What should we think of China's Olympics?

SOCIAL STUDIES - Published Monday June 23rd, 2008

Are the Beijing Olympics a good or a bad thing?

I am having trouble keeping track. Forty-six days to go before they start and I am not sure anyone has answered that most basic of questions: are we in favour of this, or opposed?

Opinion has it that there were members of the Olympic Committee who decided to hold the games in China because it would force them to "clean up their act." While others suggest that China took the positive nod as a carte blanche acceptance of China and all things Chinese.

Neither side was on the same page from the get go; and since then we have had to contend with Tibetan protests, Olympic Torch Relay Riots, and possible boycotts; none of which are actual Olympic events, yet.

In China there have been some blackouts of information, and Human Rights Watch reports that migrant labourers are being forced to work in extreme conditions to finish the "re-building" of Beijing while demolition of their shanty town villages continues. Street people and criminals are being deported to outlying regions while foreigners and even citizens are facing harder and harder visa restrictions on their travel.

And there is so much being foisted onto China in the name of "preparing" for the Olympics -- first they have to give Taiwan and Nepal back, then they have to free all the prisoners from the Tiananmen Square riots of 20 years ago, stop selling arms to Zimbabwe, reduce the pollution of Beijing by some incredible amount. . . it is a wonder that China is bothering with us at all.

Don't get me wrong -- I am 100 per cent in favour of better human rights, of cleaning up the environment, of responsible and good government, even of more realistic trade understandings. What I am not in favour of is taking an event like the Olympics and saddling it with a political agenda that is quite different, and perhaps even contrary, to the hopeful spirit of unity that the games are supposed to engender.

It is not as if the Olympics have not been used as a political platform before. Three come to mind almost instantly: the 1936 Berlin Olympics in which the National Socialist Party of Germany built monolithic structures and tried to demonstrate Aryan superiority; only to be beaten at every turn by the African American Jesse Owens. Then there was the Palestinian attack on Jewish athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics. Both of these events managed to open the eyes of the world to things we were blatantly trying to ignore -- the racism of the Nazi party and the violence of the PLO. The last one in my mind is the USSR Olympics of 1980 which were boycotted by 65 countries in protest of the, ahem, invasion of Afghanistan.

In the last century the games were cancelled three times as well, Once during the First World War and twice during the Second World War.

So yes, the games can be political -- but what we are talking about here is having the true nature of the games hijacked for political purposes by outsiders. The reason I am confused as to what to think about Beijing is that something else entirely has been going on; the games are actually being used as social engineering to change a country.

Who made this decision?

And with what level of arrogance was the decision made?

How can the Olympic Committee decide national policy for a hosting country, and how can they ignore the thousands of lessons learned by our imperialistic attitudes over the last 1,000 years in the process?

By social engineering I simply mean that outsiders are using an event and the attention generated to force their own principals and ideals onto another culture. This almost always goes horribly wrong -- as the entire continent of post-colonial Africa readily attests.

We have used it ourselves, by creating residential schools and reservations for our aboriginal population to "make them more like us". Then South Africa used our system to try and make their aboriginals more "Dutch." In every case what we have mainly done is to destroy vibrant and important cultural heritage in favour of forced harmony, which in turn only lasts as long as we have sufficient security forces.

Back to China . . . In "giving" the games to Beijing the International Olympic Committee was hoping to change China -- instead they have forced China to attempt its own social engineering in one city at an accelerated pace which has caused more problems, resentment, and xenophobia than you can possible imagine.

All of this on the back of an idea that is about celebrating sport, and unity of purpose and the spirit of competition -- the powers that be have actually changed the purpose and destroyed the original intent. The only ones that will pay the price are the young competitors who have poured heart and soul into preparing for something that they thought was about sports and who end up sidelined by politics.

I guess I will continue to be in support of the games, as I am in support of Chinese culture; and at the same time, I will continue to speak up against injustice to the poor and dispossessed wherever we find them, as I continue to hope for a better world filled with hope and harmony and cooperation.

In the words of Pierre de Coubertin who first wrote the Olympic motto for the modern games and then got the idea for a creed from this phrase from a speech given by Bishop Ethelbert Talbot at a service for Olympic champions during the 1908 Olympic Games:

"The most important thing in the Olympic Games is not to win but to take part, just as the most important thing in life is not the triumph but the struggle. The essential thing is not to have conquered but to have fought well."