Olympics doesn't outshine Issues

Ryan Dinkgrave

As of late, the Olympic torch has looked more like a celebrity being chased by paparazzi or a controversial politician on the run than a historic symbol of a global athletic competition. In Paris, Olympic officials extinguished the flame and put it on a bus to avoid the crowds before they canceled a leg of its tour of Paris. Before the torch arrived in San Francisco, daring protesters climbed the Golden Gate Bridge to unfurl a giant banner that read “One World, One Dream, Free Tibet.”

But should any of this have come as a surprise?

Of the approximately 200 generally recognized nations in the world, a minority are dictatorships or republics under single-party control. Of this minority, none is as large, powerful or controversial as the People’s Republic of China. Given the country’s history of not respecting human rights and a reputation for harsh censorship, why did the International Olympic Committee select China to host the games?

There are a number of possible explanations, but most come down to familiar forces — power and money. Unfortunately, China is a poor choice to host the games as a result of these very same forces. The Chinese Communist Party maintains its totalitarian rule through the stifling of free speech and other abuses of power. For example, with the cooperation of major American companies such as Google Inc. and Microsoft Corp., the government regulates online communications and punishes those who use banned words such as “democracy” and “human rights.” This ensures that the party is always reflected positively, regardless of how abhorrent its behavior.

While people around the world have long rallied against China for its abuses of human rights and its occupation of Tibet, the country has come under international scrutiny in recent years for other concerns, as well. A decade of explosive growth has come with a high price in the form of pollution, and recent incidents have suggested the nation is not prepared to handle such situations. The air is of such poor quality that in Beijing, where athletes are to compete this summer, the government measures “blue-sky-days” — where the smog doesn’t block the view across Tiananmen Square. Worse still is China’s complicity in the genocide in Darfur by trading weapons to the Sudanese government for oil.

The stage was set for the current predicament, wherein the Olympic torch is met around the world with protest, much to China’s frustration. Since it was first announced that Beijing would host the 2008 Summer Olympics, China has insisted the Olympics and Chinese politics are separate and unrelated topics. This is quite an absurd notion, however, as the Olympics, being the summit of the world’s nations, have always had a political component. From the Nazi propaganda film “Olympia,” which depicted the torch’s trip from Greece to the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin, to the U.S. boycott of the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow, politics and the Olympics have been closely intertwined.

So what exactly did the IOC expect when it chose Beijing to host the Olympics? There was no shortage of healthy democracies that would have been thrilled to host the games. Toronto, Paris and Osaka, Japan were among the finalists, and all would have made much more appropriate settings for such a global celebration than the tensely controversial political and social environment in China.

What did the Chinese government expect when Beijing was chosen to host the Olympics? Did it believe that by building enormous stadiums and facilities that the international press would conveniently “forget” the Chinese human rights record? Did it think it could plaster the cartoon Olympic mascots that were originally called “the Friendlies” over the images of torture and forced detention without trial?

Regardless of anybody’s intentions or expectations, the fact of the matter is that the issues of Tibet, Darfur and human rights are at the center of attention as Beijing prepares to host the world this summer. China will continue to insist these issues are not related to the sporting events, but it is difficult, if not impossible, to imagine these topics not being discussed by the world’s media during the sporting events in August. If the Chinese government concludes after the Olympics that the event was “lost” to the political issues and that it has suffered as a consequence, it will have to blame itself.

Ryan Dinkgrave is a State News columnist. Reach him at dinkgra2@msu.edu.

Published on Thursday, April 10, 2008