Saturday, August 9, 2008

16 Days That Changed the World: Bejing Summer Olympics 2008


DOES ANYONE CARE?

Day One: August 8 - A propagandistic Chinawood opening ceremony that fooled nobody overseas, but did manage to fool everyone inside brainwashed mindcontrolled China. Some comments from people in the UK, for example:

All that regimentation leaves me stone cold. I won't be enjoying, watching or cheering on anyone at the Olympics from this barbaric country.

- J.S., London, England., 8/8/2008 20:46


The chinese are using olympic games for their own ends, for instance why were the military involved in the flag ceremony on TV. This is a fragrant transgression of the olympic spirit. Dont be fooled by the opening ceremony - China must never again hold the olympic games until Tibet is free and the people of China are free from these authoritarian creeps.

- Terence, UK, 8/8/2008 20:51


Expensive nonsense. Grown people watching other grown people running round in circles.

- Hlafen T Heffelberger, Cleethorpes, 8/8/2008 20:51



I absolutely cannot bear to watch this Olympics. This farce just shows how awfully low civilisation has sunk: $40billion wasted for a publicity stunt; disgraceful men like President Bush jumping on their moral high chair; the happy happy hollow smiles of media people; drug cheats. If the Olympics is about celebrating human endeavour and the glory of mankind then the human race is doomed. Good luck to all of the hardworking, humble and dignified athletes, but I will not watch this manipulative exhibition.

- Ivan, UK, 8/8/2008 21:22




Day Two: August 9, murder most foul: A Chinese man, 47, kills Todd Bachman, 62, the father in law of the USA volleyball team's head coach, originally from New Zealand. Mr Bachman's wife is injured in the attack, and their 29 year old daughter witnessed the attack at the Drum Tower in Beijing, a tourist site. Beijing police forbid local eyewitnesses from talking to the foreign media. Huge cover-up. Of course, the killer did not know Mr Bachman, he was insane, a totally senseless murder. But a sad story none-the-less, on Day Two of the 16 Days That Changed the World (for better or for worse, probably for worse, if nobody wakes up to the thugs and goons of communist China's mindcontrolling, brainwashing leadership, who themselves are products of Soviet style braindwashing and mindcontrol. RIP, Mr Bachman. China, wake up!

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-fg-react10-2008aug10,0,6669588.story

Day Three, August 10: China refuses to allow a group of normal Taiwanese fans of the Taiwan team to enter China at the airport in Beijing and sends them back on the next plane. This kind of communist thuggery and goonishness should be protested worldwide: http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/taiwan/archives/2008/08/10/2003419927

www.taipeitimes.com (August 9 issue, page 2, Taiwan News)

Day Four, August 11: Turns on some of the firworks seen in the Bird's Nest stadium on opening night were faked. A Beijing newspaper reported the deception. And Simon Jenkins in the UK offers this very good overview of how the world has been fooled by both the IOC and the Chicoms. More trouble in western region with attacks by "terrorists". www.news.google.com

"I spy a little Olympic crack in China’s wall"
by Simon Jenkins , UK commentator

When China won the contract to host the Olympics, the official Xinhua press agency declared it “another milestone in China’s rising international status and a historical event in the great renaissance of the Chinese nation”. Nobody watching Friday’s start to $40 billion of public expenditure, in what is still one of the world’s poorest nations, could be in any doubt of that. Let us hear no more about the Olympics being about sport.

Ever since their refounding at the end of the 19th century the Olympics have been about politics, whether they were Hitler’s chauvinist parade of 1936 or the current International Olympic Committee’s wishy-washy vacuities about harmony and peace. It is not swimming, running and jumping that have brought 80 world leaders to Beijing. It is national pride. Not since 1936 have the Games been so overtly political as now.

This does not make the Olympics a bad thing. Sport has often been politics by other means, nowhere more so than in authori-tarian oligarchies desperate for the public acclaim of sporting success.

Any visitor to China attests to how much has changed over the past 30 years. Freedom is more widespread, wealth more accessible, travel more open. The expectation that China should be like the West, because it is getting rich like the West, is as facile as the thesis that capitalism necessarily leads to liberty. Of all liberal fallacies, none is more curious than the assumption, applied to countries such as Lebanon, Iraq and Afghanistan, that they can become democracies at the flick of switch.

Much of the abuse hurled at the duplicity of China in recent weeks should be hurled at the cynicism of the IOC. When he gave the Games to Beijing, Jacques Rogge, the IOC president, claimed this would “help the development of human rights in China”. He thus gave the lie to Sir Craig Reedie, Britain’s member on the IOC, who ridiculously declared that its contract was “with the host city; it does not become involved in politics”.

The IOC gave China the Games because it knew that only the wilder shores of politics could possibly fuel its bizarre four-yearly extravaganza. Only politics would induce any country to part with the billions required to meet the IOC’s surreal building, town planning and ceremonial specifications. The modern Olympics makes Nero’s Colosseum seem a bauble and the Field of the Cloth of Gold a village fete. As London is finding, the extravagance of this 16-day venture defies all reason.

An illustration of this is the mendacity that surrounds the Games’s promotion. The BBC, eager to justify its 300 junketeers in Beijing, regularly hyped the “four billion television audience” for the Games. This is the global reach of stations carrying the feed. The actual numbers watching a festival of mostly minor sports can only be guessed, but is certainly small compared with such world sports as football, boxing, tennis and golf.

The tourism gain is equally illusory. The number of foreign tourists to the Olympic Games is trivial, overwhelmed by the army of taxpayer-supported officials and hangers-on. According to the tourism authorities, four-star hotels are just 45% full, with visitors 20% down on the same month last year.

The last Olympic venues, Athens and Sydney, lost tourists. Visitors and tour operators avoid host cities for fear of crowds and a related downswing in three-year block bookings takes time to recover. Australia admitted as much when it later advertised itself with the slogan, “Where the bloody hell are you?”

Lord Coe and Tessa Jowell, the Games minister, keep hyping the British Games as “making a profit”. They never give figures. The only profit is to a tiny circle of architects, consultants and construction companies. An Olympic Games must be the most expensive public gesture, in billions of dollars a day, that any nation can undertake in peacetime, a political spectacular masquerading as sport.

The IOC was drawn to China as the one big country to which it still had a quid pro quo to offer: international respectability. The IOC knew that China might be induced to spend huge sums, not by virtue of political reform, but to cloak the absence of such reform.

To China the deal seemed a good one. The last great dictatorship on Earth must have regarded paying for the Games as a cheap admission fee compared with taking a gamble on free speech, regional devolution, the rule of law and contested elections.

So far the deal has held. Beijing has delivered the IOC the requisite extravaganza. Its sportsmen and women, many barely out of childhood, have risen to the occasion, supplying countless smiling faces to bedeck the IOC’s mission statement of joy and the brotherhood of mankind.

The IOC seems to have found in Chinese communism a shared language and nostalgia for the drilled utopianism of the mid-20th century. A large area of old Beijing has been razed and rebuilt with stadiums, office blocks and avenues, monuments to the modernising zeal of the party. Morally emasculated western architects have lined up for work, led by the son of Albert Speer as master planner.

Above all the Chinese have proved that the Olympics are about control. Lose control, as did the world torch tour and its “1,000 jogging policemen”, and you cannot deliver concord and good publicity. Instead, control has required the Chinese to arrest untold hundreds of human rights activists. It has rendered Tibet virtually inaccessible. Anyone concerned with protest, such as the signers of a letter pleading for “an Olympic spirit” in human rights, has been thrown in jail or removed from the capital; 100,000 troops have been brought in to ring the city.

I have not found any Chinese commentator to suggest that the Olympic Games has led to liberalisation, indeed the reverse. That need not render the outcome of the Games a political failure. The juices of soft world power never run smooth.

In the credit balance can be placed months of publicity for the plight of the Tibetan people, to which the condition of the Uighurs of Xinjiang can now be added. After five years of cloying sycophancy from the West - reminiscent of the talk of the “tiger economies of the Pacific rim” in the 1990s - China’s image is now more qualified and complex.

Alongside greater familiarity with the Chinese as people has come a welcome awareness that they are not one people. They are, like Europeans, many and with diverse ambitions and loyalties, illustrated in the 56 ethnic groups displayed at the opening ceremony.

Just as the Games have required a reinforcement of control, so they must have encouraged liberal elements within the Chinese establishment in the view that progress on the world stage cannot, after all, be wholly divorced from certain forms of freedom. There is no such thing as unqualified admission to the club of liberty.

The tools of authority may have been strengthened to curb dissent over the Games fortnight and are unlikely to be eased when they are over. But the Games have clearly been a political trauma for China. They have revealed the inner workings of the regime to the world and that may nudge it in a direction that all who know and admire the country so desire. For such a boon, the Chinese people have had to part with $40 billion. Perhaps one day they will regard it as money well spent.

11 comments:

Anonymous said...

Michael Bullshit Bristow, reporting for the BBC, incredibly wrote:

"Those who watched the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympic Games from inside the stadium seemed unanimous in their praise.


"It was fantastic. I was so moved," said 20-year-old Zhang Qiong, as she sat down at the end of the event to contemplate what she had just seen.

It was hard to find someone who disagreed with her. "

Uh, Michael, the 91,000 people at the opening ceremony? How many were Chinese? Like 85,000? And of course they loved it. It was mindcontrol propaganda for them. Who in the West loved that crap show? Wake up, BBC!

Anonymous said...

In Beijing, Parents Of Ex-Player Are Stabbed; One Dies


Todd Bachman, the father-in-law of U.S. men's volleyball coach Hugh McCutcheon, was stabbed to death at a Beijing tourist site by a Chinese man who then killed himself.






By Jill Drew and Ariana Eunjung Cha
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, August 10, 2008; Page A01

BEIJING, Aug. 9 -- A Chinese man stabbed two relatives of a U.S. Olympic coach Saturday, killing a man and severely wounding his wife, as well as injuring their Chinese guide, at a popular tourist site in downtown Beijing, according to government and U.S. Olympic officials.

This Story
In Beijing, Parents Of Ex-Player Are Stabbed; One Dies
Team Is Jolted By News Of Attack
Father of Former Olympian Killed in Beijing
The attacker then jumped to his death from the second story of the Drum Tower, an ancient structure in the heart of Beijing.

The attack, on the first full day of Olympic competition, occurred despite an overwhelming security presence in the city and marred the Chinese government's efforts to showcase the country as open and welcoming to foreigners.

Anonymous said...

A reporter for New Zealand television who is covering the Games was attacked and slightly injured Friday night AUGUST 8 by a young man wielding a broken chair, Japan's Kyodo news agency reported.

Still, there are regular reports of violent incidents throughout the country as people frustrated with government corruption or injustices lash out.

For example, a man who was angry about a rough police interrogation in Shanghai recently walked into the station and stabbed to death six police officers and wounded four others.

Attacks against tourists are rare, but the U.S. Embassy has warned they are on the rise.

A reporter for New Zealand television who is covering the Games was attacked and slightly injured Friday night AUGUST 8 by a young man wielding a broken chair, Japan's Kyodo news agency reported.

Anonymous said...

to the chicago reporter who wrote about the murder: reporter Mike Downey

mikedowney @ tribune.com

"Your warm and fuzzy feelings were a result of your being in denial from the beginning. As you rolled up on Tiananmen Square did you have no memory of the thousands of students and supporters slaughtered there for trying to bring democracy to their country? Did you pay any attention in the runup to the Olympics of all the people rounded up and jailed for their politics or homeless status? The peace, love and unity China is trying to sell to the world is a thin facade for a brutal undemocratic communist dictatorship. You can't blame all of Beijing for the attack, but neither can you ignore that China is a country ruled by violence and oppression. Contemplate that, and get back to us on the grandeur and enchantment front. "

Cary Allen
USA

Anonymous said...

US tourist killed in Beijing attack

The attack was ***not**** mentioned on state-controlled television's main evening news bulletin, though it was reported by the official Xinhua News Agency, ...

It was another headache for China's communist leadership, which has planned meticulously for a flawless games and deployed a 100,000-strong security force plus countless volunteer guards to protect against any trouble.

The attack was not mentioned on state-controlled television's main evening news bulletin, though it was reported by the official Xinhua News Agency, in reports carried widely by other Chinese media.

Xinhua identified the attacker as Tang Yongming, a 47-year-old factory worker from the eastern city of Hangzhou with no criminal record, who divorced and moved out of his family home in 2006 and ***arrived in Beijing on August 1 this year****. No motive for the attack was known.

Anonymous said...

Chinese Foreign Ministry pays high attention to attack against U.S. citizens


www.chinaview.cn 2008-08-10 01:16:50 Print

BEIJING, Aug. 9 (Xinhua) -- Chinese Foreign Ministry paid high attention to the attack against U.S. citizens here Saturday, which led to the death of an American man and injuries to the other two, both women.

Chinese Vice Foreign Minister He Yafei promptly came to the hospital to see the injured U.S. tourists and informed the U.S. ambassador in China Clark Randt.

Senior officials from department of consular affairs of Chinese Foreign Ministry has immediately informed the case to the U.S. embassy in China.

He has expressed deep sympathy to the U.S. government and the relatives of the victims. "The Chinese government paid high attention to this case. Relevant law enforcement department has undertaken serious investigation and would promptly handle the case in accordance with the Chinese law."

The Chinese side will make every effort to save the wounded, and timely inform the investigation and its results to the U.S. side.

Randt thanked China's sympathy to the victims and the prompt response from relevant Chinese departments.

A Chinese man attacked two American tourists and a Chinese tour guide in downtown Beijing on Saturday shortly after noon.

The attacker then killed himself by jumping from the second story of the historic Drum Tower, a popular tourist site, after the incident, a spokesman with the Beijing Municipal Government Information Office said,the motive for the attack remains unknown.

The two injured women are in stable condition at a hospital.

The attacker was identified as 47-year-old Tang Yongming from the eastern city of Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province, according to an ID card found on his body.

On Saturday, the United States Olympic Committee (USOC) issued a statement on its official website, identifying the American nationals as relatives of a U.S. Olympic volleyball coach.

Anonymous said...

Taiwanese cheerleaders blocked at Beijing airport

‘THERE’S A PROBLEM’: After an hour of questioning by police, Cheerleading Squad for Taiwan members were told “higher-ups” said they must be sent back to Taipei

By Loa Iok-sin
STAFF REPORTER, WITH CNA

Sunday, Aug 10, 2008, Page 2

Cheerleading Squad for Taiwan captain Yang Hui-ju (楊蕙如) was refused entry to China at the Beijing airport yesterday and forced to return to Taiwan.

Yang arrived at Beijing International Airport at 3:20pm. Instead of going through immigration and customs, however, she was “escorted somewhere for further inquiries,” Yang told news channel ETTV by cellphone yesterday.

Yang, who campaigned for former Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) chairman Frank Hsieh (謝長廷) during the presidential race, told ETTV that she was denied entry to China and put immediately on a return flight to Taiwan.

Commenting later during her transit in Hong Kong, Yang told TVBS that Beijing airport police had examined her Taiwan compatriot entry permit and muttered: “There’s a problem.”

The police then took Yang and her companion to a questioning room and looked through her bags, she said.

‘WHY CHEER?’

Yang said the airport police asked her why she was visiting China, to which she responded: “I’ve come to cheer for Taiwan.”

The police asked Yang how many matches she would attend to cheer for Taiwan and she replied “maybe seven or eight games.”

“Why cheer at so many games?” the police responded, Yang said.

After an hour of questioning, Yang said the airport police said “higher-ups” had “ordered” that she and her friend be sent back immediately. They were put on a flight to Hong Kong.

Yang organized the cheerleading squad years ago to support Taiwanese athletes at international competitions. Last year the squad traveled to New York to cheer for New York Yankees pitcher Wang Chien-ming (王建民).

NO NATIONAL SYMBOLS

The cheerleader squad normally dons yellow uniforms bearing the Taiwanese flag and the English slogan: “Taiwan Woo!”

They also normally wave Taiwanese flags as part of their routine.

But the cheerleading squad had said it would drop the national symbols to cheer for the nation’s athletes in Beijing.

“I won’t bring any flags — including the national flag — and will not bring banners that are too eye-catching either,” Yang told a news conference last week in Taipei. “Chinese laws are unpredictable, no one knows what would happen if you were to break the rules of the Games.”

In related news, Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairman Wu Poh-hsiung (吳伯雄) yesterday visited the Athletes’ Village in Beijing to cheer the nation’s delegation and present the members with NT$200,000 in spending money.

Wu was accompanied by KMT Secretary-General Wu Den-yih (吳敦義), Legislative Yuan Deputy Speaker Tseng Yung-chuan (曾永權) and other top officials.

Speaking about the baseball team’s first game of the Olympics — scheduled for Wednesday against the Netherlands — Wu Poh-hsiung said China-based Taiwanese businessmen had bought most of the tickets, ensuring a “Taiwanese cheerleading squad.”

If you factor in the support of Chinese spectators for Taiwan’s team, it will virtually have a “home field advantage,” he said.

When approached for comment on Wu Poh-hsiung’s visit to the Olympic Games, DPP Chairwoman Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) said in Taipei yesterday that as the leader of Taiwan’s governing party, Wu Poh-hsiung should exercise caution, lest he give the impression that “Taiwan is part of China.”

Tsai said Wu’s remark about a “home field advantage” was regrettable and disappointing. Such a remark undermines the nation’s status as a sovereign state, she said.

[1.6 billion hits as of today]

Anonymous said...

The Beijing Public Security Bureau said that Mr. Tang divorced his wife five years ago then quit his job at a Hangzhou factory in 2006 and sold his house in the city. He left Hangzhou for Beijing on Aug. 1. Police said they were unsure what motivated Mr. Tang to carry out the attack.

Anonymous said...

Legacy of Beijing Olympics will transcend athletics
By Evan Osnos | Tribune correspondent
8:00 PM CDT, August 9, 2008
BEIJING - Even before nightfall on the first day of competition, the Beijing Olympics appeared destined for a legacy that reaches beyond the bounds of athletics.

Olympic authorities and Chinese leaders Saturday confronted the challenge of conveying a delicate balance between solemn grief and confident control after an attack at a Beijing landmark left one American tourist dead and another wounded, along with their Chinese guide.

As investigators dug for clues into what motivated the Chinese assailant, who took his own life after the attack at the Drum Tower south of the Olympic green, the violent incident added to a volatile mix of sports, politics, patriotism and protest already swirling around the Games.

Early Sunday, several explosions were reported in China's western region of Xinjiang, killing at least two people and seriously injuring several others, state media reported. Xinhua news agency said said gunshots were heard after the blasts and that troops had been deployed to the area.



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Beijing Olympic architecture vs. Chicago's plans In the weeks to come, these factors are likely to congeal into one of two scenarios: China recovers from the first-day tragedy to rack up medals, keeps other spectators safe and happy and closes the Olympics with a sense of pride and accomplishment. Or Chinese athletes do their best under intense pressure, controversies simmer over safety, pollution and human rights, and China closes the Olympics under a cloud of bitterness and confusion.

Either version -- or some combination, more likely -- will have broad consequences for the U.S. and other countries. How China feels about itself, and how the world feels about China, when the Games conclude could shape Beijing's posture on human rights, climate change and other international issues.

"If the management of the Games goes well, I think it will have a positive effect on China's global diplomacy and confidence of the government. It will probably make them more receptive to international cooperation and multilateralism," professor David Shambaugh, director of the China Policy Program at George Washington University, said shortly before the Saturday attack.

"Conversely, if the government receives a lot of negative media coverage and the Games are mismanaged, or there is an incident, it will only fuel the more xenophobic and less cooperative elements in the Chinese government."

China is well aware of the stakes. Xu Wu, a former journalist who teaches at Arizona State University, advised the Chinese government on public relations in the run-up to the Games. In a presentation to senior officials, he forecast severalscenarios during the Games that could have a lasting effect on foreign relations, including: a foreign team booed by Chinese fans, for instance, or Beijing pollution interfering with competition, or foreign athletes encountering hostile crowds outside stadiums if they make politicized statements.

"If this becomes a Chinese nightmare," Wu said, "it will spread over to the world and become an international nightmare because China will feel humiliated and this will add to that suffering."

The Olympics are a gamble for everyone involved: for the International Olympic Committee, which staked its reputation on holding China to promises of a spectacular, transparent and inclusive Olympics; for foreign governments, which bet that the Beijing Games would make China a more cooperative player in international affairs, and, above all, for China's government, which is opening its doors wider than ever before with the hope that a China the world knows is better than the China it does not.

None of those is a sure bet.

Even before the attack on foreigners, China and the world were already exchanging volleys of positive and negative messages. President George W. Bush rejected calls to boycott the Opening Ceremony and thereby delivered China one of its most coveted political symbols. But he tempered that as soon as he stepped onto Chinese soil Friday with an appeal to his hosts to "let people say what they think." Scattered protests continue to flare in Beijing and Hong Kong over controls on the media and Beijing's control of Tibet.

Though none of these is a surprise to China's leadership, several experts on China's elite decision-making say the sheer relentlessness of the criticism over human rights is likely to trigger high-level discussion of just how important the issue really is to China's image.

Traditionally, Chinese citizens and policy makers have interpreted human-rights criticism to be only partly sincere. They attribute it more directly to power politics, in which foreign governments use human rights as an excuse to block China's global influence.

That internal perception could be changing, said Minxin Pei, a China expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

"China will feel very defensive about the human rights issue and, if anything, it will start paying more attention to this issue and why this issue has attracted so much criticism from the rest of the world," Pei said.

Beyond human rights, the U.S. depends on China's cooperation for some of the most pivotal security challenges of the day: the continued nuclear disarmament of North Korea, building international pressure to limit Iran's nuclear ambitions, forcing the government of Sudan to end the genocide in its Darfur region. In addition, the U.S. is seeking Beijing's cooperation on curbing carbon emissions, revaluing the yuan, and reducing the U.S. trade deficit with China.

China has shown that it can turn its cooperation on or off at will. Shortly after filmmaker Steven Spielberg, who was helping design Olympic ceremonies, appealed last year to China do more to end violence in Darfur, Beijing announced plans to send a team of engineers to aid peace efforts in Sudan. China later signed on to a UN Security Council decision to send peacekeepers to Darfur. But China's efforts have met muted reactions overseas, and, indeed, Spielberg later pulled out, saying China did not go far enough.

The Olympic effect on perception runs both ways, however. And the world's image of China could also change in ways that shape its foreign relations.

"The greatest potential change in China's international situation may not be its orientation to the world but the world's orientation to it," said Derek Mitchell, a China expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

Over the next 15 days, the world will be bombarded by more images of China -- both positive and negative -- than any time since the crackdown at Tiananmen Square in 1989. The image left behind could be defined by political openness, architectural splendor and a non-threatening patriotic fervor. Or, it could be a very different impression.

"Should conditions in Beijing, both in human rights and air-quality terms, continue to be poor," Mitchell said, "China's ambition to be an `attractive' nation with `soft power' legitimacy ... will take a hit, even in the developing world."

eosnos@tribune.com

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Anonymous said...

I spy a little Olympic crack in China’s wall

Simon Jenkins

When China won the contract to host the Olympics, the official Xinhua press agency declared it “another milestone in China’s rising international status and a historical event in the great renaissance of the Chinese nation”. Nobody watching Friday’s start to $40 billion of public expenditure, in what is still one of the world’s poorest nations, could be in any doubt of that. Let us hear no more about the Olympics being about sport.

Ever since their refounding at the end of the 19th century the Olympics have been about politics, whether they were Hitler’s chauvinist parade of 1936 or the current International Olympic Committee’s wishy-washy vacuities about harmony and peace. It is not swimming, running and jumping that have brought 80 world leaders to Beijing. It is national pride. Not since 1936 have the Games been so overtly political as now.

This does not make the Olympics a bad thing. Sport has often been politics by other means, nowhere more so than in authori-tarian oligarchies desperate for the public acclaim of sporting success.

Any visitor to China attests to how much has changed over the past 30 years. Freedom is more widespread, wealth more accessible, travel more open. The expectation that China should be like the West, because it is getting rich like the West, is as facile as the thesis that capitalism necessarily leads to liberty. Of all liberal fallacies, none is more curious than the assumption, applied to countries such as Lebanon, Iraq and Afghanistan, that they can become democracies at the flick of switch.

Much of the abuse hurled at the duplicity of China in recent weeks should be hurled at the cynicism of the IOC. When he gave the Games to Beijing, Jacques Rogge, the IOC president, claimed this would “help the development of human rights in China”. He thus gave the lie to Sir Craig Reedie, Britain’s member on the IOC, who ridiculously declared that its contract was “with the host city; it does not become involved in politics”.

The IOC gave China the Games because it knew that only the wilder shores of politics could possibly fuel its bizarre four-yearly extravaganza. Only politics would induce any country to part with the billions required to meet the IOC’s surreal building, town planning and ceremonial specifications. The modern Olympics makes Nero’s Colosseum seem a bauble and the Field of the Cloth of Gold a village fete. As London is finding, the extravagance of this 16-day venture defies all reason.

An illustration of this is the mendacity that surrounds the Games’s promotion. The BBC, eager to justify its 300 junketeers in Beijing, regularly hyped the “four billion television audience” for the Games. This is the global reach of stations carrying the feed. The actual numbers watching a festival of mostly minor sports can only be guessed, but is certainly small compared with such world sports as football, boxing, tennis and golf.

The tourism gain is equally illusory. The number of foreign tourists to the Olympic Games is trivial, overwhelmed by the army of taxpayer-supported officials and hangers-on. According to the tourism authorities, four-star hotels are just 45% full, with visitors 20% down on the same month last year.

The last Olympic venues, Athens and Sydney, lost tourists. Visitors and tour operators avoid host cities for fear of crowds and a related downswing in three-year block bookings takes time to recover. Australia admitted as much when it later advertised itself with the slogan, “Where the bloody hell are you?”

Lord Coe and Tessa Jowell, the Games minister, keep hyping the British Games as “making a profit”. They never give figures. The only profit is to a tiny circle of architects, consultants and construction companies. An Olympic Games must be the most expensive public gesture, in billions of dollars a day, that any nation can undertake in peacetime, a political spectacular masquerading as sport.

The IOC was drawn to China as the one big country to which it still had a quid pro quo to offer: international respectability. The IOC knew that China might be induced to spend huge sums, not by virtue of political reform, but to cloak the absence of such reform.

To China the deal seemed a good one. The last great dictatorship on Earth must have regarded paying for the Games as a cheap admission fee compared with taking a gamble on free speech, regional devolution, the rule of law and contested elections.

So far the deal has held. Beijing has delivered the IOC the requisite extravaganza. Its sportsmen and women, many barely out of childhood, have risen to the occasion, supplying countless smiling faces to bedeck the IOC’s mission statement of joy and the brotherhood of mankind.

The IOC seems to have found in Chinese communism a shared language and nostalgia for the drilled utopianism of the mid-20th century. A large area of old Beijing has been razed and rebuilt with stadiums, office blocks and avenues, monuments to the modernising zeal of the party. Morally emasculated western architects have lined up for work, led by the son of Albert Speer as master planner.

Above all the Chinese have proved that the Olympics are about control. Lose control, as did the world torch tour and its “1,000 jogging policemen”, and you cannot deliver concord and good publicity. Instead, control has required the Chinese to arrest untold hundreds of human rights activists. It has rendered Tibet virtually inaccessible. Anyone concerned with protest, such as the signers of a letter pleading for “an Olympic spirit” in human rights, has been thrown in jail or removed from the capital; 100,000 troops have been brought in to ring the city.

I have not found any Chinese commentator to suggest that the Olympic Games has led to liberalisation, indeed the reverse. That need not render the outcome of the Games a political failure. The juices of soft world power never run smooth.

In the credit balance can be placed months of publicity for the plight of the Tibetan people, to which the condition of the Uighurs of Xinjiang can now be added. After five years of cloying sycophancy from the West - reminiscent of the talk of the “tiger economies of the Pacific rim” in the 1990s - China’s image is now more qualified and complex.

Alongside greater familiarity with the Chinese as people has come a welcome awareness that they are not one people. They are, like Europeans, many and with diverse ambitions and loyalties, illustrated in the 56 ethnic groups displayed at the opening ceremony.

Just as the Games have required a reinforcement of control, so they must have encouraged liberal elements within the Chinese establishment in the view that progress on the world stage cannot, after all, be wholly divorced from certain forms of freedom. There is no such thing as unqualified admission to the club of liberty.

The tools of authority may have been strengthened to curb dissent over the Games fortnight and are unlikely to be eased when they are over. But the Games have clearly been a political trauma for China. They have revealed the inner workings of the regime to the world and that may nudge it in a direction that all who know and admire the country so desire. For such a boon, the Chinese people have had to part with $40 billion. Perhaps one day they will regard it as money well spent.

Anonymous said...

http://northwardho.blogspot.com/2008/08/16-days-that-changed-world-bejing.html