The purpose of this study is to examine China’s discourse on uniting all ethnic groups internally and conveying the human community to the world in the opening ceremony of the 2022 Beijing Winter ...Olympics (BWO), reflecting the different Olympism of the East and the West and the intersection of Chinese humanism discourse to form the core concept of this study. In terms of research methods, this study took the opening ceremony of the BWO as the research object, collected the content of the opening ceremony of the 2022 BWO, media reports, and related academic research, and analyzed the discussion of the 2022 BWO at the opening ceremony. The results have shown that the BWO opening ceremony continues the Chinese humanism concept of the 2008 Beijing Olympics, showing the connotation of people-oriented patriotism and emphasizing the ideal of a community with a shared future for humanity in the world. This study concludes that the BWO opening ceremony emphasizes Chinese tradition, culture, and patriotism. At the same time, the opening ceremony’s theme is set as the concept of “One World, One Family.” This discourse has formed a contrast between cosmopolitanism and patriotism, which not only shows the contradiction in the internal discourse of Chinese humanism but also shows the dialogue’s dilemma between the Asian value thinking advocated by Chinese humanism and the universal values of individualism and human rights emphasized by Western concepts.
Toward the mid-1980s, humanism gained political momentum among reform-minded intellectuals within the Chinese Communist Party. These interested individuals attempted to incorporate the discourse into ...intellectual and political projects they envisioned for the Party, which was then operating under a reformist agenda. This project has been largely forgotten today, because it failed politically. But as a cultural project, it changed the Chinese culture of the self-redefining the relationship between the self and others, the self and its duties to the state, and the self and its duties to truth.Why did Chinese humanism take off in the early 1980s? In this essay, I hope to revise the common notion that the 1980s began with a cultural "enlightenment" that later exploded politically. In contrast, the 1980s is a counter-revolution to Mao's Cultural Revolution: the goal, again, was to rethink the traditional relations between the self and the other, the self and its obligations to law and to party discipline, and Marxism.1 Whereas the Cultural Revolution renounced the self, this counterrevolution asserted the self. I would like to suggest that these humanist currents produced not only an enlightenment of the self, but also a redemption of the self. While most of my evidence is literary, I do not intend to provide the history of an idea but rather offer a hermeneutics of the Chinese subject in the 1980s, during which the Cultural Revolution subject was questioned, redefined, and became what it is today.The idea of humanism lies at the heart of these developments. Originating as a marginalized idea within the Marxist repertoire, this discourse was picked up by Chinese intellectuals as a salve for class struggles and atrocities during the Cultural Revolution. As shown in the figures, a group of concepts surrounding the subject of man, such as humanism and human rights, took a quantum leap in the early 1980s and their popularity skyrocketed toward the end of 1980s.2 Indeed, their popularity did not falter after 1989, and they successfully maintained a linguistic stasis that lasts to this day. Indeed, those utterances have become common parlance in today's China: they were written into the Chinese Constitution; they have become part of the contemporary Chinese culture.
