Every time the Olympic flame is lit in front of the host country’s president, the pulse of a nation quickens. But the Games have rarely been staged with more ambition to self-aggrandisement than in Beijing 2008, when China celebrated its arrival as a world power. Moreover, that which in the summer of 2008 was broadcast to the world through the language of the Olympics was in 2010 reiterated in the language of a world exhibition in Shanghai, in which China presented itself to the global public as a platform for the scientific achievements of the 21st century.
The Olympics and the World Expo are symbols of the secular shift that occurred around the turn of the millennium: the ascent of China – and other countries of the Global South – to the exclusive club of global powers. It is scarcely possible to overestimate the significance of this shift for world history, and in particular for the people of the South. After centuries of humiliation, they finally see a Southern country on a par with the powers of the world. Countries once treated as colonial underdogs now measure up to their masters, and people of colour take over from ‘the white man’. Yet what amounts to a triumph of justice threatens to turn into a defeat for the planet. The desire for equity is largely fixed on development-as-growth, and it is development-as-growth which strains human relations and fundamentally threatens the biosphere. Indeed, China’s success brings the dilemma of the 21st century into focus: politics is compelled to push either equity without ecology, or ecology without equity. It is hard to see how this dilemma can be solved unless the belief in ‘development’ is dismantled.
