|
No
to a Beijing Olympics
By JONATHAN
POWER
July 11, 2001
LONDON - Human rights and sports don't mix. That
refrain echoes back to the 1960s when conservatives
opposed the breaking of sporting links with
apartheid-ridden South Africa. But in the end sporting
links were ruptured and nothing hurt the sport loving
white South Africans more. It was the beginning of a
wake-up call- that the rest of the world did not like the
kind of society that its white people wanted to keep in
place.
Now this same defence is being trotted out by those
who wish to see China being awarded the right to host the
2008 Olympic games, a decision that will be made at the
end of the week at the meeting of the International
Olympic Committee in Moscow. Those who wish to see China
get the games argue, as a senior State Department
official said to the Washington Post last week, that it
could give China "a powerful but intangible incentive" to
improve its human rights performance and to exercise
restraint toward Taiwan.
History suggests it's doubtful if holding the games
dilutes the psychoses of a society. Probably the reverse.
When Hitler's Germany hosted the games in pre-war Berlin
it was an excuse for Nazi pageantry and triumphalism. And
in more recent years the awarding in quick succession of
the games to Los Angeles and Atlanta did not work to make
Americans more internationally minded or more supportive
of the UN. If China gets the games it will be merely an
excuse for Chinese leaders to boast to themselves, to
their people and to the world that they are in the A
league now and nothing can stop the great march of the
Chinese people towards success. There is no evidence at
all that it could make them treat their political
dissidents with more humanity or ease up on the use of
torture or the draconian application of the death
penalty.
China since the days in 1793 of the mission of Earl
Macartney, emissary of King George 3rd, has kept its
distance from the West, preferring to be as
"self-contained as a billiard ball", to quote the great
historian Alain Peyrefitte. It was Peyrefitte who argued
in "The Collision of Civilisations" that Macartney's
decision not to kowtow to the emperor gave the Chinese
the impression that their civilization was denied. They
withdrew into their bunker and have remained there for
two hundred years prickly, ultra-sensitive, quick to take
offence and too ready to assume the worst of the West's
motives.
Thus, among Sinologists, there has developed a strong
school of thought that there is only one way of dealing
with China - a sort of delayed, reversed kowtow, always
leaning over backwards neither to annoy nor to provoke
China. This is combined with the propensity of many in
the West to project the economic growth rates of the Deng
Xiaoping era into the distant future, while taking little
note of its paucity of legal and institutional framework
(unlike its rival, India) to contain such endeavour.
Reasoning of this kind, assuming China will soon mature
into a political and military superstate, seems to blight
good sense. "It encourages China", as Chris Patten, the
last British governor of Hong Kong, wrote in his
provocative book East and West, "to think it can become
part of the modern world entirely on its own terms. Were
that to happen it would make the world a more dangerous
and less prosperous place. China remains the classic case
of hope over experience, reminiscent of de Gaulle's
famous comment about Brazil: "It has enormous potential
and always will.""
If the China of Mao Zedong was long protected by
western liberals from censure, it was to find, perhaps to
its own surprise, that from the time of President Richard
Nixon onwards a new wave of political dispensation came
from the right of the political spectrum. Bill Clinton,
campaigning to unseat George Bush senior, even charged
that Bush was soft on China. Yet once elected he too
seemed to bend overboard to placate China. Wei Jingsheng,
China's most thoughtful ex political prisoner shrewdly
observed in one conversation I had with him: "The Chinese
government's concept of human rights has not moved
towards the universal standard of human rights. On the
contrary, the human rights values of Western politicians
have moved closer to those of communist China."
In the spring of last year, however, after much
lobbying from human rights activists, there was an
important dual shift in US policy. Clinton finally
decided that the U.S. would criticize China in the UN
Human Rights Commission (without however the support of
the major European countries). At the same time Clinton
balanced this by finally deciding that the time had come
to support China's entry into the World Trade
Organisation.
This is probably the right mix: the continuous
drumming and tattoo of human rights lobbying, at the same
time as trading, commercial and educational links are
being strengthened.
But where does the awarding of the Olympic games fit
into this balancing act? They are certainly not a right,
as Chinese propaganda has sometimes seemed to suggest.
They are a gift from the international community. And
that should come at the right moment, when the world
feels it is opportune to give China the respect that is
due to an open and free society. Canada, Japan, France
and even Turkey all have a better claim for that than
does China today. This is not the time and China is not
the place for the Olympic games. We can all wait another
four years and then look at the Chinese claim again in
the fresh light of hopefully a new day.
I can be reached by phone +44
7785 351172 and e-mail: JonatPower@aol.com
Copyright © 2001 By
JONATHAN POWER
Tell a friend about this article
Send to:
From:
Message and your name
 
|