China's Great Leap: The Beijing Games and Olympian Human Rights Challenges
Reviewed by Paul Mozur
Posted July 4, 2008
As the beleagured Olympic torch relay slouched toward Lhasa on June 21, Beijing readied the security forces and held its breath. Tibet Communist Party Secretary Zhang Qingli kicked off the celebrations with a thinly veiled warning to Tibetans: “We will certainly be able to totally smash the splittist schemes of the Dalai Lama clique and safeguard the stability of Tibet … to contribute to the success of the Beijing Olympic Games.” Then for three hours runners jogged with the torch through streets isolated by security to the cheers of the hand-picked, predominantly Han Chinese spectators.
In what is becoming a trend in China, everything went as planned, and yet the result has been a public-relations disaster. On June 27 The Wall Street Journal Asia reported that the International Olympic Committee issued a letter of warning to Beijing for mixing politics and sport for Mr. Zhang’s neat piece of vitriol. Beijing shot back with a typically bemusing statement claiming that it is all for the depoliticization of the Olympics and that Mr. Zhang’s speech was intended only to promote a “stable and harmonious environment for the Olympic Games.”
While most have grown inured to such Beijing doublespeak, the more significant contradiction comes in the IOC’s insistence in clinging to its quixotic Olympics-without-politics stance. As Dave Zirin’s outstanding essay shows (“The Ghosts of Olympics Past,” one of 24 essays by China experts and human-rights activists that comprise China’s Great Leap) the IOC has historically proven unable to see that the Olympics are inevitably political and that by demanding the Olympics be apolitical, it further politicizes them.
Looking back, it is impossible to recall an Olympics that has been apolitical. For example the massive debt accrued by Montreal in 1976, the democratic revolution before South Korea’s 1988 games and the Tlatelolco Square massacres before the 1968 Mexico City Olympics all made those Olympics fundamentally political.
Even worse, with a critical historical view turned on the Olympics, the Games seem more often an extravagant excrescence on the international community than a celebration of cooperation and sport. And the IOC, in the characterization of Mr. Zirin, seems little more than “a club for fossilized aristocrats with nostalgia for epaulets.” To begin fixing the many problems that plague the Games—graft, security threats, and, in the case of China, broken promises to improve human rights—a simple admittance that the Olympics are political would help immensely. Then the organization might dare strive for transparency and disclosure, and realistically counter the toxic side of international politics that can ruin the Olympics. Instead, the IOC’s unrealistic stance has only worsened things in Beijing this year.
As Executive Director of Human Rights in China Sharon Hom’s essay chronicles, the IOC has refused to release the Host City Contract with Beijing citing “commercial confidentiality,” even though the contracts were released for four of the past six Games. Moreover, its repeated tight-lipped reaction to the Olympic torch protests, Beijing’s recent crackdown in Tibet and media-company protests that Beijing is reneging on its promise of unlimited access for journalists during the Olympics align it woefully with the Chinese Communist Party. One thing is certain: If something goes wrong this August, the IOC cannot be relied upon to aid what will undoubtedly be a sensitive situation.
The 24 authors see the games as an opportunity to focus on the human-rights challenges China faces. The editor, Media Director at Human Rights Watch Minky Worden, bills it as “constructive criticism to chart the future, offered by experts who care deeply about China and its people.” Of course, the degree to which the authors wish to agitate for change as well as their hopes for success vary widely.
Former student organizer at Tiananmen Square Wang Dan calls for the international community to demand an “Olympic amnesty” whereby all political prisoners and exiles are released or allowed to return for the Olympics. Meanwhile, famed Chinese writer Liu Xiaobo cynically predicts that a successful Olympics will primarily benefit the government and the elite classes. Bao Tong, former CCP Central Committee secretary to Premier Zhao Ziyang, who was purged after the Tiananmen crackdown, notes a darkening pattern in internal affairs: “The Chinese government is growing increasingly reliant on coercive powers to keep down the disgruntled while at the same time growing addicted to tactical cosmetic patches, such as hosting the Olympics.”
The book’s essays on specific topics in China’s development remain similarly divided about the country’s progress. Jerome Cohen, a law professor at New York University and an expert on Chinese law, cites a glimmer of hope for legal reform in the Supreme Court’s recent attempt to cut the number of executions in China. R. Scott Greathead, a board member of Human Rights in China, recounts Mia Farrow’s successes in effecting change in China’s policies in Darfur through her “genocide Olympics” campaign. The June 24 letter from China urging for quick elections in Zimbabwe, while undoubtedly politically calculated, forms another positive development of foreign engagement by China. On the other side of the spectrum, essays on China’s environmental and migrant labor problems reveal flaws that will most likely only be fixed by a rise in civil society and greater governmental tolerance of dissent.
Paul Mozur is a Princeton-in-Asia fellow at the REVIEW.
