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 fter
careful deliberation, the Bush administration has decided to take
no position on Beijing's bid to host the 2008 Summer Olympics. By
itself, this is not a very remarkable decision. The U.S. government
is not required to take any position on bids to host the Olympics,
and many people would prefer they not do so. As a conversational
cliché, "the Olympics are too politicized" is almost
as well entrenched as "looks like rain" or "how about
them Yankees!" Speaking as a conservative who wishes the federal
government to butt out of places where it doesn't belong, I guess
I should be glad that the administration has declared neutrality
on Beijing's Olympic bid.
I'm not, though.
One thing the federal government ought to do, whenever it can
do it without any injury to U.S. interests, is speak up for civilized
values against barbarism and lawlessness. Another thing it ought
to do is express loud anger and indignation when U.S. citizens are
hustled off into dungeons and tortured by foreign powers, as has
been the fate of Dr. Li Shaomin, currently in the tender care of
Communist China's secret police. One thing the federal government
ought not do is pander to the yearning for respectability
that thugs and gangsters naturally have. And another thing it ought
not do is play into the national psychoses of an aberrant,
autistic nation badly in need of some tough love.
It would be
nice if we could discuss this matter simply as a clash of values
and wills with the Chinese Communist Party. Unfortunately, as you
will know if you have spoken to any Chinese people about Beijing's
candidacy for the Olympics, there is much more to it than this.
By way of further
insights, allow me to introduce you to James Bruce, Eighth Earl
of Elgin. When, in 1860, the Chinese seized British envoys travelling
under a flag of truce, Lord Elgin marched his army into Beijing.
He then burned the Emperor's Summer Palace, in order, as he said,
"to punish the court while sparing the people."
Lord Elgin
had a point. The imperial court was not popular with the Chinese
people, being made up of Manchus, a Siberian tribe who had seized
the Empire from an imploding Chinese dynasty two hundred years previously.
Punishing the court while sparing the people must have seemed to
the noble Lord like good P.R. And, of course, a Chinese general
in the same position would have burned the whole city of Beijing,
after first putting its population to the sword. Lord Elgin probably
thought he was making a good impression on the Chinese masses.
Alas, in China
no good deed goes unpunished. The burning of the Summer Palace is
regarded by all Chinese people as a major atrocity against their
national dignity and honor. To this day, an Englishman in China
is in daily peril of being buttonholed by some angry patriot and
scolded for Lord Elgin's act of magnanimity. (It is interesting
to note by way of comparison that after fifteen years in the United
States, I have yet to be told off for General Ross's burning of
the White House in 1814.) The Chinese man in the street may not
have cared for the Manchu court, but he took the point of view that
the Summer Palace was a Chinese palace, built with the labor of
Chinese people on Chinese soil, filled with Chinese artefacts made
with loving care by Chinese craftsmen, and that its destruction
was an insult to the whole nation. *
Some similar
psychological dynamic is at work in the Chinese bid to have Beijing
host the Olympics. For those of us who oppose Beijing's bid, our
strongest motivation is to vex the Chinese Communist Party, and
to punish them for their continuing gross offenses against international
law and decency — most prominently, at the present time, for their
brutal seizing of American citizens and near-citizens in violation
of all diplomatic proprieties. As I pointed out when
I last wrote about Beijing's Olympic bid: "We should not
give these tyrants anything they want, unless the giving
will shift the balance of power away from them and to their people."
Denying the Olympics to Beijing would be a stinging rebuke to the
Communists — a plain message to them that we do not consider their
vicious little tyranny sufficiently respectable to play host to
an international sporting event established on high principles.
It would be "punishing the court while sparing the people."
And yet, like
Lord Elgin, we should get no thanks from the Chinese people, only
fierce anger. As with the Manchus, you cannot find anyone in China
who has a good word for the Communist Party. The Party is universally
detested for its corruption and brutality. If granting the Olympics
to Beijing had no purpose but to boost the fortunes of the Chinese
Communist Party, nobody in China would want them.
Yet practically
everybody in China, including even many dissidents, does
want them, very badly. Why? Why is it so all-fired important to
them? Why will the rejection of Toronto's bid, or Paris's, or Osaka's,
be a third-lead item on the news in those countries, while the rejection
of Beijing's bid will be a stupendous national trauma for the Chinese?
The answer lies in that terrible, aching inferiority complex that
makes China such a danger to the rest of us, and which, paradoxically,
does so much to hinder China's development as a civilized modern
nation. The French, the Japanese, and the Canadians woke to awareness
of themselves as nations when they were already surrounded by other
nations much like them in size, in population, in level of cultural
development. China, by contrast, became aware of being a nation
among other nations only after being woken rather abruptly, and
by no means gently, from a 3,000-year dream of herself as the one,
the only civilization.
Yet as much
as one may understand the origins of China's collective neurosis,
and perhaps even sympathize with it to some degree, I do not believe
we should pander to it. The pressing need here is for the Chinese
people — not the court, the people — to get acquainted with
some unwelcome truths.
Look: there
is probably no more important task for the world today than to think
how we can help the Chinese get themselves a rational system of
government. Everyone who cares about the future of the human race
should be racking his brains to come up with something we
can do. I like to think I have done my
own small bit in this regard; but no one can ever really do
enough, and this issue should be a constant preoccupation for all
of us. However, the beginning of wisdom in this matter is the recognition
that there are features of Chinese culture and common Chinese belief
that are large impediments to the kind of progress we want. First
and foremost, there is the deep-ingrained imperialism of the Chinese
— practically all of them. I have posed the following little experiment
elsewhere:
Try asking pretty much any modern Chinese person which of the following
he would prefer: for the Communists to stay in power indefinitely,
unreformed, but in full control of the "three T's" (Tibet,
Turkestan, Taiwan); or a democratic, constitutional government without
the three T's. His answer will depress you.
The continued
military occupation of two million square miles of other people's
land, and the bullying and threatening of Taiwan, are unacceptable
violations of civilized values and international order. They are,
however, wildly popular among the Chinese. Now, modern history (Turkey,
Russia, Austria, Spain) suggests rather strongly that a power of
the imperial-despotic type cannot advance to constitutional nationhood
until it has first shed its imperial possessions. If we want China
to be free, we have some serious issues to discuss with the Chinese
people. Offering tokens of respectability to their flammable, ramshackle
empire is not the right way to begin this conversation. At some
point we shall have to say to them: "If you want the respect
and esteem of the rest of the world, you must withdraw your armies
to the borders of metropolitan China and stop making belligerent
threats against people who mean you no harm."
This will not
go down very well, for the same reason that an IOC rejection will
not go down very well. Yet it would surely be wrong of us to pretend
to a respect and an esteem that we cannot, as believers in liberty,
justice and law, honestly feel. It would be equally wrong to give
China the impression that she is acceptable as a full member of
the international community when, for reasons that go deeper than
the continuing rule of the Chinese Communist Party, she is not in
fact acceptable at all, if our ideals mean anything to us. "Olympism,"
as defined in the Olympic Charter, includes "respect for universal
fundamental ethical principles." China does not yet rise to
that standard. The Chinese Communist Party does not; neither, it
is sad but necessary to say, do the Chinese people.
* Much of the Summer Palace was in fact designed by the 18th-century
Milanese artist Giuseppe Castiglione. It is supposed to have represented
a high point of Sino-European artistic collaboration. If you like
the rococo style, perhaps it was; but looking at what remains of
the Summer Palace, I can never quite banish from my own mind the
thought that, from the strictly esthetic point of view, its burning
may have been a net gain for civilization.
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