"The journey of harmony" isn't
living up to its name.
That's what organizers of the
Olympic Games dubbed the tour of
the Olympic torch before realizing
that the flame would have to be
secreted away during its ceremonial
meanderings. It was extinguished at
least once in Paris as pro-Tibet protesters
besieged it, and in San
Francisco it popped up unannounced
in unexpected places lest demonstrators
create an unseemly ruckus.
If they have a sense of humor, the
gods of public relations must be
smiling. China celebrated landing
the 2008 Summer Olympics as a
global PR coup that would seal its
status as an internationally
respectable power of the first rank.
Instead, China is reaping the embarrassment
that comes with cracking
skulls in Tibet and abetting genocide
in Sudan as the world's eyes turn to
it as the host of an event devoted "to
promoting a peaceful society concerned
with the preservation of
human dignity."
The International Olympic
Committee shouldn't hold the games
in countries with closed political systems.
There were four perfectly
acceptable alternative cities to
Beijing — Paris, Toronto, Istanbul
and Osaka — that wouldn't have
meant holding the games in a country
where dissidents would be rounded
up and jailed prior to the commencement
of the high-jumping and
synchronized swimming.
If the games weren't a de facto seal
of approval, thugs wouldn't pant
over hosting them. Hitler worked to
keep the 1936 Olympic Games —
awarded to Berlin in 1931 prior to
his rise to power — in Germany. For
good reason: historian William
Shirer says that "he turned them into
a dazzling propaganda success for
his barbarian regime." In its eagerness
to keep the Summer Games in
Seoul in 1988, the then-authoritarian
state of South Korea didn't crush
protesters, thus arguably paving the
way for its eventual political opening.
China won't be so gingerly, but to
the extent the games become the
occasion for embarrassment for
Beijing rather than glorious selfcongratulation,
the better. The torch
should be harried, and Western leaders
should stay away from the opening
ceremonies.
All of this is mere symbolism, of
course. For China, though, it's the
ceremony and the pretty picture that
matter most. When Chinese
President Hu Jintao met with
President Bush at the White House in
2006, the substance of their talks was
less important than a Falun Gong
protester interrupting their press conference.
President Bush hasn't declared
himself about the opening ceremony,
understandably. If he says he won't
go now, he'll lose any leverage over
the Chinese. But ultimately he can't
go, unless he wants to repeat his
father's experience of rubbing shoulders
with Chinese officialdom fresh
from a crackdown. Bush has talked
about religious freedom more than
any other American president. In the
past, he hasn't hesitated to irk China,
meeting with the Dalai Lama in the
White House.
We're warned that a boycott of the
opening ceremonies would inflame
Chinese nationalism. But China is a
rising power beginning to flex its
muscles; its nationalism gets exercised
by nearly anything. We can't
be held hostage to the perpetual
inflammation of people whose
nationalism entails stamping out the
independence and culture of another
country.
It is the misfortune of Beijing that
it has lost the cachet it once had on
the left. The country is associated
less with Mao's Little Red Book than
with capitalist development and rampant
pollution, making it an acceptable
target for moral censure. It helps
that Tibet's most famous representative
is a Buddhist monk and that the
autonomy of a landlocked Central
Asian region at 16,000 feet is a cause
safely sequestered from any hint of
the American national interest.
Tibet will surely get more restive
rather than less as the August games
approach. They are simply too good
a platform for international attention
(the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests
began upon a high-profile visit by
Mikhail Gorbachev). China will
respond brutishly and hope its
Olympic stage-management still
comes off without a hitch.
