| | |  Americas & Beyond | August 2008 
The Beijing Olympics - China’s Dash for Freedom
 PVNN
| | China’s rise is a cause for celebration — but despite the Beijing Olympics, not because of them | | |
“Sport”, as George Orwell noted more than 60 years ago, “is an unfailing cause of ill-will.” This newspaper generated some of its own in 2001, when we argued against the award of the 2008 Olympics to Beijing, and drew comparisons to the Nazi-organised games in Berlin in 1936. Chinese officialdom and many ordinary citizens were furious: another petulant effort by Western foes to thwart China’s inexorable rise.
A futile effort, too: Beijing won the games, and some would say the argument. As tourists land at the city’s futuristic airport, or troop into the spectacular new stadiums, many will catch their breath in wonder at the sheer scale of the modernisation China has wrought so quickly. China’s rise has indeed continued, in double-digit rates of economic growth, and in the growing recognition that it is a future superpower that cannot be ignored on any global issue, whether global warming or, as our leader on the collapse of the Doha round argues, global trade. Surely the Olympics, a bonanza for business as much as for athletes (see our special report this week), are the fitting symbol for this? The precedent is not Berlin 1936, but Tokyo 1964 or Seoul 1988, celebrating the coming of age of an economic power: only bigger and better, as befits the peaceful reintegration into the world of one in five of its inhabitants.
Games but no fun
This is indeed a cause for great celebration. But the Olympics have had little to do with it. On balance, the award of the games has done more harm than good to the opening up of China. The big forces driving that opening are independent of the games (see article). One is the speed with which China globalised in the 1980s and 1990s and then accelerated to a breakneck pace after accession to the World Trade Organisation in 2001. The other is the spread of the internet and mobile telephony that have transformed society. The Olympics, by contrast, have seen the Communist Party reassert an authoritarian grip over Beijing. It has used the pretext of an alleged terrorist threat to impose a restrictive security cordon on the city and curtail visas even for harmless businessmen.
The intense international scrutiny may have moderated the response of the security forces for a brief period at the beginning of the riots in Tibet in March. It may have had some effect on the way the authorities handled the relief effort after May’s earthquake in Sichuan province. The government has also made it easier for foreign reporters to travel round China. But in most cases the security forces are as thuggish as ever; and the internet was anyway forcing the party’s information-management systems to cope with new pressures.
Those who have argued for the beneficial effect of the Olympics on China have made three specific claims, none of which holds water. First, Chinese officials themselves said the games would bring human-rights improvements. The opposite is true. China’s people are far freer now than they were 30, 20 or even 10 years ago. The party has extricated itself from big parts of their lives, and relative wealth has broadened horizons. But that is not thanks to the Olympics, which have brought more repression. To build state-of-the-art facilities for the games, untold numbers of people were forced to move. Anxious to prevent protests that might steal headlines from the glories of Chinese modernist architecture or athletic prowess, the authorities have hounded dissidents with more than usual vigour. And there are anyway clear limits to the march of freedom in China; although personal and economic freedoms have multiplied, political freedoms have been disappointingly constrained since Hu Jintao became president in 2003.
Second, these would be the first “green” Olympics, spurring a badly needed effort to clean up Beijing and other Olympic venues. This was always a ludicrous claim. Heroic efforts to remove toxic algae blooms from the rowing course do not amount to a new environmentalism. The jury is still out on whether Beijing will manage to produce air sufficiently breathable for runners safely to complete a marathon. If it does, it will not have been because of any Olympic-related change of course. Rather it will be the result of desperate measures introduced in recent weeks: production cuts by polluting industries, or simply closing them down; and the banning from the road of half of Beijing’s cars.
The third boast was not one you would ever hear from the lips of Chinese diplomats. A belief in the inviolability of Chinese sovereignty is often not just their cardinal principle, but their only one. Yet some foreigners claimed that the Olympics would make Chinese foreign policy more biddable. Western officials have been quick to talk up China’s alleged helpfulness: in persuading North Korea at least to talk about disarming; in cajoling the generals running Myanmar into letting in the odd envoy from the United Nations; in trying to coax the government of Sudan away from a policy of genocide. But last month China still vetoed United Nations sanctions against Zimbabwe; it wants a UN vote to stop action in the International Criminal Court against Sudan’s president, Omar al-Bashir.
Beijingoism
China’s leaders remain irrevocably wedded to the principle of “non-interference” in a country’s internal affairs. In so far as China itself is concerned, they seem to have the backing of large numbers of their own people. The Olympics are taking place against the backdrop of the rise of a virulently assertive strain of Chinese nationalism- seen most vividly in the fury at foreign coverage of the riots in Tibet, and at the protests that greeted the Olympic-torch relay in some Western cities.
And all that was before the games themselves begin. Orwell described international sport as “mimic warfare”. That is of course infinitely preferable to the real thing, and there is nothing wrong in China’s people taking pride in either a diplomatic triumph, if that is how the games turn out, or a sporting one (a better bet). But there is a danger. Having dumped its ideology, the Communist Party now stakes its survival and legitimacy on tight political control, economic advance and nationalist pride. The problem with nationalism is that it thrives on competition- and all too often needs an enemy. |
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