Political Games
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China has a poor record in human rights. This has been pointed out by dissidents, activists, journalists, lawyers, labor organizers and even some Western politicians, almost always without any effect. China is too powerful. Business interests prevail. Might next year’s Olympic Games make a difference?
Although President Bush has decided to attend the Games and give them his imprimatur, activists have scored a notable success. Mia Farrow managed to embarrass the Chinese government, as well as Steven Spielberg, a consultant for the opening ceremony, by suggesting that Chinese subsidies to the Sudanese government are contributing to the mass killings in Darfur. The phrase “Genocide Olympics,” used by Farrow in The Wall Street Journal, was particularly upsetting to the Chinese. Spielberg quickly told them that genocide was bad. And just as swiftly the Chinese government endorsed a United Nations decision to send peacekeepers to Darfur.
Could similar pressures help to improve China’s domestic conditions too? There are reasons to doubt it. After all, organizers of international sporting events and authoritarian politicians have at least one thing in common: They would like us to believe that sports and politics don’t mix. This is particularly true when it comes to the Olympic Games. Instead of politics, or as a kind of substitute for politics, officials of the Chinese Communist Party and of the International Olympic Committee like to trumpet high-minded slogans about peace and international brotherhood.
In fact, they always did. Two traditions dovetail very nicely in Beijing. Baron Pierre de Coubertin, a kind of noble Boy Scout, invented the modern Games in 1894, partly because he felt that the French, after their defeat in the war against Prussia, needed a tonic to restore their virility. Like most aristocrats of his time, Coubertin was not a great fan of democratic politics. He preferred pageants, marches, jamborees, mass spectacles, world fairs and sporting contests as a way to foster healthy patriotism as well as international peace and friendship. Politics of the democratic kind was regarded by sporting aristocrats like the good baron as divisive and a threat to peace and order.
Long before the Communists took power, or indeed the arrival of Coubertin’s Games, Chinese authorities used uplifting slogans to promote obedience and unity. They, too, were morbidly afraid of disorder, and hence of too much freedom for the common people. What has changed is that traditional Confucianist slogans have been replaced by modern Communist or nationalist ones. Moral exhortations, like “Serve the People,” as well as official movements to strengthen the nation under the Communist Party, are what pass for political participation in China.
In the real world, of course, sports is often highly political. All politicians, even democratic ones, like to boost their own credentials by covering themselves in the glory of national sporting heroes. But fascist and Communist regimes, true heirs of the 19th-century love of mass spectacle and pageantry, have been especially keen to use Olympic gold to mobilize popular enthusiasm and gain international prestige. Winning medals was one of the few things East Germany, say, used to be better at than most democracies.
So China and the Olympics were actually made for each other. There may not be much left of the ideological aspects of communism, but mass mobilization and control are still very much Chinese specialities. We can trust Beijing to build the greatest stadiums and widest boulevards, as well as staging the best, biggest, most disciplined spectacles. So keen are the Chinese to control every detail of their Games that meteorologists are even experimenting with ways to control the weather by launching chemical missiles into rain clouds that might spoil the proceedings.
Neither the Chinese government nor the I.O.C. would like such delicate issues as human rights, or Tibetan and Taiwanese independence, or indeed anything that might disturb the order of the Games to get mixed up with sports. In 2001, the I.O.C. made an evaluation of the candidate cities to stage the games. The report went into great detail about weather conditions, infrastructure, finance and so on, but human rights is not even mentioned as a possible issue.
This, as I said, is in the spirit of Baron de Coubertin as much as of the government of China. The question is whether the organizers will get away with it. For the first time, thousands of reporters from all over the world will be able to look around the People’s Republic and take notes. No doubt, some reporters will write articles about dissidents being arrested, people being kicked out of their homes to make way for the stadiums and wider boulevards, and the fact that Chinese citizens who complain risk being locked up. These are indeed important issues, more pertinent perhaps than China’s policies in the Sudan. But will it do any good? Will Beijing care?
Probably not. What Beijing cares about most is not what foreigners write in their papers, but what Chinese say or do inside China. And that will be kept firmly under control. Foreign articles or broadcasts may be censored in China. Foreign reporters won’t be arrested for what they write, but their Chinese assistants might well be. Beijing also cares deeply about the Games themselves. They want them to go off perfectly, so that China will be admired as a modern, powerful, disciplined country that cares about peace, friendship, etc. And since almost everyone involved in the Games — the sports fans, the I.O.C., the foreign dignitaries and perhaps Steven Spielberg, too — want the same, that is most likely what Beijing will get.
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