China bunkers down behind its great wall
By Kent Ewing
HONG KONG - Now that the Beijing Summer Olympic Games slogan - "One world, one
dream" - has turned into a nightmare for Beijing, it is apparent that protests
dogging the Olympic torch as it makes its painful and humiliating way around
the globe have succeeded only in hardening China's position on Tibet and human
rights and alienating the Chinese people.
On the mainland - and in Hong Kong too, where East and West supposedly meet in
commercially inspired harmony - the violent, farcical street theater that
accompanied the relay of the flame through London and Paris has been greeted
largely with scorn and resentment.
The cowardice that led to the last-minute rerouting of the flame in San
Francisco did nothing to assuage the pain. This moveable
mockery of China's ambition to be an equal partner in world affairs is
perceived as an insult not just to the Chinese government but to Chinese people
everywhere. The counter-protests staged by overseas Chinese living in those
cities offer proof of that.
The torch's mostly peaceful passage through the Argentine capital of Buenos
Aires last Friday brought welcome relief to Beijing, and the respite continued
as the relay passed through Dar es Salaam in Tanzania on Sunday and Muscat in
Oman on Monday. Islamabad in Pakistan is the next stop this week - and you
won't find much support there for the free-Tibet movement or for dissidents
languishing in Chinese prisons.
Indeed, Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, now visiting Beijing, lambasted
Western leaders and media for politicizing the Olympics with their criticisms
of China's human rights record and policy in Tibet.
After Islamabad, however, things are almost guaranteed to get rough again for
the torch in the Indian capital of New Delhi, where an army of displaced
Tibetans is sure to mass. Australia could also be a freak show - and remember,
as the torch approaches the end of its run through 21 countries on all six
inhabited continents, it is scheduled to pass through Tibet itself.
By the time the "sacred" flame reaches Beijing for the opening ceremony of the
Games on August 8, where the protests will no doubt continue with 30,000
foreign reporters looking on, every group with an ax to grind against China
will have had an opportunity to air its grievances to a worldwide audience.
Indeed, these Olympics, if they are not torpedoed altogether in the next four
months, may be remembered as the "Protest Games", and Chinese leaders may come
to rue the day they decided to host them. What was supposed to be Beijing's
grand international coming-out party is rapidly disintegrating into one big,
prolonged excuse to bash China.
And while these criticisms may be based on legitimate concerns about the
repressive Chinese presence in Tibet and the ugly human-rights record of China
in general, their expression has led to a surge of nationalism among Chinese
that has strengthened, not weakened, authoritarian Communist Party rule.
Internet chat rooms are full of outrage over newspaper and television reports
of protesters hanging from the Golden Gate Bridge and doing their best to
extinguish the Olympic flame as it is carried through the streets of their
cities. How is the average Chinese supposed to react to a Western protester
greeting the symbol of his or her country's arrival on the world stage with a
fire extinguisher?
Two heroic stories perhaps best illustrate the great divide between Chinese and
Western sensibilities over the rough passage of the flame. On the Chinese side,
we have Jin Jing, a 28-year-old amputee now widely revered as the "wheelchair
angel". After losing a leg to cancer, she has become a national hero for her
defense of the flame during its perilous Parisian sojourn. According to state
media, Jin, formerly a member of Shanghai's wheelchair fencing team, fought off
waves of deranged demonstrators to keep the flame alight during the Paris leg
of the relay. Photographs and video footage of her successful battle with one
assailant lit up Internet chat rooms with nationalistic fervor and outrage.
"Ms Jin is a smiling angel in a wheelchair," gushed the official Xinhua News
Agency. "Her fearlessness was infectious and touched the heart of the entire
nation."
And, in this case, the propaganda was also the reality.
Jin, who had lost her job as a hotel switchboard operator, should now have no
trouble finding other employment. An entire nation has embraced her as a symbol
of Chinese determination and pride.
On another side of the world meet Majora Carter, 41, an Olympic torch-bearer in
San Francisco who used her moment in the limelight to unfurl a small Tibetan
flag that she had hidden in her sleeve. While the native New Yorker's moment of
glory was much briefer and not as widely celebrated and as that of her Chinese
counterpart, it was no less emblematic.
"I was expressing my right as an American citizen using freedom of speech in
support of people who don't have it," Carter told the New York Daily News. "It
just became really clear to me what was going on in Tibet, and I wanted to do
something."
While the ordeal of the wheelchair angel went on for a reported 15 minutes,
Carter and her Tibetan flag were quickly muscled out of the relay and into the
hands of the San Francisco police by the Olympic torch's now notorious
paramilitary phalanx of Chinese escorts.
"Apparently, I'm not a part of the Olympic torch-bearing entourage anymore,"
Carter told the Daily News.
A spokesman for Coca-Cola, which sponsored Carter in the only North American
stop for the relay and obviously wants to sell a lot more cola in China,
expressed the company's disappointment.
"It's unfortunate that Ms Carter used an invitation to participate in the torch
relay as a platform to make a personal political statement," said Kelly Brooks.
"We firmly believe the Olympics are a force for good that celebrate the best in
sports, and we are proud to support the Beijing 2008 Olympics."
No doubt Chinese leaders were expecting the rest of the world, like Coke, to
focus on the bottom line. But it has become obvious that many in the West have
no qualms about using the Olympics to call out China on everything from human
rights to Tibet to Darfur. This, they naively believe, will persuade China's
leaders to reform.
On the contrary, Western protests, particularly over the Tibet issue, have only
succeeded in angering the Chinese people, which has freed up the central
government to take an even harder authoritarian line. Despite the protests, the
leadership did not hesitate this month to jail human-rights activist Hu Jia for
three years and half years.
Beijing also seems to be preparing for a crackdown in Xinjiang, an autonomous
region in the remote northwest whose population is mostly Muslim. Last week,
the Ministry of Public Security announced that police had broken up two
terrorist cells in the region that were targeting the Olympic Games. While this
may very well be true, ministry spokesman Wu Heping offered no evidence of the
alleged plot, and it is certainly not beyond Chinese leaders to exaggerate the
threat of terrorism to justify a crackdown on the restless Uyghur minority who
live in the region.
State media have also labeled the Tibetan Youth Congress, which supports
independence for Tibet, "a terrorist organization" and accused it - again,
without evidence - of acts as horrific as cutting off the ears of its enemies
and burning innocent people alive.
In addition, US house speaker Nancy Pelosi, one of China's harshest critics in
the West, has come under vitriolic attack. The Communist Party's flagship
newspaper, the People's Daily, said Pelosi would be voted "the most disgusting
figure" in any poll of the Chinese people.
No to be outdone, Xinhua added, undoubtedly with Pelosi's support of the Dalai
Lama (now on a two-week tour of the US) and the riotous Tibetan demonstrators
in mind: "The Chinese people are fully justified to call her 'a protector of
mobsters, arsonists and murderers'."
This is how China "caves in" to Western protests. The Olympic flame fiasco has
only hardened China's leaders in their conviction that there is a Western plot
to humiliate the country in the leadup to the Olympics that is part of a
broader conspiracy to prevent China's rise on the world stage. And the Chinese
people stand behind that conviction. Their rising tide of angry nationalism
will last well beyond the Olympics. The dream that this summer's Games would
bring China and the West closer together has been shattered. As pressure builds
on Western leaders to boycott the opening ceremony, resentment, distrust and
misunderstanding are the rule.
Kent Ewing is a teacher and writer at Hong Kong International School. He
can be reached at kewing@hkis.edu.hk.
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