With the Olympics just around the corner, what do foreigners think of the event?

American anthropologist, Susan Brownell, is a US Fulbright Research Scholar for 2007-2008 who specializes in Chinese sports. A former nationally ranked track and field athlete, Brownell is doing research on the Chinese Olympics Games at Beijing Sports University.

Below is a truncated version of the interview with her.

Chinadaily.com.cn: When did you first know about China's sports? How's your interest in them it developed?

Susan Brownell: Actually my interest in Chinese sports came rather late. My earliest interest was in Chinese culture and history as I grew up in the United States. I always thought traditional Chinese art like brush painting and architecture was beautiful.

Also, my family has a connection with Chinese people in America. My grandmother had grown up in the southern states of Mississippi, where there were many Chinese immigrants to the United States who built the railroads. And they settled there and opened small shops.

It was in the early 20th century when racism was really strong in the south. So they got together and formed a Chinese association to protect themselves. They were looking for a lawyer to represent them at court, someone to defend their interest and not cheat them. And my great grandfather was a prominent lawyer known as a defender of civil rights. So they selected him.

 

Susan Brownell

So first I was interested in China and then I became interested in sport in the socialist countries in the 1980s. I competed in the US Olympic trials in 1980. But that was the year of the US boycott against the Moscow Olympic Games as it was the time of the Cold War.

In those days in the West, Olympic athletes were required to be amateurs and most of us were not making any money from sports. We didn't think it fair that our government never gave us any support and then told us that we could not attend the Olympic Games, which was our dream.

So there was a lot of discussion about government-supported sports. Maybe that's a better system in the Soviet Union and the eastern bloc countries. At that time we really didn't think about Chinese sports at all because China was not participating in the Olympic Games yet. But then later in 1982 when I entered graduate school I decided to combine my interests of China and socialist sports.

What do you think is the biggest change in Beijing from your experience?

Well, in general, one of the biggest changes in Beijing is that foreigners and Chinese can mix freely because we couldn't in the 1980s. There were policies keeping Chinese and foreigners apart.

There were two different types of money: renminbi and the Foreign exchange certificate. Actually those policies were favorable towards us, not towards Chinese people. There were many nice hotels and some stores like Friendship Store that we could go into but our Chinese friends could not go without us.

Sometimes I would spend the night with my Chinese friends but I had to register with the Paichusuo (police station). If Chinese students want to enter a foreign student's dorm they had to register at the gate and leave their identity card number.

Even though the opening up policy started on 1978, in the 1980s, China was still not really open to the outside world.