It’s difficult to discuss China’s Olympic history without stumbling over politics and propaganda. The swimmer Fu Yuanhui may help change that. PHOTOGRAPH BY SHI YALEI / IMAGINECHINA VIA AP

By official count, there are twenty-eight sports, three hundred and six events, and twenty-four hundred and eighty-eight available medals at this year’s Rio Olympics. The more than eleven thousand participating athletes represent two hundred and six countries, which duke it out over sixteen days in a ritualized display of prowess that is as pricey as it is purposeless. There’s pro-forma talk of sportsmanship and international coöperation, but even the opening ceremony’s Parade of Nations lays bare the tribalism in us all: what counts here is the flag and the flash of gold. For the Chinese government, which in recent years has made no secret of its desire to promote China’s supremacy on the world’s most conspicuous athletic stage, the Olympics are closer to a gladiatorial contest than a sporting event. The task is to bring the motherland glory, and glory comes exclusively in one color.

It’s difficult to discuss China’s Olympic tradition without stumbling over politics and propaganda. When the first modern Games were launched, in Athens, a hundred and twenty years ago, the Chinese—enfeebled on the inside by an impotent government and threatened at their borders by Western powers—feared for the extinction of their millennia-old empire. They didn’t begin participating in the Olympics until 1932, under the flag of the Republic of China, and they won not a single gold. Shortly after the Communist revolution, they went on a twenty-four-year hiatus. In the meantime, in 1959, a table-tennis player named Rong Guotuan became the country’s first world champion in any sport. Mao Zedong praised the victory as a “spiritual nuclear weapon,” perhaps signalling the privileged position that sports would come to occupy. Zhang Boling, an early advocate of the Olympics, proclaimed as early as 1909 that “a great nation must first strengthen the race; a great race must first strengthen the body.” When China reëntered the Games, in 1984, its athletes won fifteen gold medals. According to Zheng Wang, who authored the book “Never Forget National Humiliation,” which devotes a chapter to the politics of the Olympics, gold medals have since become the “currency of the Communist Party’s legitimacy” and a concrete marker of China’s position in the global hierarchy.

China’s sudden gold-medal success was due in large part to the establishment, in the nineteen-eighties, of state-run sports schools. Scouts began plucking promising young athletes from their homes and immersing them in intensive, isolationist training. Eight- and nine-year-olds sacrificed a traditional education for incubation in a system in which the odds of being chosen to participate in something as high-stakes as the Olympics were—and remain—woefully slim. In 2008, three thousand professional athletes trained full-time for the Beijing Olympics; a fifth actually made it to the Games. And even reaching the lower tiers of the podium is hardly cause for celebration. The motto might as well be “Go gold or go home.” First-place winners—like Liu Xiang, who became the country’s first gold medallist in men's track and field, at the 2004 Athens Games—are anointed as national heroes overnight, and can expect to bask in fame and fortune for the foreseeable future. Those who do not win gold are regarded as disappointments. To make matters worse, most lack the skills or resources to begin life as non-athletes.

With such pressure to succeed, it is not surprising that some Chinese competitors take grave risks to win. Earlier this year, Wang Junxia, who won gold and silver in distance running at the 1996 Atlanta Games, admitted to having been part of a Chinese state-sponsored doping regime. (The International Association of Athletics Federations is currently investigating the claim.) Between 1990 and 1998, twenty-eight Chinese swimmers tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs, causing the kind of public scandal that has cast a dark and enduring shadow on the team. Indeed, the ongoing feud this year between the twenty-four-year-old Chinese swimmer Sun Yang and his Australian rival, Mack Horton—in which Horton accused Sun of being a “drug cheat” after Sun suffered a three-month ban, in 2014—plays on these persistent feelings of Chinese humiliation and indignation, the sense that China is being mocked as a nation for decades of deficiency.

But at the Rio Games a different narrative has also emerged. Although the spotlight on Chinese athletes began with doping, it eventually landed on Fu Yuanhui, a twenty-year-old swimmer with the facial expressiveness and vibrant personality of a Pokémon. (The word “adorkable” comes to mind.) On August 7th, Fu finished third in the semifinal of the women’s hundred-metre backstroke, finding out her time from a reporter after the race. She doubled over in joy. “Whoa, I was so fast!” she said. “I’m very, very satisfied with my result!” Fu proceeded to tell the reporter that she’d used up all her “mystical powers” to achieve the result. When asked whether she had high hopes for the final the following day, Fu blithely assured the reporter that she had “absolutely no expectations.”* Now, contrast this reaction with Sun’s tearful breakdown, two days earlier, upon learning that he had placed second in the men’s four-hundred-metre freestyle, after losing to Horton by thirteen hundredths of a second. Some of Sun’s anguish must have been personal, since he had been defending his gold-medal title from the 2012 Olympics, but some was on behalf of his compatriots. That 2012 gold was China’s first in men’s swimming, and Sun lost it.

Fu was born in 1996 and grew up in the early aughts, when China had already made great strides in economic reform and swung its doors open to the outside world. The same year that Fu swam in her first Olympics, in London, Hu Jintao, who was then the general secretary of the Communist Party, delivered a speech exhorting his fellow-citizens to promote China’s “soft power”—power that would presumably include impressive medal hauls. But Fu’s generation, bred on the same social-media outlets that now unreservedly embrace her idiosyncrasies, has awarded the young star something better than a gold medal. “She looks like she’s having so much fun!” a commentator from Beijing wrote, having watched Fu on the state television broadcast. “When’s the last time we saw that on CCTV from a Chinese athlete?” In the past, fun had seemed like a selfish pursuit, the unpatriotic trivialization of a nation’s striving. But Fu’s unexpected fame introduced new vocabulary into the conversation and changed its tenor: her mystical power overrode Hu’s banal soft power. Last Sunday, after China placed fourth in the team relay, Fu made headlines again. Grimacing on the pool deck, she attributed her personal performance to menstrual cramps. She was immediately hailed as a taboo-breaking pioneer. As a Chinese blogger remarked, “The West has made a big fuss about this feminist athlete’s stance. But what if she wasn’t trying to make a statement and was just saying what she was feeling?”

Had Fu hailed from another country, her emotional transparency might not have received quite as much notice. But her capacity to speak extemporaneously, rather than recite the agenda of the motherland, is something new. Few Chinese citizens today remember a China without an authoritarian, top-down leadership, just as few Chinese athletes have ever experienced sport without entering its politically pressurized industrial complex. In this sense, Fu is no exception. “I started swimming to get healthier, because I was quite weak as a girl,” she said during a live social-media broadcast at the Games. “I used to quite like it, but now that it has become my career I can’t say if I like it or not. It’s become part of my life.” Still, Fu’s demeanor suggests that swimming, for her, is not all about strengthening the race or the nation. Before the Western media caught onto her idiosyncratic charm, a Chinese friend messaged me to talk about the Fu phenomenon. “Her words and attitude!” my friend wrote. “She is probably one of the first Chinese athletes to take the Olympics Games as lightly as games!”

*This post has been updated to clarify when Fu spoke to the reporter, and the context for her comments.