The ****trait of an Unprepared "Olympic Host" -- The battle of Beijing:
what happens when an authoritarian government and thousands of activists
go head-to-head at the Olympics? China is about to find out. /Foreign
Policy
The battle of Beijing: what happens when an authoritarian government and
thousands of activists go head-to-head at the Olympics? China is about
to find out.
Full Text:COPYRIGHT 2007 Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
You can always count on the Olympic Games to provide drama. Next year's
games in Beijing will be no different; they too will produce powerful
stories and riveting television. But this time the images will not just
be athletes overcoming the odds or breaking records. They will also
focus on the clashes between the Chinese police and the activists who
will arrive from all around the world. The causes that motivate their
activism range from human rights to global warming, from Darfur to
Tibet, from Christianity to Falun Gong. The clashes outside the stadiums
are likely to be more intense and spectacular than the s****ts
competitions taking place inside. And the showdown will be captured as
much by the videocameras in the cell phones of protesters and spectators
as any news agencies' camera crews. In fact, the Beijing Olympics will
not just offer another op****tunity to test the limits of human athletic
performance; it will also test the limits of a centralized police
state's ability to confront a nebulous swarm of foreign activists armed
with BlackBerries. A governmental bureaucracy organized according to
20th-century principles will meet 21st-century global politics. Lenin
meets YouTube.
The athletes are not the only ones training hard for the Olympics. The
Chinese government and the activists are getting ready for the battle in
Beijing, too. The Associated Press re****ts that China's intelligence
services, police, and government think tanks are compiling lists of
foreign organizations and individuals in what has been described as one
of the "broadest intelligence-collection drives Beijing has taken
against foreign activist groups." According to Xinhua, China's official
news agency, Zhou Yongkang, the minister of public security, has ordered
the police during the games to "strictly guard against and strike hard
at hostile forces at home and abroad."
And the various "hostile forces" will test China's mettle. In Prague, an
organization called Olympic Watch was established in 2001 with the
explicit mission of using the Beijing games as an occasion to challenge
China's policies on freedom of speech, the death penalty, Tibet,
religious freedom, and forced labor camps. Darfur campaigners are
calling the Beijing games the "Genocide Olympics" and are demanding that
China stop sup****ting the Sudanese government. The Wa****ngton Post
dubbed the games the "Saffron Olympics" to denounce China's sup****t for
Burma's murderous regime and the massacre of its saffron-clad monks.
This pressure is already on, a little less than a year before the games.
What will happen when the games start and thousands of foreigners travel
to Beijing not to watch the games but to try to change China? How will
the authorities know that the old lady from Denmark is actually coming
with her church group to protest China's abortion policies, or that the
young Australian couple is actually part of a militant environmental
organization? In short, what if the $40 billion the government is
spending to showcase modern China yields the ugly global image of a
thuggish regime?
It's fair to say that the Chinese government probably had no idea what
it was getting into when it applied to host the Olympics in 2000. The
world--and China's place in it--have changed substantially since then,
making the challenge for an authoritarian regime hosting the world games
far greater than it might have imagined. Back then, Chinese companies
had not yet become as active investing in pariah states that no other
company would dare touch. In 2004, for example, China surpassed Iran to
become the largest military supplier to Sudan. In 2005, a new pope took
a strong stance against China's persecution of Christians and went as
far as excommunicating the Catholic bishops sanctioned by the Chinese
regime. China's environmental degradation was far less of a global
concern seven years ago. Its exchange rate, tainted products, and
aggressive trade practices had not become the lightning rod that they
are now.
But perhaps the changes that most threaten China's political performance
during the Olympics are that the number of Chinese cell-phone users has
boomed from 140 million to more than 600 million since 2001, while the
number of Chinese Internet users has soared from 17 million to 162
million since 2000. Bloggers, chat rooms, social networks, and other
online communities were far less prevalent seven years ago than they are
today. And the development of Web-enabled cell phones that can double as
videocameras is made even more politically consequential by the rise of
YouTube, which was founded less than three years ago.
No public relations campaign, regardless of how massive, can alter
reality. And the reality is that thousands of protesters with causes
that enjoy public sup****t around the world--and in China--will stage
highly visible and creative protests during the Olympic Games. It is
equally true that the Chinese government will try to suppress them.
Inevitably, thousands of videocameras will record the ensuing battle.
The path from the streets of Beijing to YouTube will be almost
impossible for the regime to monitor and blockade.
Of course, the other option for the Chinese government is to agree to
some of what the protesters demand. And slowly, modestly, it has already
begun to do so by, for example, ****ging Sudan to accept international
peacekeepers. But the demands are too many and too varied. Many seek to
alter the very nature of the regime and the political and economic power
upon which it is based. Therefore, the government will inevitably
attempt to control and repress the activists. And that will be a new and
frustrating experience for a centralized government that is not used to
containing well-organized, media-savvy foreigners who work through
highly decentralized, international, nongovernmental organizations that
know how to mobilize public opinion to advance their causes.
The 2008 Olympic Games promise to be a great spectacle. And we will all
be watching.
Moises Naim is editor in chief of FOREIGN POLICY.
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