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Saturday 22 November 2008

Big Brother versus YouTube: let the Beijing Games commence

Mark Leonard, Britain’s pre-eminent analyst of modern China, says the Olympic genie is out of the bottle. The prospect of global scrutiny has actually increased repression as the authorities try to stamp out dissent. But digital technology is impossible to police

The most fashionable theory in Chinese think-tanks is the American academic Joseph Nye’s theory of ‘soft power’ — the idea that a country can assert itself not only through the ‘hard power’ of military and economic coercion, but the attractiveness of its ideas, its culture and the political institutions it builds. Beijing has tried to build up its own soft power by sharing its development expertise while stressing its commitment to multilateralism and peaceful integration (in contrast to Washington’s neo-liberalism, unilateralism and imperial urge). And it has used a battery of public diplomacy techniques — from international TV stations to cultural institutes — to promote a ‘Chinese Dream’ as an alternative to the American Dream. The Olympics is the most dramatic ad for this new China.

When its charm offensive fails, Beijing has been adept at bullying foreign governments to temper their criticism. When I was in Beijing in May, French diplomats were reeling from a ‘Skip France’ campaign organised by the Beijing municipal authorities. According to their account, Chinese tourists who wished to travel to France were told that tickets were not available and visa applications dropped from 300 a day to just ten. Chinese foreign policy experts explained to me that the goal was to punish Nicolas Sarkozy for saying that his attendance at the Olympics would depend on the human rights situation in Tibet. It worked. Last week, Sarkozy announced he would attend the opening ceremony to ‘deepen [France’s] strategic partnership with China’.

China has found Western NGOs (non-governmental agencies) less compliant than their national governments. When, on 8 August 2007, the Beijing Olympic Committee started the official countdown to the Games with a giant clock in Tiananmen Square, the limelight was stolen by an unofficial event launched by a group of Canadian activists. These protesters had climbed on to the Great Wall of China and unfurled a banner saying ‘One World, One Dream, Free Tibet’. In the last few months there have been campaigns by activists for human rights, supporters of the banned Falun Gong spiritual movement, persecuted peasants and environmentalists. Of all the campaigns, the most visible one was the ‘genocide Olympics’ campaign over China’s role in Sudan which attracted support from Mia Farrow and Steven Spielberg.

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