Authoritarianism, Opacity & Proxies: The 2008 Olympic Torch Relay in Italian Media

The study explores the representations enacted by Italian media around the 2008 Beijing Olympics’ torch relay, based on a sample of newspaper articles, television news programs and online materials. While an explicit contrast between Olympic values and the concurrent violence due to the 2008 Tibetan crisis offered the main frame in Italian media, the study advances the hypothesis that these discourses simply gave new form to longer-standing representations about China, revolving around key notions of ‘opaqueness’ and ‘authoritarianism’. This ‘radically other’ China and the Olympics (embodied in the Torch) are continuously described as ‘incompatible’, while in the process offering a number of actors (public opinion, media, and industries) a rare chance for self-definition in opposition to the ‘other’. In this sense, the Tibetan issue appears to be used as a proxy to speak about broader issues, often related to the ongoing economic competition between Italy and China.