"If our bodies are not strong, how can we attain our goals and make ourselves respected?" – Mao Zedong, founding father of the People's Republic in an article published in 1917.
WAY BACK in the day, the Olympic ideals were what it was all about. Not necessarily the winning, but the taking part. Not now. Not China. Like a peacock unfurling its tail to the watching world, the 2008 Olympic Games will be the most costly to date.
The stadiums represent award-winning feats of architecture and innovation, a symbolic and tangible illustration of the nation's regeneration, while its athletes will serve the same purpose across all 28 sports.
A host country hellbent on topping the medal table, its desire to prove itself the best is naked.
If the amount spent on the infrastructure is in excess of £40bn, the authorities are far more reticent when it comes to revealing how much is lavished on its sports programmes but it is thought to be in excess of £100m annually. A serious business, athletes are identified at a young age, wooed by the lucre and by the time they want to leave many find they are trapped by circumstance.
Yang Wenjun won gold for China in flatwater canoeing four years ago and as a reward was given a new house. It was his parents who moved into it. Formerly rice farmers, his father cashed in on his son's newfound fame and was given a white-collar job, his mother was able to quit work completely. The medallist is still ensconced in one of the country's myriad sports centres, unable to escape a life he claims he has long-since grown to hate.
He would have left the sporting world behind and attended college if he could but like most of the 250,000 children enrolled in sports schools from an early age he has no real education. At 24 he is equipped for nothing other than canoeing. Even then he tried to leave but with the Beijing Games on the horizon, officials threatened to withhold his retirement payment if he did not compete.
"It is not possible to survive without those benefits," Yang has said publicly. While part of the sports programme he receives $230 (£116) monthly, as well as performance-related bonuses, although his team, province and local government officials all receive a percentage of his winnings and any sponsorship deals. However, outwith the programme, as an unskilled worker, he would be lucky to earn a third of that.
The investment may be huge, the personal cost high but it is reaping rewards as far as medal tallies go. The People's Republic of China first competed in an Olympics in Los Angeles in 1984. Straight away they finished fourth in the medals table, with 15 golds, eight silver sand nine bronzes. Four years later, in Seoul, they stuttered and managed only five golds, 11 silvers and 12 bronzes. For a country where honour matters, such a backward step was not acceptable. The sports centres and the investment in place, by 1992 they were back to fourth in the table, in Atlanta in 1996 they consolidated that position but by 2000 their bid was being put together to stage the XXIX Olympiad and they moved things on by leaps and bounds. Almost doubling their gold medal tally, they ascended to third place and by Athens, they were just three gold medals shy of the USA total of 35.
So much for the perception of China as the 'sick man of Asia'. Four year ago India, the only other country with a comparable population, finished with just a single silver medal, proving that the Olympic isn't purely a numbers game. The US has already stated that China could do better than them in Beijing. It seems a logical assumption, given the staging of these Games, with a spotlight positioned to allow the host nation to shine.
Since the end of the Second World War, only one nation has successfully usurped USA at the top of the medals table – USSR – and it is their sporting model the Chinese have adopted. A vast network of scouts go out to primary schools where the children are put through stringent physical exams to test whether their bone structure and bodies are likely to develop in a way appropriate for a certain sport, considering height, strength for weightlifting and agility. Those deemed to have the greatest potential are then enrolled in the sports structure, which dedicates itself to the honing of Olympic champions, with even the youngest athletes – some as young as five – training for hours every day.
At the top of the pyramid are more than 300 elite sports training schools nationwide where 46,000 youngsters aged six to 18 undergo intensive daily training. Below that, there's another 3,000-plus second tier specialist sports schools with in excess of 400,000 children in training. At the lowest level six million kids hone their skills at 11,400 regular schools which specialise in a designated sporting category.
A conveyor belt of talent, or sports version of lab rats? And with the eyes of the world on Beijing, there has been sporting diversification, as they add the glamour disciplines of athletics to a portfolio which once featured mainly table tennis, badminton, gymnastics. China recognised the need to compete across the board and in Athens, and Liu Xiang became a national hero, winning China's first men's track and field gold in the 110m hurdles. Four years ago they competed in every sport except for baseball and equestrian events, this month they will contest all 28 Olympic sports and are targeting medals in most.
But, for all that the Games have been meticulously planned for success, there is still the problem of pollution. All kinds of it. The smog which hangs over the host city is one thing, the fear of huge numbers of positive drugs tests is another. Not to mention the human rights issues which China would love the world to turn a blind eye to. But while they continue to act like a nation with something to hide, censoring websites and punishing careless talk or unwanted protests, that remains less than likely.
The slogan of the Games is 'One World, One Dream', while the Beijing Organising Committee for the Olympic Games have talked about the Games as the People's Olympics, there is the impression that some dreams and some people matter less than others. In a harsh sporting regime where the end is believed to justify the means, not even personal hardship or health issues are allowed to derail the ambition.
In the new state of the art National Aquatics Centre, also known as the 'Water Cube' due to its groundbreaking design, diver Hu Jia will represent his country despite damage to both retinas of his eyes.
Reaching the highest echelons in sport has always required sacrifice but in China, as a nation attempts to prove itself one of the big boys, some of those sacrifices could be considered greater than most.
