Games bring China's rulers political gold

By Chris Buckley

BEIJING (Reuters) - The successes China can claim from holding the world's biggest sports event are likely to entrench the patriotic zeal and political muscle that pulled the country through a tumultuous build-up to medals triumph.

The Beijing Olympics came laden with critics' hopes that the intense international gaze on China would help relax the Communist Party's stranglehold on power.

But the Party ran the Olympics according to its own formula, to impress citizens with the winning ways of one-party rule while smothering domestic dissent and garnering international stature.

"Demonstrate the superiority of the socialist system in concentrating energies to accomplish grand feats," President Hu Jintao told Beijing Games organizers days before the opening.

As China ends the Olympics proudly on top of the gold medal table, the Party emerges surer that its hold on patriotism and top-down political power can stay unthreatened, said Shi Yinhong of Renmin University in Beijing.

"The government has used the Olympics to display its organizing strength and win over the public with a new kind of self-confident nationalism," said Shi. "Perhaps Western powers should expect fewer, rather than more, concessions from China."

The Beijing Olympics were never certain to turn out this way.

Before the Games, China was buffeted by international turbulence over restive Tibet, ties with Sudan, censorship and shackles on dissent, and fears about food safety and pollution.

But in the months before the Games, the Chinese government also used two crises at home to hone the message that it, not its critics, knew best how to handle the nation's problems.

Protests against Chinese rule in Tibet that disrupted the international leg of the Olympic torch relay sparked a fierce nationalist response from Chinese people. The government drummed home the theme that any criticism of the Olympics was an affront to the country's unity.

Then the May 12 earthquake in the country's southwest that killed upwards of 70,000 people became an opportunity to mobilize shaken citizens around a vast relief effort. "I love China" t-shirts and red national flags flowered on the streets.

The Olympics then came as a crowning patriotic ritual.

"The Chinese nation's Olympic dream has always been bound to its course of national revival," the official Xinhua news agency commented on Sunday. "The Beijing Olympic Games have added impetus for national self-confidence."

The Games did not passed untroubled.

Authorities went to extraordinary lengths to present an ordinary facade. Thousands of police kept dissidents under house arrest and shut protesters out of the capital. Promised "protest parks" became empty tokens of the political control.