How China’s Sense of Grievance at the Olympics Fuels Nationalist Celebrations

For Chinese athletes and those watching back home, the Paris Olympics is not just the ultimate sporting competition. It’s a stage for great power rivalry—with every Chinese success serving as evidence of faltering Western dominance.

“White superiority has collapsed!” reads a popular post on Weibo, after swimmer Pan Zhanle won gold in the men’s 100-m freestyle—breaking the world record he had previously set—and Zheng Qinwen became the first Chinese player to win gold in an Olympic tennis singles event. 

Pan and Zheng have “jointly dug the grave for white supremacy,” the post declared, noting that swimming and tennis are typically the fortes of Europeans and Americans.

“The 100-m freestyle is like the crown jewel of swimming,” wrote another Weibo user. “The world record has been broken by a yellow-skinned person, so they [Americans] are really stung by it.”

And when the Chinese swimming team broke the U.S.’s 64-year reign over the men’s 4x100-m medley relay on Sunday, nationalists saw it as further confirmation of the end of U.S. domination across society.

“Pan Zhanle came out of nowhere, like Usain Bolt in the swimming pool, and slapped Europeans and Americans in the face again and again,” reads one of the top posts on Weibo celebrating the team’s relay victory. “How lucky that our generation can witness our country and ethnicity breaking the Western monopoly in various fields: economy, industry, technology, and sports.”

In keeping with a longstanding ethno-nationalist state narrative that frames China as a historical victim of an imperialist West due for its comeuppance, much of the Chinese public opinion expressed about the country’s victories in Paris so far seems to focus on the foreign losers as much as the Chinese winners—with an emphasis on triumph over those who have aggrieved China, particularly the U.S.

At the Paris Olympics, several incidents involving Chinese athletes—like tennis champion Zheng being criticized by rival Emma Navarro, a photographer accidentally breaking table tennis player Wang Chuqin’s paddle, and another who had apparently shoved Wang—have all gone viral among Chinese social media users who are interpreting these as attempts to disrespect or sabotage China.

This perceived dynamic has been most prominent in swimming events, where Chinese athletes have complained of being unfairly maligned by allegations related to a doping scandal and being snubbed by unfriendly peers in Paris.

Pan described his historic 100-m freestyle win as “avenging an insult,” claiming that Australia’s silver medalist Kyle Chalmers had blatantly ignored him when he tried to say hi before the race (Chalmers denied doing so and later said they’d patched things up) and that the U.S. team had splashed water at the Chinese coach (observers have called the accusation “dubious”). “It felt like they were looking down on us,” Pan said.

His words went viral and were met with a wave of support on Chinese social media. “It’s a world record set under their indignant gaze!” wrote a Weibo user. “Pan Zhanle used his action to give them a tight slap!”

“Faced with skepticism from the outside, as well as foreign athletes’ disrespect and arrogance, Pan Zhanle responded by breaking the world record in the final,” Chinese news outlet The Paper posted on Weibo.

As for the doping scandal, which a third of China’s Olympic swimmers are embroiled in, the athletes have maintained their innocence, and their supporters are decrying the allegations as a smear campaign by the West.

Wang Guan, a host for the state media China Global Television Network, wrote on Weibo that the “Western sports sphere” was trying to “kill our reputation” with media coverage of the doping scandal. “International outreach efforts also apply to sports,” he said. “We can never lose this battle.”

Some athletes themselves, who have been subjected to rigorous drug testing, have also suggested that the doping allegations leveled at them are politically motivated. Breaststroke world record holder Qin Haiyang, who had tested positive for the banned heart drug trimetazidine (TMZ) before the Tokyo Olympics, said that the tests were a plot by European and American teams to “disrupt our preparation rhythm and destroy our psychological defense.”

“Why are Chinese athletes questioned when they swim fast?” Chinese swimmer Zhang Yufei, who had also tested positive for TMZ in 2020, asked at a press briefing last week, after winning the bronze medal in the women’s 200-m butterfly. “Previously, when the great [Michael] Phelps won seven, eight gold medals, why didn’t anyone dare to question him?” (Phelps had, in fact, been subject to doping allegations during his career, including by his rivals.)

Zhang’s comments were reshared by state-run newspaper Global Times, which lambasted the “double standards” held by Westerners. 

Chinese social media users’ general sense of grievance has even morphed into conspiracy theories that it’s the U.S. swimmers who are actually doping.

China, which has invested heavily in athletic development, has already enjoyed decades of Olympic success, consistently ranking among the countries with the most gold medals (alongside the U.S. and the U.K.). But even as Chinese athletes in Paris have made further strides in sports traditionally dominated by Westerners, a sense of the injustice and isolation they’ve been forced to overcome continues to loom over Olympic discourse.

“Some Western media have always been trying to depict China as a rigid authoritarian country with no freedom and fun, and that Chinese people are not cool at all,” reads an article published this week in the Global Times, “but Chinese Gen-Z athletes tell the opposite story in Paris, breaking bias and lies circulating in the West.”