Tibet: An Olympic-size black eye for Beijing

This was not the way China

This was not the way China’s authoritarian government planned it, said Trudy Rubin in The Philadelphia Inquirer. “The Olympics were supposed to be China’s coming-out party on the world stage.” But with the games just five months away, the ruling cadre finds itself facing a “nightmare rather than a celebration.” For the last two weeks, the world has watched China mercilessly crack down on Tibetans rioting for their freedom in their capital of Lhasa. Armed security forces have killed as many as 100 and dragged off thousands to jail. In Greece this week, the lighting of the Olympic flame was disrupted by protesters, including a Tibetan who doused herself with red paint and prostrated herself in front of a torch runner. Beijing, though, is defiant, said Joshua Kurlantzick in The New Republic. Even before the current unrest, authorities were locking up dissidents, shutting down publications, and harassing ethnic minorities. It’s all part of a new, cynical government tactic: “using Olympic security as an excuse to crack down on its ‘enemies.’”

Is anyone really surprised? said Matthew Continetti in The Weekly Standard. When the International Olympic Committee picked Beijing in 2001, it did so in part in the naïve hope that “hosting the Olympics would mellow Beijing’s ruthlessness” and give Western democracies some leverage over its coercive policies. That hope is now officially dead, said Robert Kagan in The Washington Post. “China can go for great stretches these days looking like the model of a postmodern 21st-century power. But occasionally the mask slips and the other side of China is revealed.” For all its apparent modernity, China remains a backward dictatorship run by ruthless men whose primary concern is preserving their own power.

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