Decades-old snub is the real reason China is so furious about diplomatic boycott of the Winter Olympics

China threw another tantrum this week, displaying a level of anger that made no sense. It can be explained by a snub from decades ago.

Chinese President Xi Jinping (left) and US President Joe Biden. Picture: Nicholas Asfouri and Nicholas Kamm/AFP

OPINION

The Winter Olympics are the Sheffield Shield of international sport. Some people care about it a lot; most people don’t even know it’s on.

So how on earth did it suddenly become a geopolitical flashpoint that has resulted in the world’s largest superpower threatening Australia and her two strongest allies with all manner of sinister retribution?

Citizens across the globe woke up to headlines yesterday morning that sounded ominously like the “drums of war” Australian Defence Secretary Mike Pezzullo once infamously described hearing.

“Australia will ‘pay a price,” read the headline from the ABC, while on the other side of the world the BBC told its readers: “China warns nations will ‘pay price’”.

These are hardly sensationalist news outlets. China’s anger was visceral and real.

And so what prompted this extraordinary outburst? A missile strike? A downed aircraft? Freedom of navigation exercises in the South China Sea?

No, it was the fact that the US, UK, Australia and Canada would not be sending any diplomats to the Beijing Winter Olympics next year.

“The US, Australia, Britain and Canada’s use of the Olympic platform for political manipulation is unpopular and self-isolating, and they will inevitably pay the price for their wrongdoing,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin told reporters.

To be clear, the athletes will still go and compete — the luge and shuffleboard will, mercifully, be safe — but there won’t be any official government representatives to shake hands and eat canapes.

Frankly you’d think the Chinese officials would be relieved — just think of the savings to the catering bill, let alone all the excruciating small talk avoided — but instead they exploded.

Why?

Journalists in front of the Beijing 2022 logos at the Winter Olympic Main Distribution Center (MDC) in Beijing, China. Picture: Kevin Frayer/Getty Images

The last time there was a major Western Olympic boycott was of course at the Moscow summer games of 1980, in response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. And for most countries, including the US and Australia, it was the athletes themselves who were barred from going.

Tellingly, China was also one of the countries that boycotted the Moscow games. Not because they protested the USSR invading Afghanistan but because they thought the Soviet communists had gone soft and were opening up too much to the West. Not enough “self-isolating”, as Wang Wenbin might put it.

China’s response to the Winter Olympics snub was also far more aggressive than its reaction to US President Joe Biden warning its President, Xi Jinping, that America would not tolerate any invasion or annexation of Taiwan — the very apex goal of Chinese nationalism.

And of course China has been slapping trade embargoes on Australia like a drunken sailor in a knock shop, costing billions of dollars at the stroke of a pen, so the concept of boycotts isn’t exactly foreign to them.

In other words, the move by the four Western countries is negligible by diplomatic standards, tiny by boycott standards and even minor by Olympic boycott standards.

So again, why is China so furious?

US President Joe Biden meets with China's President Xi Jinping during a virtual summit on November 15. Picture: Mandel Ngan/AFP

The answer lies not in the prospect of a future war over Taiwan but in the ashes of World War II.

For amid all the militaristic and economic belligerence of China over the past few years, it has also been quietly trying to reconstruct itself as an Allied power.

Of course China did fight with the Allies in World War II, having been invaded by Japan and endured years of suffering and death before the Americans finally entered the war and the British turned their attention back east after the fall of Singapore.

But China always felt it was not given its due by the US and UK, and insult was added to injury when after the war the US forged incredibly close ties not with the country it fought alongside but with its hated enemy Japan.

China’s war story was further complicated by the fact that it was the Nationalists who were in government and did the bulk of the fighting, and when Mao’s Communists overthrew them four years after the end of the war it would have been bad propaganda to accord them too much credit.

And of course the Communists further isolated China from her former allies, not to mention from the USSR over fanatical ideological differences.

But recently, China has been rehabilitating its role in World War II, effectively remaking itself as a war hero and thus an upstanding and morally righteous global citizen.

Chinese President Xi Jinping. Picture: Noel Celis/AFP

Oxford University China specialist Rana Mitter explores this sense of itself expertly in his book China’s Good War: How World War II is Shaping a New Nationalism.

As it states: “China has recently constructed such a story of its own modern genealogy, which presents the country not only as powerful but as just and moral — with the Second World War as the point of origin … As a result, China, like the United States, should be able to draw on its record as one of the victorious Allied powers to define its own vision of the region. Like the other Allies, China also seeks to legitimise its own behaviour and give itself prestige by virtue of its contributions to the wartime victory.”

And who should morally shame and abandon China on the international stage today? The exact same two parties it believes abandoned it 75 years ago: The US and the British Empire.

And Hell hath no fury like a nation scorned.