China has a problem. Not an issue, a problem. The Chinese wanted
more than anything else to win the competition to host the 2008
Olympics — and they did.
In the summer the wind comes off the Gobi Desert and brings
heavy lashes of rain down upon Beijing. For this the people are
usually quite happy, for it sweetens the air that is otherwise
densely polluted with dust and the exhaust of a massive number of
cars and trucks. This combines with the dense smoke of the
coal-fired factories on the outskirts. In that environmental mess
the Chinese government plans to hold their first Olympic Games.
With a display of confident totalitarian thinking typical of
Chinese communism, the Chinese have announced they intend to
control the skies above Beijing by rocketing silver iodate into the
clouds, thus producing days of glorious sunshine. This is
particularly important for the new immense and beautiful latticed
concrete stadium has no retractable roof, in fact no roof at
all.
Pollution will be contained citywide by the banning of all but
essential vehicles. The outlying factories will be closed down. The
ordinary citizenry will be of no consequence during the games, for
they will be banned from mixing with the influx of foreigners.
It is unclear whether the authorities are afraid to expose their
people to the material advantages of the visitors or they don’t
want any Chinese shortcomings to become evident to the
foreigners.
ACCORDING TO BEIJING, the trouble in Tibet — those nasty monks
with their riotous ways — has all been designed by anti-Chinese
forces to embarrass China.
Behind it is, of course, that deadly conniver, the Dalai Lama,
who covertly operates to encourage dissidence and revolt among the
peaceful Tibetans who otherwise love their Han Chinese
occupiers.
All this Tibetan nonsense, again according to the official
Chinese spokesman (actually a chic uniformed, hard-faced woman from
the Public Security Ministry), has been timed to coincide with the
run-up to the games. That Nicolas Sarkozy , the French president,
may have his country boycott the opening ceremonies is
characterized off-the-record by the Chinese as an example of just
that Dalai Lama-type plotting.
It is uncontestable that China’s 1.3 billion people are
struggling mightily to lift themselves from historical poverty and
underdevelopment. Nor does anyone question the justified desire for
international recognition of a country that has so successfully
introduced a burgeoning market economy into what had been a
moribund socialist system.
But therein lies the problem. The residual totalitarian
instincts of Mao’s communism rise up whenever gratification of the
leaders’ desires is not immediate.
The resulting conflict has to be explained away or simply denied
by Beijing bureaucrats. The Olympic Games has created just that
situation. The Chinese government has taken on more than it can
handle. Aside from the massive pseudo-scientific climate control
issue, the security paranoia of Chinese leadership has them
envisaging nefarious plots by Western governments to exploit the
Olympic presence to influence the ordinary man in the Chinese
street.
Answer: Keep the Chinese people off the streets and far away
from the infectious presence of international sports fans.
To accomplish the task of separating the “foreign devils” from
the innocent masses thousands of police and security forces will
“protect” each of the communities from each other. The Olympic
spirit will reign — no matter what. If the politburo says it will
reign, it will reign!
SO HERE’S THE PICTURE: The heat, humidity and rain of the summer
will be countered by Chinese scientific genius. The pollution for
which Beijing is famous will be removed by fiat, as will the
traffic jams of vehicles and pedestrians. The Tibetans will be
clubbed into submission in their country in a timely fashion and
the press will forget about them — again.
If there is a basic fault in all this, it lies at the foot of
the Olympic organizing committee that allowed itself to be
bamboozled into agreeing to hold the games in Beijing in the first
place.
In the same way that China is able to squash internal dissent,
it muscled and manipulated its way through the Olympic committee’s
approval process. No matter the objection — pollution, lack of
infrastructure, bad summer climate — the IOC looked the other
way.
But the most egregious example of Olympic self-blindness was in
the willingness to overlook China’s
exploitation of its own people and those of a nation they had
invaded and whose freedom they have repressed for decades. For
this, if nothing else, the Olympic movement will be forever
stained.
