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Editor's
note: The State Department announced on Monday that the U.S.
will remain neutral on Beijing's bid to host the 2008 Olympics.
In the October 9, 2001, issue of National Review, NR's
managing editor, Jay Nordlinger, made the case against "Beijing
2008."
 ere
we go again: Beijing is trying to get the Olympic Games, this time
for 2008. In the early 1990s, they made an
all-out effort to win the Games for 2000, losing out by a hair to
Sydney. Now they are the clear front-runner; a decision is expected
sometime next summer. The Chinese insist — aggressively —
that the 2008 Games are their due. Therefore, it is time to consider,
once more, whether the Games should be staged in a totalitarian
capital.
Back in '92 and '93, when the Chinese made their first attempt,
Tiananmen Square was a fairly fresh memory. (That massacre took
place in 1989.) The authorities needed a leg up with both the world
and their own people. So they craved the Olympics even more desperately
than they do today. In a breathtaking campaign, they earmarked billions
of dollars for "Olympic construction." They offered to pay transportation
and room-and-board for the many thousands of athletes and officials
who would attend the Games. They initiated a public-hygiene crusade:
"Mobilize the Masses to Create a Fly-Free City!" They enlisted the
citizenry to scrub and festoon the capital. They held contests in
speaking English and other foreign languages, with cold cash going
to the winners. They forbade residents to burn coal (as most of
them did for their basic needs): The sky had to be blue! Every day,
it was put out more flags, brandish and recite more slogans.
And the deciders? They got the royal (Communist) treatment. Said
one Beijing official, "We look upon the International Olympic Committee
as God. Their wish is our command." The government ordered the air
force to disperse the clouds over the capital, lest it rain on the
Committee's grandees. They took the step of nominating Juan Antonio
Samaranch, boss of the IOC, for the Nobel Peace Prize. They provided
each member of the Committee with all manner of comforts, including
a chauffeured black Mercedes. They pledged to build a monument on
the Great Wall bearing the names of all ninety IOC members.
And, for a special treat, they stopped following around foreign
reporters — stopped putting tails on them, giving them a little
more space.
Nevertheless, there were human-rights objections here and there.
The U.S. Congress adopted a resolution opposing the granting of
the Olympics to Beijing; the European Parliament did the same. This
hardly pleased the IOC. Samaranch grumbled that the United States
was happy to trade with China but not to give them the Olympics.
Another Committee official said — poetically if absurdly — "If
we always picked a city wearing a halo, we wouldn't be celebrating
our hundredth anniversary…"
The Chinese dissident community itself was split. Most were opposed
to letting the regime have the Games, but a few prominent spokesmen
were not. Wang Dan, a student leader in Tiananmen Square, was released
in February 1993, about a half-year before the Committee's vote.
Somewhat reluctantly, he favored giving the Games to Beijing, hoping
that this plum would "accelerate China's opening to the rest of
the world." Wei Jingsheng, another widely admired dissident, felt
the same. He was released a grand total of nine days before the
Committee voted, after being imprisoned for 14 and a half years.
As a further sweetener, Beijing delayed the prosecution of about
twenty other democracy activists — men and women who were pawns
in the regime's Olympic game.
A History of Politics
Today, Wei opposes Beijing 2008, for reasons that we will explore
in a moment. (Wang Dan — who now, like Wei, lives in the United
States — was unavailable for comment.) Wei brings up —
as do many others — the specter of Berlin '36. These were,
of course, the Hitler Games. The standard American view of these
Games is that they blew up in Hitler's face thanks to the historic
performance of the (black) U.S. track-and-field star Jesse Owens.
This view is handed out to Americans in kindergarten along with
crayons and construction paper. But it is untrue: The opportunity
to host the Olympics was of great importance to Hitler and the furtherance
of his regime, as scholars of the period uniformly acknowledge.
Berlin got the '36 Games in 1931, two years before the Nazis rose
to power. Once Hitler was installed, however, a movement took shape
to boycott the Games. In 1933, the American Olympic committees voted
to stay away from Berlin if Hitler refused to allow Jewish athletes
to participate on German teams. The regime found two token Jews,
both of them living in exile, and this gesture satisfied the Americans.
All hope of a boycott faded. Hitler also relaxed — just for
a bit — his general persecution of the Jews, a period that
became known as his "Olympic Pause."
In 1935, the American consul in Berlin, one George S. Messersmith,
wrote the following to secretary of state Cordell Hull: "To the
[Nazi] Party and to the youth of Germany, the holding of the Olympic
Games in Berlin in 1936 has become the symbol of the conquest of
the world by National Socialist doctrine. Should the Games not be
held in Berlin, it would be one of the most serious blows which
National Socialist prestige could suffer." As Duff Hart-Davis, author
of Hitler's Games, relates, the Nazis ensured that Berlin
was nicely and benignly turned out, creating the mirage that the
Führer's Germany was "a perfectly normal place, in which life went
on as pleasantly as in any other European country." Freedom-suppressing
governments — such as China's — become expert at erecting
Potemkin villages. Hart-Davis further writes, "That the success
of the eleventh Olympiad gave Hitler an enormous boost, both moral
and political, nobody could deny." The journalist William Shirer
recorded in 1984, "Hitler, we who covered the Games had to concede,
turned the Olympics into a dazzling propaganda success for his barbarian
regime."
Whether a boycott would have made a difference is a matter for speculation.
Germany, incidentally, was banned from the 1948 Games, held in a
London that still bore marks of the Blitz.
Political questions have never been divorced from the Games, and
probably never will be. The chance to host the Olympics is panted
after by many nations, for many reasons. By the end of 1972, the
IOC had awarded the Games to all three of the major aggressor powers
in World War II: Italy (1960), Japan (1964), and Germany (1972).
This was a way of welcoming those countries back into the family
of nations, and of rewarding them for taking the democratic road.
For Cold War reasons — "balance" and all that — the Committee
felt it necessary to give the Games to the USSR in 1980. But in
December 1979, the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, and as former president
Richard Nixon put it so memorably, "You can't just go over there
and high-jump with them."
China, for its part, has always been an Olympic problem. For years,
the regime refused to participate in the Games if Taiwan were permitted
to do so. As it stands now, Taiwan is allowed to compete, but only
under the awkward name "Chinese Taipei."
One truly interesting case is that of the 1988 Games, held in Seoul.
The fact of the Olympics there is often credited with hastening
the democratization of that country. As Don Oberdorfer, former Washington
Post reporter and a Korea expert, explains, "The dictatorship
in Seoul, which had pledged free elections, faced huge protests
in 1987," a year before the torch was to be lit. Strongman Chun
Doo Hwan "considered calling out the military, but the prospect
of the Olympics stayed his hand. President Reagan, too, sent a letter
warning him not to do it, but the coming of the Olympics was the
biggest factor." The rest, for South Korea, was smooth sailing out
of authoritarianism. Oberdorfer is one who hopes that Beijing will
get the Games for 2008, believing that this "would have a restraining
effect" on that regime.
A License for State Thuggery?
Wei Jingsheng thinks otherwise. In 1993, he notes, "I was used to
enhance the Party's effort to get a high score on its application
for 2000." And "there was a sudden improvement in human rights"
— a Chinese "Olympic Pause." In those days, he favored the
Games in Beijing because "I thought the Party would be able to hold
on to power for a few more years in a very stable form, and I thought
having the Games would promote the opening of people's minds." Yet
the wheel has turned. "The regime is relatively unstable, and by
2008 it might be in a state of great turmoil. The Games would do
the Chinese people no good, and the Olympic movement itself no good."
Then there is the key question of nationalism. "If China gets the
Games," says Wei, "that would inflame extreme nationalism. It would
play a harmful role in the moral and spiritual lives of the people.
The Party would promote itself to anti-Western elements, and it
might even be encouraged to attack Taiwan." In this regard, "there
is a clear parallel to Berlin — the regime would be bolder."
But if Beijing were again denied the Games, would that not incite
further nationalism and xenophobia? "Just the opposite," answers
Wei. "The regime would have gone unrewarded. When the bad boy is
not behaving himself, we should not encourage him, but find a way
to tell him he is wrong."
Justin Yu, a Chinese journalist working in New York, points out
that the regime uses sports to puff itself up before its own people,
much as the Eastern-bloc countries used to do. The Olympics, according
to Yu, are strictly "a tool for Beijing to use. The Games give them
a reason to crush Falun Gong, for example. [These are the meditators
and slow-movement exercisers who so vex the Party, and who are arrested,
tortured, and killed for their troubles.] The regime can say, 'So
many foreigners are coming, we have to show our good side. So let's
chase out all the trouble-makers, hunt them down to the very last
one.' They will say to people, 'We have to show the world that we
are unified. You have no freedom, but we have the Olympics. So sacrifice
more, be patient, and accept more people in jail.' And if people
believe that having the Olympics will raise the prestige of the
PRC, they will go along with it."
What, though, of the argument that the Olympics would put the government
"in the spotlight"? Yu scoffs: "People are always talking about
the 'spotlight': The Asian Games in 1990, the International Women's
Conference in 1995 — these international events are supposed
to put the regime 'in the spotlight.' Actually, they just provide
an excuse for the regime to cleanse and purge the city. They make
a Disney village — clean and nice. Where is Mickey Mouse? They
move out laborers from the country, who may not look so good. Intellectuals,
dissidents, certain important political prisoners held in Beijing
jails — all are moved out, transferred, because the government
doesn't want anyone to visit with them."
Concludes Yu, "The government's general line is: 'Whoever is against
us shows us no respect. You're either for us or against us. The
Dalai Lama — he is against us. Against China. We have an international
event now, so let's crack down on anyone who might embarrass us.'"
In other words, "The Communists create an atmosphere, a mood, in
which they can do anything."
Su Xiaokang, the Princeton, N.J.-based editor of Democratic China,
an online magazine, puts it this way: "After Tiananmen Square, the
government had no authority. So they had to find another source
of support — that was nationalism. They made everything a matter
of Chinese pride. They had lost trust, and something like the Olympics
is a way of getting it back. They took Hong Kong back. They want
to take Taiwan back. The Olympics would strengthen them, make them
look good. That's why they want them so badly."
Exactly the Wrong City
Do they ever. The authorities are back to their old tricks —
having the streets polished, insisting that bare-chested men put
on shirts, offering English lessons on buses. They even went so
far as to withdraw 27 athletes and 13 coaches on the eve of the
Sydney Olympics. They had been "doping," of course, and China was
loath to see anything tarnish its Olympic image with another vote
coming up. More ominously, the mayor of Beijing, rallying the troops,
made so bold as to say that China must "battle and crush Falun Gong
and other cult organizations." With so much at stake, not an ounce
of deviation can be tolerated.
The regime is also playing very heavily the numbers card. The argument
is: We are almost a fifth of the earth's population, so how can
you withhold the Games from us? One official lectured, "The Olympic
Games belong to the whole world. The fact that the Games have not
yet been held in China is a failure of the Olympic movement." Pressed
on human rights, the official said huffily, "There is no
excuse for denying the dreams of 1.3 billion people to hold the
Olympics in Beijing."
This line may prove hard to resist. But, again, the "international
community" confronts a question: Is holding the Games in a country
like China consonant with the ideals of what we used to call "Olympism"?
And should the Games be used as a political carrot, or stick? Those
of us who — even into adulthood, despite layers of scandal
and commercialism and cynicism — love the Olympics should choke
on the idea of watching tyrants and butcherers preside smilingly
over the Games, just as Hitler did. (And, ultimately, what one thinks
of the Olympics in Beijing probably comes down to what one thinks
of the regime in Beijing.) Of all the cities in this great, vast
world, from Tipperary to Timbuktu, why the capital of Red China?
Here is a first principle, a simple criterion: The Games should
not be held in any country whose own people are not free to leave.
That is just for starters. Juan Antonio Samaranch and his boys have
four other finalists for 2008: Paris, Toronto, Istanbul, and Osaka.
Any of them would do — Beijing would be a disgrace.
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