My nine day trip to China to attend the Beijing Olympic Forum organized by the Chinese sports ministry was a prelude to the forthcoming Beijing Olympics in August 2008. The organisers had arranged for an initial two days in Beijing, followed by four days at a small town, Ku Fu, in the Shandong province, and a last day at Beijing before I left for India. Visiting a country that has remained closed to the world up until the middle of the 1990s, it was greatly exciting.

Our stay at the quaint little town of Ku Fu, the birthplace of the great Chinese philosopher Confucious, the visit to the Great Wall and the Forbidden City in Beijing, the 30-course banquets that were served, the musical sounds of the Chinese language (very few people speak English, and we were always accompanied by translators), all added up to a totally exotic experience. Yet for all the touristy quaintness, it is also a society that is intensely competitive, fast-changing and rapidly becoming more global, a society where women are increasingly more confident.

Speaking to students at Peking University and Beijing Sports University, it was clear how intensely young women in China identify with the upcoming Beijing Olympics. Every female student I spoke to indicated she had enrolled in the Olympics volunteer programme. For these young people, the Beijing Olympics is much more than a major sports event to be organised by their country — it is also being seen as the occasion to showcase a new China to the world; a China that some of them believe can outstage even the United States for the position of the world’s leading sports power. A China that is more global, more international, one that has emerged in the last 10 years, and the current generation of Chinese women especially consider their lives to have been transformed as a result of the opening up of a closed society. It was a common note among my interviewees, “We are different from our mothers.”

While women’s lives were transformed as a result of the Chinese cultural revolution in 1949, when women emerged from the traditional mould, China has been a remarkably patriarchal society, which is perhaps beginning to change somewhat after its opening up to the world in the last decade or so.

For the students I spoke to in Beijing, drinking Coke and buying international consumer items was symbolic of a changed society, and women’s changing position in that society. Chinese women of the Coke and Pepsi generation are very much like their Indian counterparts — with the opening up of a patriarchal society to global consumer culture, they have a newfound liberation that they cherish.

It is now well documented that China’s rise to sporting preeminence in the 1990s has largely been a handiwork of Chinese women athletes. Ma’s generation, as they are still fondly called, rose from nowhere in the early 1990s to shatter American supremacy over field sports. Gone were the days when Americans and Africans dominated field sports and the Chinese were restricted to winning in Gymnastics or Diving. In fact, while men’s athletics continues to be dominated by the Americans and Africans, middle and long distance running in women’s athletics is now largely a Chinese monopoly.

In every Olympics since 1988, Chinese women have increased their representation over men. Their extraordinary performances have thrust Chinese women into global limelight and sparked considerable interest, not to mention controversy, with accusations of drug violations and illegal recourse to performance enhancement. Facilities at Beijing’s leading sports university, the Peking University of physical education, demonstrate why. At five in the afternoon, the synthetic track is full of women of various ages practicing intently under the supervision of their coaches, mostly women. For them athletics is a means to emancipation.

Sporting success brings in its wake liberation from the strains of patriarchy, a passport to a life of their own. Says Professor Dong Jinxia, a professor of women’s sport at Peking University and author of the celebrated Women and Sport in modern China: Holding up more than half the sky, “For us in China the Beijing Games are much more than a sporting event. The battle is being fought at two levels. First, we want to make a mark as the world’s leading sporting nation. Second, in doing so, we want Chinese women to lead the change thus carving out for themselves a position of equality in Chinese society.”

Similar sentiments were echoed by Prof. Fan Hong, Director of the Chinese studies centre at Cork University in Ireland. Hong, a former athlete herself, remembers how punishing her schedule was when she was forced to train in the wee hours of a bitterly cold Beijing winter. “There was no compromise. We were told we were fighting not just against athletes from the west but also against our own men compatriots who were born into privilege.”

For me, it was greatly interesting to compare the transformation of Chinese women in the last decade to a similar transformation in Indian society. While in both nations women have been at the forefront of sporting glory, the transformation in China seems more enduring and deep rooted. For India, P T Usha, Shiny Wilson, K M Beenamol and more recently Anju George have won multiple medals over the last two decades. In fact, having won her semi-final at Los Angeles in 1984 and becoming the first Indian woman to compete in an Olympic final, Usha, someone we had never seen or heard off before, was truly at the centre of our nationalist imagination in 1984. When the serious looking DD news reader on the black and white television set announced her loss in the final, the sense of loss and sympathy extended far beyond the sporting realm—everyone, including our grandmothers, could empathise with the poor Indian girl who was believed to have been let down by a lack of modern training.

In a country where sporting achieve–ments had been few and far between, and where pathos is an enduring theme in popular culture, the misfortune of PT Usha struck a chord with many registers and turned into a legend. Despite having failed to win a medal, Usha had become a national icon and a symbol of women’s empowerment at the same time. In China, on the other hand, this transformation is much more actualised. So much so that ‘Women hold up half the sky’ and ‘Women can do what men can do’ are no longer just popular slogans peddled by Chairman Mao, but recent actualities of Chinese sport on the eve of the Beijing Games.