Tibet: An Olympic-size black eye for Beijing

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.

Beijing’s brazen thuggery is appalling, said The New York Times in an editorial. “Yet the response of the international community, and of the International Olympic Committee, has been tepid,” with the U.S. and other countries issuing “anemic statements urging restraint.” That’s not enough. Some foreign leaders are suggesting they won’t attend the opening ceremonies; President Bush should send a powerful signal by following suit. Whatever we do, let’s not organize a boycott, said British Olympic Association chairman Colin Moynihan in the London Times. As the U.S. learned in 1980, and the Eastern Bloc found in 1984, boycotts solve nothing and only yield huge medal wins for the host nation. Besides, the Olympics are a sporting event, not a forum for political ideologies.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

“We shouldn’t be mixing sports and politics?” said Bernard-Henri Lévy in The New Republic. That’s rich. It’s the Chinese who are politicizing these games by “hoisting the Olympic flame over the bodies of assassinated men of peace and prayer.” Besides, said Anne Applebaum in Slate.com, the Olympics have almost never been apolitical. The 1936 Berlin Games spotlighted Nazi Germany’s military might. The U.S.-USSR rivalry was played out in the Cold War–era Games. As for the charge that boycotts don’t work, that’s hogwash. “The boycott of South African athletes from international competitions was probably the single most effective weapon the international community ever deployed against the apartheid state.”

Who needs a boycott? said the Chicago Tribune. Around the world, public outrage is building over Beijing’s domestic repression, its grip on Tibet, and its support of murderous regimes in Darfur and elsewhere. For China, these protests are “beyond inconvenient”; they are deeply humiliating. Come August, they’ll be inescapable. As Beijing seizes on the Olympics to hype what’s right with China, “it should remember that the Games will also draw attention to what’s wrong.”