Word: pride
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...Pride is a difficult concept to quantify, but for China, the Olympics provide a simple calculation for its ascent. Two decades ago in Seoul, China won just five golds. By 2004 in Athens, the country's 32-medal gold rush was second only to that of the U.S. Now China is hoping its home-turf advantage in Beijing will vault it into first place. If the People's Republic succeeds, the controversies over protests in Tibet, arms for Darfur, Steven Spielberg's pulling out as adviser to the Games--all that loss of face to date will have been worth...
...markets and natural resources. Its trade with Africa and Latin America has increased sixfold since 2001. It is the world's top consumer of cement, grain, meat, coal, copper and steel. Back at home, China has transformed itself into a nation of superlatives, each record burnishing its reborn pride. The country boasts the world's biggest dam (the Three Gorges), the largest corps of engineers (350,000 new graduates every year) and the most urban areas with a population above 1 million (more than 100). The People's Republic is the most wired nation on earth (215 million--plus netizens...
Take sports. After Beijing won the right seven years ago to host the 2008 Olympics, the country's State General Administration of Sports unveiled a Cabinet-approved policy called "Winning pride at the Olympics." The program built on China's long-standing "Gold-medal strategy" of targeting sports that offer the most Olympic golds because of different weight classes or race lengths. (Fencing, for instance, holds 10 golds, while canoeing/kayaking has 16.) It didn't matter that most Chinese knew nothing of these sports. The point was to accumulate gold medals. Women's sports, which tend to receive less funding...
...impressive given that it isn't a very sporty nation. I remember jogging in Beijing several years ago only to have people look behind me to see whom I was running away from. But China's leaders have a long tradition of using sports as a spur to national pride. Consider the country's decades-long dominance of table tennis. This supremacy had little to do with a national passion for wooden paddles and plastic balls. China decided to develop star paddlers largely because the International Table Tennis Federation was, in 1953, one of the first sports organizations to drop...
...their drive to restore Russia's Soviet-era muscle, Vladimir Putin and his allies have plenty to build on: fabulous petroleum wealth, ironclad political stability and an increasingly confident foreign policy. Will national pride get an extra boost from the country's footballers? Can they join the phalanx of Russian hockey and tennis stars who are earning the nation some international respect...