As the Dalai Lama begins a contentious two-week visit to the United States and the Olympic torch continues its tortuous journey across six continents toward Beijing, the 2008 Games, already tarnished, have become a political as well as an athletic spectacle, with vying theories of human rights and how best to promote them.
Groups devoted to causes as diverse as press freedom, Falun Gong, Tibet and autonomy for Uighur Muslims in China’s far west have used the Games as leverage to highlight issues that had been relegated to advocacy chat rooms during most of China’s long economic boom.
Aggressive street demonstrations in London, Paris and the United States, and mounting calls for President George W. Bush and other world leaders to skip the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games in August as a show of protest against China’s internal policies, have produced a nationalist backlash in China. There, both the leadership and ordinary people resent what many see as a plot to disrupt the Games and damage China’s image as a rising power, which the Olympics once seemed likely to burnish.
Politics has not intruded on the Games to this extent since Soviet bloc countries boycotted the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles in retaliation for a United States-led boycott of the Moscow Games in 1980, after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
Not meaning to demean Asians in any way (I have many Asian friends and a Chinese daughter-in-law) , I will just say this: There is such a thing as national “loss of face,” and the Chinese leaders don’t want to “lose face,” or be made to “look bad” in the eyes of foreigners.
One of the International Olympic Committee’s reasons for awarding the summer 2008 games to Beijing was to encourage the Chinese government to improve its human rights record.
There is probably no comparison between “ancient” Greece and “modern” China with respect to the Olympic games but I believe I recall from my ancient history class that Greece during its early time of national growth where city-states were constantly fighting and killing each other would somehow put aside their death-dealing spats and sustained a fragile peace while the ancient Olympic games were conducted. Of course our present world nations may be too sophisticated to even try to conduct games peacefully for awhile!