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China in our hands

Wednesday, 6th August 2008

The Spectator on the Chinese regime

For many people, watching the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics will be like trying to enjoy a party above the din of police cars taking away uninvited guests. However much you turn up the music, you can still hear the sirens: the oppressed of Tibet and other rebellious provinces, the silenced dissidents, the Western protesters, like the four ‘Free Tibet’ activists detained this week, the families of those executed under one of the most severe penal codes in the world. And the party will be a little short on celebrity guests too. Steven Spielberg won’t be there: he resigned as artistic adviser for the opening ceremony in February, in protest at China’s support for the murderous regime in Sudan. Last week, Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg appealed to Gordon Brown to snub the closing ceremony in protest at China’s failure to fulfil the promises on human rights it made when awarded the Olympics back in 2001; Mr Brown is unlikely to take Mr Clegg’s advice, though it is hard to imagine our glum Prime Minister adding any inappropriate levity to the occasion. Some famous names have even likened these Games to the Berlin Olympics of 1936: a great propaganda coup for Hitler in spite of the embarrassment caused by Jesse Owens’s challenge to his racial theories.

We respect, though do not share, the views of those who decline to have anything to do with the Beijing Olympics. Although he runs an oppressive regime, Hu Jintao is not Adolf Hitler. He is not massing its troops on foreign borders and, great though its shortcomings remain, China’s human rights record is at least improving. A boycott would have achieved nothing. Those who argue that the apartheid regime was brought to its knees by a sporting boycott against South Africa tend to overlook the fact that apartheid lasted 20 years after the country found itself barred from Lords and Twickenham. In any case, the sporting boycott began not as a general protest against apartheid but when a South African government agent attempted to bribe the black English player, Basil d’Oliveira, to withdraw from a tour of South Africa. To our knowledge, the Chinese have not so far attempted to bar our athletes on the grounds of their race.

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Vespasian

August 9th, 2008 11:41am

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

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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