Guilty without trial: state-sponsored cheating and the 2008 Beijing Olympic women's gymnastics competition

Abstract

One of the most widely covered news stories during the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics involved several Chinese female gymnasts who had allegedly falsified their ages and were in fact ineligible for competition because they were underage. Using a news-framing analysis, this study examines how New York Times and Washington Post reporters framed the scandal. I argue that by employing the frames of state-sponsored cheating, assumed guilt, Western fair play and kowtowing, US journalists positioned the controversy as part of a larger ideological metaphor to represent China's refusal to adhere to Western standards, and to explain how this enables the nation to unfairly bypass the United States in the Olympics and in general as a world power. To rectify what they perceive to be a power imbalance, reporters craft a new narrative in which the Chinese gymnasts and, by extension, China itself, are not the victors in the contest for supremacy between East and West. In so doing, journalists evoke, support, and perpetuate the US' historical racialization of the Chinese as a slight, effeminate, deceitful people, thereby assigning these qualities to China as a nation and as a people. While journalists assuage US readers' fears of a future dominated by China, they close off avenues of understanding by positioning the US and China as enemies.