Your view confirms that it is a gigantic mistake to let the Chinese
government hosting the 2008 Olympics .
--The fault lies largely with the IOC. There was a verbal "quid pro quo"
that if Beijing were given the Games in 2008 China would work on improving
their human rights record, but apparently the promises were vague and the
IOC, which was supposed to monitor the situation via Amnesty International
and apply pressure as needed never really followed up.
I don't think it was fundamentally a mistake: one need only look at Tokyo
in
'64 and Seoul in '88 to see what a boost the Olympics were to those
developing Asian hosts, and I suppose that the IOC hoped that the same
would
happen for Beijing. However given that, it is hypocritical of the IOC to
insist that the Games are non-political; the IOC should freely admit that
they are and take responsibility for that fact in my view. Otherwise the
Games should only be held in countries with stable systems which are
integrated into the global system.
I doubt very much that it is possible for the new generation of
Chinese red guards to do the things "just right".
--This is becoming clearer by the day. In my view the CCP is caught
between
a rock and a hard place. My feeling from attending numerous sessions of
the
Party Congress and tracking the government announcements in various areas
is
that there are some very smart people in charge--I think that those at the
very top are not too corrupt and are really trying to get China on the
rails. The problem is that they are just too weak to enforce their vision
on
the huge numbers of totally rotten and corrupt local administrations and
elites which still exist throughout the country. One of my colleagues, who
is a great Sinophile and who speaks the language fluently, returned in
disgust from a recent newsgathering trip to the provinces, saying that the
people in the countryside all think that the world ends at the edge of
their
villages, and practically for them it does. "Heaven is high and the
Emperor
is far away" still applies strongly in "modern" China. The image that I
have
is that the CCP is riding a runaway nuclear reactor: they have to keep the
economy boiling so that an ever-increasing quality of life placates the
m*****, but moderate things delicately so that the whole thing doesn't go
critical and explode. This is no easy task, and I think it explains why
they
come down so hard on any sign of civil unrest. My sense is that there is a
deep anger that runs throughout the people on the Mainland, and an
incipient
violence lurking just below the surface.
As I said before, this is the result of their being brutalized from all
sides continuously for centuries: by the feudal Chinese hierarchical
system,
then by the Brits and Japanese and other foreign powers in the late 19th
and
20th centuries, and then by their supposed saviors led by Mao. That this
anger can be diffused peaceably is shown by the state of civil society in
Taiwan--these are basically mainlanders with the same cultural history who
have been spared only the traumas of the communist era and who were early
integrated into the global community, but the difference in tone between
Taipei and Beijing is like night and day. Fifty years can make a big
difference if used effectively.
The question is whether the present power structure is up to the task. As
enlightened as some of the top cadres may be on some levels, there is
still
bitter infighting and politicking in the CCP, with reactionary old
hardliners still holding a lot of power. For me the really unfortunate
fact
is that there is still a huge exceptionalist myth being fostered at all
levels. Chinese constantly go on about their glorious past; how theirs is
the only continuous civilization unbroken for 5000 years. They look down
on
all other cultures with an arrogance which is only now becoming apparent
as
they wield more and more economic power. This nationalism is being
fostered
by the ruling powers as a way to ameliorate interal strife, but it comes
at
the cost of increasing inflexibility in international relations and
stopping
China from incor****ating im****tant cultural advances from other
civilizations, which they missed in the last fifty years or so. Add to
that
the difficulty of administering 1.4 billion people centrally in an era of
dimini****ng resources and it adds up to a huge problem.
Time is not on our side in this. There are certain parallels between the
Chinese situation and that of prewar Japan: another society which rapidly
industrialized at great cultural cost because of perceived threats from
the
West with a heady sense of exceptionalism. It took a huge war and some
terrible bombings, followed by a long occupation before they really
entered
the dominant world order, and it is just recently--in the past ten years
or
so--that a stable democracy that responds somewhat to the wishes of the
people has emerged. And this is in a small country which already had a
long
cultural history of collective responsibility.
As you stated that the Chinese nation which has been "brutalized for
centuries both from within and without" , such a diagnose put modern
Chinese squarely into the category of psychopath, however, the
question remains: what can possibly be gained by letting a
fanatically nationalistic psychopath to host the Olympic games? Will
the Olympics magically transform a delusional China into a responsible
world class citizen? If someone had such a wishful thinking 7 years
ago, the cold and hard facts had proved otherwise.
--I think there was a hope that by giving China a foot in the developed
world it would spur a certain liberalization. Seoul definitely benefitted
from holding the Olympics, I believe, in terms of strengthening democratic
institutions. Also, you can't ignore the more prosaic reasons: China is
the
capitalists' darling, and they wanted to protect and foster their
investments...
On the other hand, will China ever learn the fact that not that long
ago, Europeans and many other nations in the world has also been
brutalizing each other, why others can recover and only China remain
being a psychologically "wounded" giant ?! That's bloody childish and
shameless!
--China has been sleeping, and only now is going through some of the
developmental phases that other countries went through long ago. You can't
skip those steps, but what is distressing is the fact that the
exceptionalist stance keeps China from benefitting from the experience of
others. They have definitely learned their economic lessons from observing
others, but there is a huge blind spot when it comes to civil society.
In a civilized society, we usually put psychopathic patient who shows
symptom and potential of harming others into mental asylum, since
there is no asylum big enough for China, it became a real problem for
the whole world. IMHO, even the wounded Chinese nation is willing to
cure itself, a must medicine is freedom of expression and freedom of
press, yet after wasted over 100 years, China is still lack of both,
no wonder the coming Beijing Olympics has brought so much ominous
omens and lately, deadly tragedies inside China.
What a shame! for China and for the IOC !
Yes and no. China has been confronted for the first time recently with
outside criticism "where it hurts", and they are struggling to find a
response that both placates those critics and plays well at home.Nothing
will happen unless they are put against the wall. I agree that so far the
signs do not seem hopeful, but time will tell whether there will be a
****ft
towards more openness or whether those in power will feel threatened and
clamp down even more tightly. One thing is certain, there is not a lot of
room for error.
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