China, Tibet, and the Olympics
Placing the Olympics above world politics is a valiant but vain hope.
When the French nobleman and historian Baron Philipe de Coubertin revived the idea of the Olympic Games in Paris in 1894, he was motivated by both nationalism and idealistic internationalism. He felt the French had lost their war with Prussia in 1870 because of their poor physical conditioning. But de Coubertin had also been inspired by an English physician, botanist, and magistrate, William Penny Brookes. Another eccentric idealist and philanthropist, Brookes had first organized an “Olympian Games” in 1850 in the English rural village of Much Wenlock, Shropshire. De Coubertin visited the Much Wenlock Olympics in 1890, and returned to France inspired.
Brookes, in his capacity as magistrate, had intended that the Wenlock Olympian Games would encourage members of the local working class to become physically fit and thus less attracted to crime than they otherwise would have been. He also felt that sports activities organized internationally might also alleviate international tensions. De Coubertin agreed.
A valiant, but vain hope. Ever since their modern revival in Athens in 1896, the Olympic Games have fallen prey again and again to the squabbles and jealousies regularly affecting world politics. The first Games that was crudely exploited for political propaganda purposes, of course, were the infamous “Nazi” Games held in Berlin in 1936. Adolf Hitler was infuriated that an African-American, Jesse Owens, had won four gold medals and thus demonstrated that German Aryans were not quite global athletic supermen. World Wars, of course, canceled the scheduled games of 1916 and 1940. After the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979, the most powerful nations of the West boycotted the Summer Olympics held in Moscow the following year, and in 1984 Moscow retaliated by not attending the Los Angeles Olympics. Between 1936 and 1984, other minor boycotts and incidents took place.
Securing from the International Olympic Committee the assignment of hosting is an honor that many countries have sought, but which most of the cities that have been tasked with the actual hosting have grumbled about. The huge financial outlays in Games preparations (new airports, subway and rail systems, roadways) are often not paid for by revenues from visitors to the Games themselves. In addition, there is always massive disruption of local life as homes and buildings are demolished, traffic re-routed, and ways of getting around irrevocably changed. Still, the lure of international prestige and attention acquired by the host country is huge. In the 2000 Games in Sydney, there were about 16,000 accredited journalists from hundreds of countries.
Beijing first tried to be host of the games in 1993, barely four years after the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. “A more open China” greets the world, said Beijing billboards with self-conscious coyness, as hastily planted trees tried to promise a greener Beijing for the 2000 Olympics. When the games were eventually awarded to Beijing for 2008, International Olympic Committee officials gamely speculated that China might be made more democratic by hosting them.
Again, a valiant, but vain hope. China for more than a year has been busily arresting dissidents and rounding up and expelling foreigners suspected of planning to use the games as a platform to criticize China. The outburst of demonstrations and violence in Tibet that began in March 2008 only confirmed Chinese in their suspicions that malevolent foreigners would use any Chinese domestic problem to cast the country in a poor light. Chinese promises of greater press freedom for foreign reporters to travel widely in China have been withdrawn. It is now virtually impossible for foreign reporters to visit Tibet unless officially invited there by the Chinese foreign ministry.
The real problem with the Beijing Olympics is that foreign criticism of its handling of Tibet, not to mention mumbled threats of a boycott of the entire Games, has brought out the worst in both the Chinese government and the Chinese people. China, reported The Economist, has shown its “dark side” in facing down international protest, and has been “nervous, repressive, prickly, and stubborn.” Such qualities have been nowhere more visible than in China’s insistence in proceeding with the Olympic torch itinerary to several different countries, despite sometimes-violent opposition to the torch’s journey by pro-Tibetan activists. In London, the torch was nearly doused by a man who approached it with a fire extinguisher. In Paris the torch had to be quickly removed from the streets in a bus out of fears it might be seized by demonstrators. In San Francisco, the city had to provide a decoy route for the torch run after demonstrators unfurled the Tibetan snow-lion flag on the Golden Gate Bridge and threatened serious efforts to seize the torch.
But Chinese efforts to “protect” the torch with a ring of thuggish-looking Chinese men in white and blue track suits caused almost as much bad blood among some spectators of the torch run as the original Tibetan troubles. With a lack of tact bordering on insult, the Chinese are still planning to run the torch through Tibet itself in June. Meanwhile, Chinese students studying overseas have flocked to counter-demonstrations against pro-Tibetan activists, and a British reporter in Beijing who had covered the Tibetan troubles in a way unflattering to China received death threats. This is not an attractive view of Chinese culture.
An international boycott of the Beijing Games over the Tibetan issue, on the other hand, would do nothing to help the Tibetans. The real problem is that Chinese interpret foreign criticism of their Tibetan policies not as a legitimate criticism of Chinese domestic policy—i.e. human rights—but as an attempt to “split” China, to weaken it by encouraging ethnic separatist tendencies. After 150 years of humiliation at the hands of foreign nations, during which China very nearly was partitioned up among the great powers, the Chinese are not entirely unjustified in their paranoia. The Chinese also nurse a grievance that the Tibetans are not more “grateful” for the considerable economic investment Beijing has granted to Tibet, failing to comprehend that vast infrastructure projects like a new railroad into Lhasa does little to raise the income of most ordinary Tibetans.
Through its abilities, as an authoritarian regime, to deploy vast resources on organization, law and order, and social control, the Chinese government is likely to weather the current storm of international criticism over Tibet and pull off the Olympic games in an organized, and perhaps even impressive manner. But in the process it has learned a hard lesson: if you want the international recognition and attention that hosting the Games ensures, you had better be prepared for some unpleasant things in your country coming to light. China’s handling of the non-Han, alien culture of Buddhist Tibet has been one of them.
Dr. Aikman, a Senior Fellow of the Trinity Forum, was for many years senior correspondent for Time.
Columns, David Aikman, Character and Ethics, Global Culture, Mon 05 May 2008
