Beijing Olympics torch relay

The purpose of the relay, as suggested by the ACT Torch Relay Planning Committee, is to “cheer on our Australian heroes”. This is a perhaps optimistic but not unreasonable attempt to wrest the meaning of the torch back for an Australian audience. Yet it only adds even more to the weight of meanings that have burdened the torch since it was lit.

The lighting occurred in Greece with an invented ceremony. Through references to classical Greek civilization, it invoked the performance of an immutable historical tradition while actually looking like something out of a Ray Harryhausen movie.

From this implausible start, the torch relay has not functioned effectively as spectacle, like the opening and closing ceremonies of the Olympic games that can dazzle and overwhelm their spectators. Instead, the effect has been to produce a symbolic event in which the symbolism is untethered by real history, and as such is free to be appropriated and disrupted by the prevailing politics that circulate around it.

Of course, as a single, unifying symbol, the Olympic torch should work well as an object whose multiple meanings can be juxtaposed and overlaid by governments, the Olympic organizers and and the rather forlorn and forgotten corporate sponsors to achieve a wide range of political, ideological and marketing effects. But in the era of 24 hour news and sophisticated global protest movements, those meanings have been harder to control than the promoters might have hoped.

For the Olympic organizers, athletes and relay runners, the torch has increasingly hopelessly tried to represent the Olympics, and while it is in Canberra, our “Australian heroes” and their participation in the games.

For the Tibet and human rights movements around the world, the Beijing Olympic torch has simply represented the Chinese state, and has become a legitimate object of political action on that basis. The sometimes violent protest actions around the torch relay over the last month have played out as an allegory of the real violence and struggles for power within China between the state and those who oppose it.

The actual Chinese state, meanwhile, has clearly hoped to achieve a conflation of itself with the Olympics through its global presentation of the torch, thus transubstantiating the meaning of both to signify an Olympian Chinese national triumph.

So the torch relay has been presented by China as a tracing across the globe of its ascendancy. As a symbol of power the torch is legitimized by being taken to the sites of power of the countries it visits – to Downing Street, the Arc de Triomphe, and in Australia to Canberra and past Parliament House and the Australian War Memorial.

In symbolizing power in this way, those who hold the torch have struggled to define its meaning on their own terms or in their own interests. Cheering on our Australian heroes cannot compete with China self-consciously signaling its return as a global superpower. This has produced the heated public debate and hand-wringing, including participant withdrawals and protest actions, that have characterized some of the relay legs. In others, it has only been the heavy hand of the host states that has prevented trouble.

The overburdening of the torch with meaning has made Chinese indignation at its uneasy reception around the world somewhat disingenuous. The Chinese organizers have not helped themselves, either, with the deployment of Chinese state paramilitary cadets as “torch attendants”. Their cheery blue tracksuits have taken on a rather sinister quality and they have presented the world’s media with striking, but exactly the wrong, images. In London especially, the behaviour of these young men in front of 10 Downing Street showed a gratuitous disregard for the significance of their location, hinting by their unthinking presence at its centre of government at a symbolic violation of the very national sovereignty of the United Kingdom.

The Australian prime minister, whose own symbolic antennae are nothing if not sensitive, ruled out the presence of the torch attendants in the Australian leg, although the results of that remain to be seen. However, since the early protests in London, international Chinese communities not officially connected to the Chinese government have been mobilizing to support the torch as it travels around the world.

In this political movement, the meaning of the torch has become the “sacred flame of the motherland”, leaving behind any bounded connection to the Olympic games in a general sense. It has come to represent China as an historical and civilizational meaning, woven into the century-long narrative of China’s struggle to define a post-imperial modern national identity, with a symbolism possibly beyond even the control of the Chinese government. In the rhetoric of this new movement one can hear echoes of Chinese nationalist movements going back through the Diaoyutai Islands protests of the 1970s, the May Fourth movement in the 1920s and even the 1905 Anti-American boycott.

In Australia, Chinese students have been traveling to Canberra for the relay out of a fervent sense of duty and pride. Their nationalism may leave many Australians uncomfortable, although our own can be equally humourless and forceful.

Any person who chooses to identify him or herself as Chinese has much to be proud of in this Olympic year. The historical achievements of China’s magnificent civilization have immeasurably enriched the human experience, while its current economic and social transformations are offering an extraordinary release of creative potential for the world. But for no good reason for a country in which all its citizens have access to some level of education and lots of media, China remains resolutely undemocratic, with a government that ultimately has no limits to the means it can use to maintain its power.

Australians are right to think about China’s future, and the Beijing Olympic torch relay in Canberra will highlight those concerns in our national discourse. But symbolically weighed down as much as it is, a stylishly-decorated aluminium torch being taken around Canberra will never be able to express the richness and complexity of a relationship with China that is and needs to be fully cultivated in scholarship, politics, the economy, culture and a shared social life.