Just ran across this new post by TIME’s Austin Ramzy about a recent government-sponsored Olympics survey in which Chinese people selected “another gold for Liu Xiang” over “a successful Olympics” as their greatest hope for Beijing 2008. The reigning world record holder in the 110m hurdles, Liu is arguably China’s most beloved athlete and has been subject to unbelievable 2008-related pressure ever since he took gold in Sydney in 2004. Now Chinese people appear to being saying they would rather see the Beijing Games end up in failure than see him lose. Or, to put it another way, if he loses, the Games may be considered a failure.
Reading Austin’s post puts me in mind of a topic I meant to mention here before I got sucked into my thesis vortex: the new “Impossible is Nothing” advertising campaign Adidas just launched in China and its excruciatingly vivid illustration of the kind of heat Chinese athletes face as the big dance approaches.
I wouldn’t ordinarily devote space on this blog to advertising, particularly when it comes from a company that gets plenty of exposure on its own. Every so often, however, one has to suck it up and recognize that a marketing firm (in this case, TWBA) has done something truly noteworthy.
What’s noteworthy about the Adidas campaign, which launched late last year, is its imagery: Color shots of various Chinese athletes doing their thing with the help of–sometimes on top of–millions of their compatriots, the latter strikingly sketched in black-and-white. According to the Shanghaiist, the campaign took six months to put together. In an earlier post on the TIME China Blog, Austin mentioned seeing immense crowds on Wangfujing, Beijing’s tawdry shopping street equivalent of Chicago’s Magnificent Mile, queuing up in icy weather last month for a chance to have their photos inserted into post-card versions of the ad. The campaign has attracted massive, largely adoring, attention in the PR world. The Shanghaiist and Austin also both appear to have been inspired by it.
I’ll admit, the ads are breathtaking. Transcendent even. Like Apple’s legendary ad for the Macintosh during the 1984 Super Bowl. But there is also something undeniably disturbing about them, particularly in the spot (see above) featuring Olympic champion diver Hu Jia, in which people have replaced both the diving platform and the water. [Click here to see it full-size. I mean it. Click.]
The image reminds me of a painting I once saw in a Confucian temple in Jilin that depicted a precarious human pyramid composed of thousands of Imperial exam candidates climbing on top of each other in a bid to reach the highest official position. The Adidas ad’s message for Chinese people may be unity rather than competition, but it’s no less frightening for that reason.
The socio-political and nationalist implications of the campaign are deep and textured, and I’m sure someone with better deconstructionist chops than myself will eventually have a go at those. In the meantime, I worry what the ads mean for the poor individuals at the center of them. I’m sure there isn’t a Chinese Olympic athlete alive who hasn’t spent hours alone in the dark worrying about how the country’s billion-plus will react if they fail to meet expectations. But now the nightmare is rendered for them in vivid detail and broadcast everywhere–on billboards, on their friends’ TV sets, in the subways. Sure, the people in the ads are all hopping around in exuberant anticipation of victory, but how difficult it is to imagine that same writing mass shouting in the rage of defeat?
Athletes of that caliber probably thrive on pressure in ways mortal people don’t. Liu Xiang, at least, claims to revel in it. But certainly there must be a limit beyond which that pressure becomes counter-productive, when athletes get overloaded with it, like car engines flooded with too much gas.
Of course, in a sense, that’s precisely what makes the ads so brilliant. Whether Hu Jia wins and sends the crowd into mass hysteria or loses and gets torn apart, the message is the same: There’s no way you can miss this.
For my money, the still images have the greatest impact, but here’s the video version for those of you who want to see it:
Tags: adidas, advertising, Beijing2008, China, hysteria, Media
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About the Author
Josh Chin is a freelance journalist based in Beijing. He also once worked as a sous chef in a French restaurant in San Francisco. Neither job has been good for his health.Photos
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看了你的文章觉得不错，随便翻译了一下，介绍给大家。估计有很多译得不对的地方，请多指教。
http://www.yeeyan.com/articles/view/19309/4867
meta:
其实我前天看到你的翻译，觉得挺好，好像没那么随便。非常感谢你替我给中国读者介绍此。我很好奇：你怎么找到我的博客？
[...] the statistics for this blog earlier today, I noticed a strange surge of visits to a post I’d done way back in January, on Adidas’ 2008 Games “Impossible is Nothing” [...]
[...] 这组广告有很深很明显的社会政治和国家主义的意味，我确定那些有更丰富的解构主义思维的人更有志于此，我同时还在为广告上正中央的可怜的人们担心。我确定在中国，没有一个活着的奥林匹克运动员没有在暗处独自长时间地担忧过如果他们没有达到大众的期望，这个国家超过十亿的人会有什么反应。但是现在，他们的恶梦被生动地细致地描述出来，并且张贴得到处都是——在广告牌上，在朋友的电视上，在地铁里，等等。当然，广告里的人们都兴高采烈地期待着他们的胜利，可是，难道我们不能很容易的联想到同样的人群因为失败而怒吼？ 原文： http://chinfamous.com/blog/2008/01/05/2008-impossible-expectations/#more-77 [...]