of the development of the national images.

That the negative images of China were being reinforced in the interpretation by Western media, however, does not mean the cultural performance was a thorough failure as a whole.In fact, the paradoxical images of the volunteers and the sacred image of the Chinese people in general as represented in the Western media serve as telling testimony to the contingency and complexity of any cultural performance, and particularly the construction of national images.Volunteers, and Chinese people in general, regardless of their intention or their active or conscious involvement in the construction of national images,are somehow also taken by the Western media as constituting the images of China and their performance are interpreted and evaluated with in a distinct light.

The tens of thousands of volunteers that participated in the event seem to have gained at least partially genuine approval from the Western media, though similar patterns of skepticism, as demonstrated by the democratic and counter-democratic codes, were also looming behind the cognitive framework.In fact, even when the Western media acknowledged the impressiveness of the works done by the young volunteer workers, they remained suspicious of the‘invisible hands’of the government that they suppose might be the ultimate pushing force behind their apparent enthusiasm.In one of the rare articles that actually treats the volunteers as its protagonists, with the title‘Beijing Puts On Happy Face for Games, Without Wrinkles’(NY Times August 10), the author wrote that the volunteers“seem to be sending the strongest message about how China wishes to be perceived.This is the face the country is showing to the world：young, eager, proud and patriotic”.By the words‘how China wishes to be perceived’,it was indicated that there was actually a gap between the real China and‘how China wishes to be perceived’by the outside world, which again attempted to showcase the‘staged’and consequently‘faked’nature of the performance.It was then also suggested in the article,as the title so clearly articulated,that these young volunteers all of whom are in their 20s, were purposefully chosen because unlike those people in their 40s and 50,they have not“lived through some of China’s political upheavals”,and therefore do not have more complicated feelings other than being patriotic.Here, the‘invisible’controlling hands of the government were again alluded to, and the volunteers were somehow deprived of their agency because it was implied that they were naive, inexperienced, and brainwashed youth who were unfortunate to fall victim to the manipulation of a calculating government, and their patriotism cannot hold to test because it is still rather blind and irrational.

The association of the student volunteers with the government,somehow pollutes the images of the volunteers, and put their spontaneity and sincerity to doubt.In a column in the Washington Post(August 24), the author commented that“Everybody pretended to speak English.Until you got past“hello.”Everyone was helpful until you went one inch past where you were supposed to go.Then, arms sprang out to stop you”.It is not hard to note that the volunteers in these sentences are associated with pretension, a shallow stage gesture behind which there was no authentic will and skill to help, but only obedient will to serve the government.The skepticism of the authenticity and agency of the volunteers was resonated in other articles, as an author in the New York Times remarked that“the volunteers are so polite and friendly,in fact, that it can be a little disconcerting.It would be Stepford-like if the eagerness to please were not so seemingly genuine.”Here, the words“disconcerting”,“seemingly genuine”, both imply a sense of possible ‘fakeness’, or‘insincerity’；and‘Stepford-like’obviously suggested a complete absence of humanness or‘genuineness’because it evokes the images of unfeeling automatons as well as puppets that were at the control of others^[5].Such an image obviously matches and overlaps with that of the authoritarian regime as constructed by the performance of the government.

The skepticism, fortunately, is but a part of mixed feelings of ambivalence held by Western media towards the volunteers.For the most part, volunteers were represented in Western media as genuinely affable and eagerly helpful.They were praised as having done“their country proud with not only relentless friendliness but also remarkable efficiency”(LA Times, August 25^th) and their welcoming and“gracious behavior”sincere.Their gracious gesture of service and friendliness were also portrayed with numerous touching incidents,as it was recalled by one journalist from the LATimes how“volunteers requested you wait on the bus until they found one”when someone arrived at a venue without an umbrella on a rainy day.

If volunteers were represented with an ambivalence that mixes skepticism and admiration, PEOPLEin its capital form, or the Chinese people in general seem to have been generously applauded without reserve.In an interview taken on CNN, it was claimed that the most memorable part for many who first came to China during the games is‘the people’, who“are very giving and kind”, and who“go completely out of their way to help you”^[6].Indeed, in the predominance of the discourse of‘untruthfulness’,‘fakeness’and‘insincerity’, one of the few social actors or categories that were exempted from such derogatory labels is the‘Chinese people’in the most general sense, as an article in the New York Times so specifically articulates “one thing did transcend the studied nature of these Games—the openness and affability and kindliness of the Chinese people”(August 24).Here the people as a group were portrayed as transcending the‘stage show’of the games, and their‘unstudied’or authentic goodness was posed in sharp contrast with the‘fakeness’of the government.To certain extent, it seems that the Chinese people in general as a social group of actors has been constructed and represented as an impeccable symbol or signifier of sacredness that possesses the magical power to resist the polluting influence and manipulation of the government.The binary construction or interpretation of the government vs.the people was most explicitly and almost dramatically expressed in a report from the USA.It reads：

The problem with China is not its people, but its leaders.It’s not one country, but two.There’s the deferential, white-glove-wearing, efficient nation of 1.3 billion that just might put on the most awe-inspiring Olympics in memory.There’s also heavy-handed official China, the one doing all that damage to its people’s good name.The government might as well be the smog that rolls in each day, obscuring the stunning venues, the first-class organization and the simple acts of kindness of tens of thousands of volunteers.You get the feeling it can’t help itself.At a time when it so wants to join the rest of the world, when it craves being discovered and admired, it reverts to its Mao default setting.

This dramatic and somehow extremely binary conceptualization of the people vs.the government serves as a telling piece of evidence, that contrary to the government, whose performance was found to be faked and untruthful and thus a failure, the cultural performance of the people in general have achieved a huge success.The Western media found the actions of the people sincere, their intentions genuine and their gesture of friendliness and openness convincing.And the national images as represented by the people are the most positive ones.The fact that despite the aforementioned binary codes that usually characterize people under authoritarian rule with negative features, that the Chinese people are mostly viewed in a positive light again confirms how the outcome of a cultural performance is contingent and subject to change.

Conclusion

The performance of the Games as a national-image building project as represented in the Western media is a mixed one.In territory where the government has lost, the people seem to have won back.As we have discussed before,more than one of the groups of social actors has been taken as representing the images of the nation, regardless of their intention or awareness, and more than one of the versions of national images has emerged that are not completely compatible with each other.Despite the wide-claimed efficiency and success of the organization, the performance of the government was dismissed as‘faked’and‘untruthful’and remained ultimately a theatrical ‘performance’that failed to move the audience.As a consequence, the image of the nation,primarily represented by the government during the Games, was a negative one characterized by the reinforced features of an authoritarian regime.The credibility of the performance of the volunteers was also partially put to doubt by Western media who tend to represent the former as ‘puppets’manipulated by the government.The image of the nation as represented by them was therefore an ambivalent one that partly overlaps with the authoritarian state, but partly differs from it in a much brighter way.It was the performance of the Chinese people in general that was found to be the most convincing,and the images of the nation as represented by them the most positive.

Such an intricate and complicated outcome was contingent on many elements,among which I found the binary codes as central to the background representation system of the Western media most relevant and significant.The actions taken by the social agencies, namely the government, the volunteers, and the people, and the hierarchy and interplay between them,in terms of power relations, also determined the interaction between their performance and their representation in the Western media.

Selected References

Alexander,Jeffrey.2004.“The Cultural Pragmatics of Social Performance：Symbolic Action between Ritual and Strategy”,Sociological Theory 22(4)：527-573.

Alexander,Jeffrey,& Smith,Philip.2003.“The Strong Program in Cultural Sociology：Elements of a Structural Hermeneutics”, in J.Alexander, The Meanings of Social Life：A Cultural Sociology.New York：Oxford University Press.

——1993.“The Discourse of American Civil Society：A New Proposal for Cultural Studies.”Theory and Society 22(2)：151-207.

Chadha, Kalyani and Anandam Kavoori.2000.“Media imperialism revisited：some findings from the Asian case”, Media, Culture& Society 22(4)：415-32.

de Burgh, Hugo.2003.“Kings without crowns?The Re-Emergence of Investigative Journalism in China”, Media, Culture& Society 25(6)：801-20.

He, Hui, et al.2007.Xin Chuan Mei Huan Jing Zhong de Guo Jia Xing Xiang de Dou Jian yu Chuan Bo (The Construction and Transmission of National Images in the Context of New Media).Beijing：Foreign Language Press.

Latham, Kevin.2000.“Nothing but the Truth：News Media, Power and Hegemony in South China”, The China Quarterly 163：633-54.

Zhang, Xiaoling.2006.“Reading between the Headlines：SARS, Focus and TV Current Affairs Programmes in China”, Media, Culture& Society 28(5)：715-37.

〔Rui GAO,Ph.D candidate in Sociology, Yale University, USA〕

【注释】

[1]This is only a preliminary research, and further research must be done to include media from countries other than the U.S.

[2]As thisis only a preliminary research, further and more quantitative research would certainly yields more rewarding and comprehensive conclusions than this one.

[3]http://www.usatoday.com/sports/olympics/beijing/2008-08-24-china- image_n.htm.

[4]Quoted from the following website：http://www.spiked- online.com/index.php?/site/article/4506/.

[5]In fact, the simile of automaton was not uncommon among the news reports, and particularly in their coverage of Chinese athletes, who were somehow portrayed as‘machine、like’people who run and jump and throw without feelings and possibly under threat of shame or punishment, and who“will do anything, including trample on‘basic human standards’, to win, win, win”.Please refer to the following websites：http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/article/5562/.

[6]http://edition.cnn.com/2008/LIVING/studentnews/08/24/students.olympics/index.html.