When the Summer Olympics take place in Beijing next year, I will
not be there. The obvious reason for this is because I was a student leader in
the protests of 1989 that resulted in what is now often referred to as the June
4 Tiananmen Massacre, and have been in exile ever since. But the less obvious
corollary of this is that I will not be there because China is not ready to embrace the
Olympic spirit.
I think it is safe to say that, if the
Chinese government were ready to embrace the Olympic spirit of unity,
inclusiveness and equality, all of us who are exiled from our homeland would
like nothing else than to be in Beijing next year. After all, it would be an
opportunity, not only to enjoy the Olympic festivities, but also to be reunited
with out families. The fact that this will not be the case makes a mockery of China’s
“One World One Dream” Olympics slogan, and its pretensions to being a mature
member of the global community.
Mine is simply one of countless stories of
exile from the world’s fastest growing economy, but I think, in view of Beijing’s triumphalism
about hosting the world’s premier sporting event, my exile and what it means
for me personally is worth mentioning. Not only will it not be possible for me
attend the Beijing Olympics, but the Beijing
government will continue to hold the family I have not seen in 18 years
hostage, and will no doubt continue to refuse to issue them passports so that
we can be reunited in a foreign country.
I am sure that many people who attend the
Olympics next year will be aware to some degree or other that, despite the
newly sanitized streets of Beijing (involving the eviction of 1.5 million
people, according to the Center on Housing Rights and Evictions), the
awe-inspiring sporting facilities, and the grand panoply of the ceremonies,
there is a dark side to the festivities. But, as the International Olympic
Committee did when it awarded the event to Beijing,
they will have decided that China
has still made great strides towards becoming a better place than it was in the
summer of 1989, and it deserves a chance.
I wish this were true. If it were, I would
be joining family and friends in Beijing
next year.
The 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics are
regularly described as “China’s
coming out party”. Nineteen years after the world watched the student
occupation of Tiananmen Square, the subsequent decade-and-a-half of
record-breaking economic growth is poised to culminate in a spectacle
calculated to awe the world and marginalize the hecklers who point to China’s
poor human rights record, its petrodollar complicity in genocide in Darfur, its
occupation of Tibet and its aggressive stance on unification with Taiwan, as
evidence that China is not yet mature enough to host the world’s most coveted
sporting event.
Politics have been an issue at nearly every
Olympics since the 1936 Berlin
meet, when athletes were expected to shout “sieg
heil” as they marched past Adolf Hitler’s chancellor’s box. Germany and
Japan were not invited, and the USSR failed to show, at the 1948 London
Olympics; 11 Israeli athletes died as a result of an attack by Palestinian
terrorists at the 1972 Munich Olympics; and more than 60 nations boycotted the
1980 Moscow Olympics to protest the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. But, it
seems likely that the Beijing Olympics, despite the hecklers, will go ahead
without any boycotts, and – if Beijing has its
way – without incident in Beijing
itself.
The reason for this, I believe, is related
to the complexities of the West’s perceptions of and relations with China.
A strong case can be made that the protests leading up to June 4 in 1989 were instrumental in opening
up China,
forcing the government to acquiesce to the demands of an educated emergent
middle class. But the suppression of the protests came at enormous cost to China
on the world stage, and the government has been paying for it ever since in
terms of western scrutiny of its human rights record.
At the same time, however, when Deng
Xiaoping toured southern China
in 1992 and called on Chinese to go into business “even more boldly” and “more
quickly” to create a socialist market economy with Chinese characteristics, the
West put its post-Tiananmen qualms behind it and poured into China with a flood of foreign
investment. This is perfectly understandable. Since the Opium Wars, the West’s
relationship with China
has hinged on how to inveigle the world’s most populous nation into opening its
doors to the global economy.
Fifteen years on, China has become an important motor
of global economic growth. In this way there are two opposing western views of China:
the one-party state that denies basic human rights and imprisons or exiles
dissenters, and global powerhouse, home to 1.3 billion potential consumers.
When Beijing
hosts the Olympics next year, it is the latter view it is looking to capitalize
on. Despite the relentless trickle of negative press about China – the
disparities of wealth and poverty, environmental degradation, suppression of
human rights – over the past decade the world has beat a path to China’s door,
and the government in Beijing sees the Olympics as an opportunity to put on a
spectacle that will finally eclipse the world’s lingering images of bloodshed
in the capital.
It is very possible that government will be
successful in this endeavor, but as one of countless exiles from modern China
who will not be able to be there in person, the summer of 2008 promises to be a
major betrayal of the Olympic spirit.
For Pierre de
Coubertin, who was responsible for the revival of the Olympic Games in 1900,
one of the four principles of the games was to achieve a truce, “a four-yearly
festival of the springtime of mankind." I find this idea of a “truce”
interesting because the reality is that Beijing
has no plans for a truce of any kind. The intention is for Beijing
to parade itself to the rest of the world as the China everybody doing business with
it and the government that rules by slogans and an iron fist would like to
pretend it is: an open, harmonious and peaceful society that is taking its rightful
place as a global leader.
The idea behind this four-yearly festival
is that the world put its conflicts behind it and comes together in a spirit of
unity. In Beijing,
that will not happen because any Chinese national who has a grievance with the
country’s one-party government will have no part to play in the celebrations.
That list includes anyone who campaigns for greater autonomy in Tibet, my
homeland of Xinjiang, my adopted home of Taiwan, anyone who has struggled to
expand participatory politics in China or to have the right to worship as they
choose, or anyone who has dissented publicly from whatever the current Party
line happens to be.
There should be no mistake about this. China’s
“coming out party” is nothing of the sort. The party in Beijing will be the Chinese Communist Party’s
“coming out party”. This government has long seen participating in the Olympics
as a legitimizing maneuver, not only on the world stage, but also in terms of
winning glory for the Chinese nation, playing on nationalism and simultaneously
conflating China with the one-party state that rules it – as the famous saying
goes, without the Communist Party, there would be no modern China.
The state has devoted enormous resources
into transforming itself into an effective sporting nation. It was not until the Los
Angeles games in 1984, that the PRC managed to win its
first gold. But by the 2004 games in Athens, China was in third place behind the United States and Russia, sweeping up 32 golds.
Winning the right to host the Olympics, then, is the final act in this more
than two-decade crusade by the CCP to achieve legitimacy through sporting
prowess.
Of course, the Chinese government itself
knows that its motives have little resonance with the Olympic spirit, and as a
result it is cloaking the event in the familiar, fuzzy rhetoric of unity we see
in the official slogan, “One World, One Dream”, which the official website
helpfully explains, “conveys the lofty ideal of the
people in Beijing as well as in China to share the global community and
civilization and to create a bright future hand in hand with the people from
the rest of the world.” Similar sentiments can be seen in the website’s
explanation of the Beijing Olympics emblem – a calligraphic seal that features
a wriggly human being who appears to be dancing, and which symbolizes a China
that is “opening its arms to welcome the rest of the
world to join the Olympics, [in] a celebration of ‘peace, friendship and
progress of mankind’."
If this is the message
to world, at home the Chinese government is using the Olympics to repress
dissidents and activists, while at the same time using the games to more firmly
establish the legality and validity of its rule. The terrible pity of this is
that the Party is exploiting national pride, and denying the Chinese people of
the right to enjoy the true spirit of the Olympics. Meanwhile, the world’s
participation in the event is an act of collusion with a political party that
in recent years has presided over a remarkable period of economic growth, but
has nevertheless throughout the past six decades since 1949 been responsible
for far more setbacks than it has successes. It also continues to be as
oppressive as it was when I was forced into exile in 1989, despite the
foreign-invested veneer of westernization that can be seen in the major cities.
When China made its most recent Olympics
bid, it promised the IOC and the international community that it was prepared
to make substantial improvements in human rights. But, just four days after winning
the bid, then deputy prime minister, Li Lanqing, announced that China
should step up its efforts to counter the Falungong, a spiritual movement whose
members are routinely imprisoned – at least 100 are thought to have died in
detainment. The then vice-president, Hu Jintao, weighed in next, saying it was
essential for China
to counter separatist movements “orchestrated by the Dali Lama and the world’s
anti-China forces.”
This should come as no
surprise to anyone, least of all the OIC, which took the surprisingly naïve
position that holding the Olympics in Beijing
was likely to improve China’s
human rights. The opposite was always bound to be the case. For Beijing to pull off the
kind of Olympics it would like to, it is forced to repress anything of a
political nature that might mar its moment of glory.
Amnesty International,
for example, is calling for the immediate release of Ye Guozhu, who was
arrested in December 2004, and is serving a four-year prison sentence for
attempting to organize a demonstration against forced evictions in Beijing,
after two restaurants he owned were demolished in 2001 to make way for Olympics
sports facilities. His relatives say he has health problems after having been
tortured in prison, and it is claimed he was beaten with electro-shock battens
in Beijing’s
Chaobai Prison.
An equally high-profile
example is human rights lawyer Gao Zhisheng, who was convicted of “subversion”
in December 2006, and is now under house arrest. While under formal arrest, he
claims to have been treated harshly by police. Meanwhile, in April this year,
four pro-Tibetan independence protesters were arrested, after they hung up a
Free Tibet banner at Mount Everest base camp,
protesting the government’s plans to relay the Olympic torch through the Tibetan
Himalayas.
According to the
Olympic Charter, sport must be “at the service of the harmonious development of
man, with a view to promoting a peaceful society concerned with the
preservation of human dignity.” But groups protesting against, or calling for
boycotts of next year’s Olympics point to a host of CCP transgressions against
both a peaceful society and human dignity.
A commitment to reform
or abolish China’s
“re-education through labor” policy appears stalled, possibly so as to clean up
the streets of Beijing
of vagrants and drug-users ahead of the Olympics. Meanwhile, Amnesty reports
that the lead up to the Olympics has seen “moves to expand detention without
trial and ‘house arrest’ of activists, and … a tightening of controls over
domestic media and the Internet.”
For the most part, the
foreign community seems to have found it relatively easy to ignore these
domestic affronts to the spirit of the Olympics. The issue of Darfur
is proving somewhat more problematic. Names such Bob Geldof and Mia Farrow have
publicly criticized China
for supporting the atrocities in Darfur through massive subsidies to oil-rich Sudan.
In March this year, Farrow wrote an article for the Wall Street Journal that popularized the term, “the Genocide
Olympics”. A Google search for the latter, five months later, produces close to
1.5 million hits.
For any Chinese – even
those of us in exile – this background to China’s successful bid for the
Olympics should be more a cause for self-examination than for celebration. Ideally,
the Olympics I would like to attend next year would be the ultimate culmination
of the kaifang – open – policy that
was ushered in by Deng Xiaoping in 1979.
Deng’s “open door”
policy was a revolutionary turning point in modern Chinese history, and for all
the problems facing China
at this juncture, it has been successful in raising the living standards for
millions of Chinese people. Unfortunately, China’s new-found economic openness
has never been matched by the openness that is needed to reform the country’s
oppressive one-party state. And this being the case the games that will take
place next year will belong to that state, not to the Chinese people, the vast
majority of whom will not be allowed anywhere near the Olympics festivities in
Beijing.
For my part, if I were permitted to return to China
for the Olympics, I admit I would seize the opportunity – it would be my chance
to see the ageing parents and the brother I have not seen in close on two
decades. But, the long-awaited family reunion aside, I think it unlikely I
would find much else in the way of cause for celebration.
——Published Far Eastern Economic Review, Cover date 2007.09.04.
This article has won the Hong Kong Human Rights Press Award, (Oped) 2007.
