China in our hands

Wednesday, 6th August 2008

The Spectator on the Chinese regime

We see little reason, then, not to celebrate these Olympics just as we did those in Athens in 2004 or Sydney in 2000. The Olympics is bigger than any of its host cities, impressive though Beijing’s spanking new sports facilities are. It is, quite simply, the most powerful sporting event on earth: the only one, in fact, in which virtually the whole world is represented. Such an event simply could not exist if we took to boycotting every nation with a poor human rights record, for that, sadly, encompasses a vast tract of the world. Moreover, the Chinese have proved in one sense that they are worthy Olympic hosts: they have gone out and bought all the tickets, which will mean no embarrassingly empty venues as in Athens. For Western nations to boycott the Olympics would, arguably, be a better propaganda victory for the Chinese than the Games themselves: how easy it would be for the Chinese to portray the boycotting nations as party-poopers who fear China’s fabulous economic growth more than they worry over China’s oppressed.

All that said, we will be watching more than the sport in Beijing. By staging the Games, China has invited the world to inspect its confidence, its vision and, not least, its behaviour. And however hard it tries to gag journalists and threaten athletes with expulsion should they don a Free Tibet badge, China cannot ultimately determine the global press coverage of these Olympics. Even the pro-boycott lobby must acknowledge that more people around the world now know more about China than would have been the case were the Olympics not being held in Beijing. Without the Olympics, the suppression of riots in Tibet this spring would hardly have registered. We would know little about religious persecution in this aggressively atheist country: how Muslims under 18, for example, are forbidden from entering mosques. Neither would many people know where Xinjiang province was, let alone know that China has its own Islamic terrorist problem, which exploded in Monday’s violent attack on a party of jogging policemen there.

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Vespasian

August 9th, 2008 11:41am Report this comment

The Chinese will not necessarily become more liberal with more money inserted into their country. The reason that there is a combination of riches and rigid authoritarianism is simply because of the west's greed. If we had the pricipals and guts to refuse to trade with China until they sorted out their regime then freedom might come to this country. But by simply trading with them and naivly hoping that this will bring freedom to the Chinese people is ridiculous. In this case, why not just admit that we dont care about how the people are treated: what interests our gouvernements is the short/medium term gain.
To use the Olympics as a bargaining tool would have worked if we really had done that. But to give the olympics to China and then weakly demand that they sort out their human rights does not work.
The fact that the Chinese gouvernement convientently destroyed an entire quater 'the quater of complainers' (that housed peolpe complaining against the gouvernement) to build the olympic village shows just how much the people of China will profit from these games. The meancing tone and threats of certain Chinese foreign office officials towards the west should give us a warning too: China is far, far out of our hands.

Riaz Ahmad

August 12th, 2008 7:11pm Report this comment

The oppression of Tibet is no different to the oppression of the Palistinian and the oppression of Kashmir. Rather hypocritically, the west is blind to its own sins, but too keen to talk about the sins of others, expecially China.

What took the west 200 years to achieve, China has done it in mere 20 years. West is much too uncomfortable with the inevitable reality that the days of westren supremacy are over, the sun is beginning to set. Now it is the dawn of the Asian supermacy with China as the future super power. The west robbed, plundered and brutalised the weak of the world to make itself great; China on the other hand has no such history; It has emerged out of pain and poverty purely by its own toil and efforts.

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