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Going
For The Gold
The world
watches as China struggles to highlight its phenomenal growth
and obscure its more unpleasant realities
By
Andrew Potter
The
first thing I noticed about Beijing was the sky. As our 777
began the last descending stages of its leapfrog over the
North Pole, the captain came on to tell us that it was a sunny,
cloudless day in the Chinese capital. But he was having us
on. From where I stood waiting in the taxi ranks outside the
arrivals area, the sky wasn’t even close to blue, or even
the washed-out beige you get on a smoggy day in Toronto. Instead,
it was a post-apocalyptic, anorexic yellow—like someone had
smeared a thick layer of liposuction fat across the lens of
the heavens. Beijing is one seriously polluted city, a fact
that has not gone down well with the athletes who will have
to compete and excel in an atmosphere saturated with particulate
matter.
I last visited Beijing in the summer of 2000, when the only
thing that impressed me more than the agoraphobia-inducing
expanse of Tiananmen Square was the ability of the locals
to accommodate a pervasive form of mechanical life known as
bicycles. In a sense, there weren’t single bikes on the road,
there was a single bicyclish entity that flowed more than
it rode, a constantly shape-shifting organism that sent tendrils
and pseudopods into every nook and cranny of the city. Back
then, getting around Beijing meant figuring out how to deal
with bicycles.
Since then, the city has added another few million residents
(current population of Beijing Municipality: 17.5 million)
as the Chinese economic engine had shifted into overdrive,
with an annual rate of growth of around 10 percent. Put another
way, real Chinese wealth has doubled in the past eight years,
a stupendous achievement by any reasonable measure.
Which helps explain why the next thing I noticed about Beijing
was how fresh-scrubbed and modern it has become. Most of the
third-world trappings that served as upfront reminders of
how stalled the country was under the old-school communists
have been renovated or swept completely away: the transfer
of the jostling outdoor warrens of the old silk market into
a four-story department store; the relentless gentrification
of the hutongs (the ancient residences and alleyways
that surround the Forbidden City); and the almost complete
disappearance of the bicycles, pushed out of their niche by
the encroachment of the one thousand automobiles added to
city’s streets every day.
Beijing starts boasting of its modernity from the moment you
arrive in the just-opened Terminal 3, the world’s largest
airport building. Not impressed? Beijing has spent the last
seven years preparing for the Olympics; along with the airport,
and along with the 24 new venues devoted to sporting events,
the city has added architectural dreamworks like the China
Central Television (CCTV) headquarters designed by Rem Koolhaas
and the new National Centre for the Performing Arts, an egg-shaped
marvel of titanium and glass designed by the French architect
Paul Andreu. In short, today’s Beijing is so sharply defined
it looks like it was created in Photoshop then dragged-and-dropped
into place, where it sits awaiting the hundreds of thousands
who will arrive in early August for the opening of the Games
of the XXIX Olympiad.
It
has been a tough few months for the Chinese. The March 14
uprising in Tibet coincided with the start of the international
legs of the Olympic torch relay and focused the world’s attention
on China’s unimpressive human rights record. The subsequent
crackdown in Tibet by Chinese authorities, and the sealing
off of the region to foreigners, sparked widespread violence
resulting in—depending on whom you ask—21 deaths caused by
Tibetan rioters, or 203 deaths caused by Chinese troops.
Either way, the conflict in Tibet inspired brought the Free
Tibet sympathizers scrambling out of the woodwork, and they
managed to disrupt the relay in a number of cities including
Athens, London, and, most notoriously, Paris, where a Chinese
torchbearer in a wheelchair almost had the torch snatched
from her hand. Beijing Organizing Committee (BOCOG) officials
blame the disruption on the organizers in the host cities,
accusing them of failing to follow through on their written
guarantees to ensure the security of the torch and its bearers.
As we were told by Mr. Jiang Xiao Yu, the executive vice-president
of BOCOG, the disruptions were “an insult to the flame and
the Olympic Movement.” Worse, he added, “it is a pity that
some cities did not fulfill their commitments, and even indulged
the disturbances.”
The torch relay fiasco was soon followed by a railway accident
where one train derailed and barreled into another, killing
at least 70 people and injuring another 400. It happened on
the Beijing-Qindao line—the route that will be used to ferry
spectators to the Olympic sailing events. Then, on May 12,
a 7.8 magnitude earthquake hit the southwestern province of
Sichuan, toppling mountains, leveling entire villages and
burying thousands beneath tons of low-grade concrete. The
official death toll has now topped 70,000, and they are far
from done digging out the corpses.
The good news is that the Chinese leadership received some
well-deserved props for their response to the earthquake.
Given the logistical nightmare involved, the rescue effort
has been fast and effective, while government officials have
been surprisingly open with both the domestic and international
media. Could this be the confident and prosperous China we
hoped we would see when they were awarded the Games back in
2001?
Not exactly. It is one thing to come clean with the world
about a seismic event that rattled teacups from one end of
the country to the other. But how about that outbreak of hand-foot-and-mouth
disease (HFMD, also known as E-71) that has swept through
seven provinces, killing 43 children and infecting another
30,000? The state news agency Xinhua has not been especially
forthcoming about it, and the way the government first denied
and then downplayed the outbreak has stirred uneasy reminders
of its secrecy surrounding previous epidemics such as SARS
and bird flu.
The Chinese understanding of the role of the government is
strongly influenced by an ancient doctrine known as the Mandate
of Heaven, devised by the kings of the Zhou dynasty to justify
their overthrow of the Shang in 1111 BC. The Mandate was conceived
as a something along the lines of a divinely-sanctioned sovereignty
similar to the notion of the “divine right of kings,” except
the legitimacy of the ruling regime depends not upon proper
lineage but upon proper behavior—the good works and deeds
of the rulers. To keep the Mandate of Heaven, a ruler is obliged
to seek the welfare of his people and govern justly, fairly,
and wisely. Any leader who fails his people, or who rules
only in his own self-interest, will lose the Mandate of Heaven
and be overthrown.
What is interesting is that according to the theory, the mere
fact that an uprising is successful is proof enough that the
regime has lost the moral right to govern, which is one reason
why the Chinese value stability and social order more than
just about anything else. The notion of the Mandate of Heaven
also makes no distinction between social unrest (like a riot
in Tibet), accidents (like a train derailment) and natural
disasters such as earthquakes. All of these contribute to
instability, suggesting that the regime has failed in its
duties and has forfeited the right to govern.
The thing about the Mandate of Heaven is that it effectively
turns politics into a huge bluff. It requires that the government
preserve, at all costs, the appearance of order, stability,
and prosperity. This is not because the people are stupid
or cannot be trusted, but because the ability to preserve
the illusion is itself indicative of the regime’s merit. If
the existence of unrest is evidence that the regime has lost
the Mandate of Heaven, then the absence of any sign of unrest
is proof of the opposite. In short, bluffing the people becomes
a political virtue, which helps explain why the Chinese authorities
are such massive control freaks. It also explains the importance
to the Chinese of honor, “face,” and—ultimately—our rather
strange itinerary on a recent guided tour of the Olympic facilities
organized by the Beijing Olympic Media Centre.
Here
is what they had planned out for our four days in Beijing:
Day 1: Visit to a primary school; food safety monitoring facility;
sewage treatment plant Day 2: Meeting with Beijing Olympic
Media Centre officials; meeting with BOCOG officials; visit
to school for gifted athletes; tour of Olympic event facilities.
Day 3: Meeting with scholars at Beijing Tibetology Research
Center; visit urban-planning museum and environmental monitoring
facility; tickets to the opera (Madama Butterfly!)
Day 4: Cultural visits to Tiananmen Square, Forbidden City,
and Great Wall of China.
A couple of things to note. First of all, if you’re trying
to soften up a crew of skeptical western journalists, you
can do no better than to take them to a primary school and
show them adorable eight-year olds in uniform doing kung-fu,
followed by an extraordinarily talented student orchestra
playing folksongs on traditional Chinese instruments, most
of which sound like kazoos. If cuteness is a form of soft
power, then Chinese kids are one of the most powerful diplomatic
weapons in existence.
Second, I cannot overstate what formidable hosts the Chinese
are. At every stage in the agenda we were given the full VIP
treatment—formal welcomes, easy access to very senior officials,
and delightful parting gifts. In between, they stuffed us
like foie gras ducks with obscene amounts of food from some
very fine restaurants, even if the actual dining hours were
a bit hard to take (lunch at 11:30 AM, supper at 5 or 5:30—it
was like being guided around by retirees.)
Notwithstanding all of that, for a trip designed to showcase
the state of preparations for the Olympic Games, the schedule
was very light on what you might call “Olympic-related activities.”
The crown jewels of these games are the Olympic Stadium, which
will host the track and field events as well as the opening
and closing ceremonies, and the aquatic centre, which will
host the swimming and diving events. Both are architectural
joys. The stadium is affectionately referred to as the “bird’s
nest” thanks to its elaborate network of interlaced steel
girders, while the National Aquatics Centre is better known
as the “water cube,” because it looks like a giant box of
blue soap bubbles.
The bird’s nest and water cube are situated next to one another
at the northern end of the north-south axis around which all
of Beijing is oriented. They sit in perfect feng shui balance,
with the stadium to the east representing the active male
“yang” power, while the aquatics centre to the west represents
the passive female yin. These are the two installations we
were all most keen to see, but our hosts insisted that a tour
of the interior of either building would be impossible. We
protested, they tossed off excuses as casually as a chef tosses
a salad (“there are test events going on”; “the floors were
just sanded”; “it’s too short notice”), and in the end all
we got was a quick drop-off so we could stand in the middle
of the Olympic park, shoot some badly composed photos and
watch the swarms of workers plant trees.
It is precisely this sort of caginess that impels bored and
jet-lagged journalists to engage in idle conspiracy-theorizing.
Could it be that the facilities are not close to being finished?
Is the running track crooked? Does the pool leak? Were the
seats installed backwards?
None of the above, I’d say. My sense is that it was not that
BOCOG did not want us to see inside their gorgeous new stadiums.
Instead, I think they simply felt they had much more important
things to show us. What do Westerners always say they like
about China? The food and the culture. So let’s give them
lots of food and culture. What are Westerners always harping
on China about? Well, the environment, for one. So let’s show
them all sorts of mind-numbingly dull pollution-reducing infrastructure.
(Note: There may be a planet upon which a visit to a sewage-treatment
plant is interesting. I never want to visit that planet.)
Anything else? Well, there’s the human-rights thing, especially
as it pertains to Tibet.
But I’ll be honest, I don’t really know much about Tibet,
and in the grand scheme of things, there are plenty of things
I care about a lot more than its political future. So that
is why, barely halfway through the week, I was already sick
to death of talking about Tibet. My colleagues from the other
papers were sick of talking about Tibet. I assumed that our
Chinese hosts were growing tired of Western journalists asking
them about Tibet. Unfortunately for all concerned, almost
everything of substance on this tour was designed to force
us to ask them about Tibet.
There really is no other explanation for our visit one morning
to the China Tibetology Research Center. The center is an
agency of the United Front Work Department of the Communist
Party of China, but within the obvious political confines,
it is engaged in significant and serious academic research,
centering on issues of economic development, demographic change,
and theological elements of Tibetan Buddhism. While there,
we met with a group of scholars—about half of whom were ethnic
Tibetans—who introduced us to the center and the work they
do.
All very interesting stuff, except none of us were Tibetan
scholars. My colleagues were mostly sports journalists, doing
preliminary research before the Games start. Which means the
only reason we were being introduced to all of this Tibet
content was because the Chinese wanted to send us a message
about the place.
And so we played along. Whenever the opportunity presented
itself, we would ask them the questions they wanted us to
ask about freedoms in Tibet, and they would give us the answers
they wanted us to hear, at considerable length. But they kept
coming back to the same plot points:
* Of course there are restrictions on travel to Tibet. What
would you expect any responsible government to do, given the
rioting that has happened there quite recently?
* Have you ever been to Tibet? No? Maybe you should go to
Tibet before asking these sorts of questions.
* Tibet was a feudal, backwards society in 1959, where 95
percent of the people were serfs. There has been substantial
social and economic development since then, thanks to investment
from the rest of China.
* The Dalai Lama is basically the leader of a barbarian cult.
Did you know that Tibetans used to make lamps out of the skulls
of serfs?
The
decision to award the 2008 Summer Olympics to China was fraught
with political calculations on all sides. For the Chinese,
they saw winning the Games as a just reward for 30 years of
openness—a sign of the country’s acceptance by the international
community and an affirmation of its program of social and
economic reform. For the IOC and the delegates from the West
who voted for Beijing (ahead of Toronto; Paris; Osaka, Japan;
and Istanbul), as well as the political leaders who tacitly
went along, the thinking was that the Games could serve as
a wedge that would help crack China open even more and encourage
it to get its act together on human rights.
The problem is that these are conflicting goals: China saw
getting the Games as an affirmation of its policies, while
the West gave the Olympics to them because we thought it would
motivate China to change. It does not seem to have occurred
to anyone at the time that this was a recipe for serious conflict,
of which the torch relay disruptions were merely the opening
skirmishes.
As I sat in the Beijing airport, almost one week to the hour
after I had arrived, I tried to sort out the unruly tangle
of ideas that was scrambling around in my brain. I tried to
pull them apart, these questions about politics and the Olympics,
about the environment and economic development, about the
rise of China and supposed decline of America, about Tibet,
nationalism, and human rights, and about state-funded propaganda,
free speech, and what it means to be a journalist in the West.
It is too much. Too much for me for sure—I wasn’t going to
solve any of these problems in one short trip. But it is also
too much to ask of these Games. Of what is, in the end, just
a very large track meet.
The big question people are asking is: Are the Chinese ready
to host the Summer Olympics? There is no doubt in my mind
that, logistically speaking, the Games will go off without
a hitch. It is inconceivable to me the people in charge would
allow it to be otherwise. The more important question, though,
is whether the world is ready for China—the China of today,
not the China of our liberal imagination—to host a successful
Olympics.
What if China manages to pull off a wonderful Olympics, but
then goes back to censoring the Internet, to putting the screws
to Tibet, to running the most efficient capital-punishment
machine on Earth? Whatever will it mean for liberalism, for
the West, for the Olympic Movement, if these Games turn out
to be just another two-week celebration of the best of sport
and culture the world has to offer?
I don’t know, and honestly, I don’t think we will know for
a long time. The answer I am increasingly inclined to give,
is the one Zhou Enlai famously gave when asked his opinion
of the ultimate effects of the French revolution: Too soon
to tell.
Andrew
Potter is citizen editor at the Ottawa Citizen, where
this article first appeared. Source: Featurewell.com
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