This article examines the Olympic narratives of young, educated urbanites in China to consider the 2008 Beijing Olympics’ role as a “diagnostic event” through which global conflicts and controversies coalesce and national identities are constructed. It illustrates how students and young professionals analyzed the Beijing Olympics to invoke discourses of similarity in the form of Western economic development models and difference in the form of essentialized tropes of Chinese culture to counter global images of China as a threat to international well-being. Exploring theories of mimicry to understand these appeals to similarity as a form of national value, this article also reveals how students and young professionals in China recommended the forms of culture manifest in the Olympics as an expression of difference to question and reformulate hierarchies of global power.
