‘Politics of grandeur’: 2 Olympics and China’s love of big

By STEPHEN WADE
AP Sports Writer

BEIJING (AP) — Beijing’s Winter Olympics remind us of how everything in China is big, bigger — and even bigger. Think of famous landmarks like Tiananmen Square, the Forbidden City, the Great Wall, the Three Gorges Dam, and dozens of high-end malls in Beijing. China has thousands of years of doing things in a really big way, reinforcing its perceived place in the world and the political power of its leaders — from emperors to Mao Zedong to Xi Jinping. None of this bigness is new. It goes back to a dozen dynasties that ruled China for thousands of years, a tradition of projecting power that was adopted  by the Chinese Communist Party when it took over in 1949.