China in our hands
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.
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.
Grudgingly, China has been forced to loosen its control of internet access to its own people. As late as last week the authorities were still denying Western journalists the free access which had been promised. Then came a climbdown, allowing inhabitants of Beijing for the first time to view the websites, among others, of the Free Tibet movement. Doubtless internet access will be restricted again as soon as the Games have left town, but the restrictions will surely be harder to sustain now that people have tasted freedom.
The wonder about modern China, which has been highlighted by the Olympics, is that a country can combine such economic confidence with authoritarianism and a lack of liberty. Nineteen years ago, just after Tiananmen Square, this wouldn’t have seemed possible. We had seen the Soviet Union driven to dismantle its autocratic political machinery as a result of economic stagnation, and it seemed inevitable that something similar would happen in China. Nearly two decades on, however, China has grown richer quicker than anyone would have imagined — and yet continued to oppress its people for far longer than anyone could have guessed.
Is this new political model — rampant capitalism combined with Marxist social control — really sustainable? We doubt it. Eventually, as the Chinese become richer, surely they will demand freedom of expression to go with their hatchbacks and power showers. By exposing the world to the Chinese and the Chinese to the world, the Olympics can hasten that process. We can cheer the competition and condemn the regime at the same time.
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