The Globe and Mail, July 30, 2008
Hello, I'm Patrick Martin, Comment Editor of The Globe and Mail, and This is globeSalon.
Today, we welcome readers to the second instalment of our new feature on globeandmail.com. Once again, we have gathered an impressive lineup of commentators to join us in discussion, salon-style, whenever major news developments or significant issues arise.
Today, to discuss the issues that have arisen concerning China, The Olympic Host we are joined by more than a dozen of our "Salonistas": from East to West... Clifford Orwin, the political scientist, currently is in Helsinki; historian Margaret MacMillan (and author of Nixon in China) is in Oxford; author Camilla Gibb is in London; Halifax lawyer and former Trudeau adviser Brian Flemming is in Halifax; Michael Higgins, president of St. Thomas University is in Fredericton; author and commentator Irshad Manji is in New York; political scientist Antonia Maioni is in Montreal; political adviser John Duffy, Nobel laureate John Polanyi, philosopher
Mark Kingwell, and The Globe's Asia-Pacific correspondent Marcus Gee are all in Toronto; Globe columnist (and horsewoman) Margaret Wente is in Creemore, Ont.; Christian broadcaster Lorna Dueck is in Burlington, and Preston Manning, politician and political activist, is in Calgary.
There are about two dozen "salonistas" and you can read full the lineup and see their biographies and pictures here.
This is not a comprehensive gathering that is representative of absolutely all Canadians. Rather, it is our subjective selection of some intellectual guests we think our readers would like to hear from on the subject of the day.
Today, that subject is China and its hosting of the Olympic Games.
Is China proving to be a good choice as host?
Will hosting the Games make China a better place, with greater human rights?
Or is it likely to be only a propaganda victory for an authoritarian regime?
Does any of the politics really matter, if the Games are an athletic success?
Editor's Note: In keeping with the nature of this discussion, we will be fully moderating reader comments to ensure the highest level of debate. We will be strictly enforcing our written guidelines on comments. Please "Join the Conversation" but please do so in the spirit we hope to create for the GlobeSalon.
Now we'll hear their responses. The discussion will continue throughout the day. Please check back frequently for the latest updates.
First, to Mark Kingwell in Toronto, who has written on China for Harpers and been a contributor to Burtynsky: China.
Mark Kingwell: The best thing you can say about the Beijing Olympics is that they are only the second-biggest public relations disaster for China in 2008. True, they haven't yet begun, which creates scope for even worse things than the Sichuan earthquakes; but, with a week to go before the opening ceremonies, we have already seen typically inept responses to issues of air pollution, internet access, security, and dissent. You can't blame the swamp of algae at the sailing venues on anything but a puckish deity, but that too created its own PR goofiness: Numerous photo ops of uniformed cadres hopelessly cleaning the shore with garden implements, the Sisyphuses of slime.
I'm inclined to see this as unfortunate rather than evil, if only because the successful Olympics once looked like a straightforward feather in Beijing's cap. Clearly they brought lots of pressure to bear on the IOC, but there was a genuine argument that it was China's moment for global glory. Yellow Peril news stories were rife in the U.S. press, there was paranoia about the juggernaut of a capitalist hybrid mobilizing 1.2 billion workers and consumers, and Shanghai offered a spectacle at once exhilarating and terrifying of what the urban future might look like. A return to the Greek ideals of pure sporting excellence � not to mention the most television cameras ever to cover an Olympic Games � seemed just what the doctor ordered. Spectacular architecture was put in the service of creating fantastic sports venues, those parks of the soul, rather than phallic skyscrapers dedicated to profit. The New China could join the rest of the third-millennium world order as an insider, maybe even THE insider.
Now we see the reality. China remains, if nothing else, sui generis, a law unto itself. Its leaders are both arrogant and cack-handed; they just can't help themselves. These Games will be remembered less for their athletic excellence than for the images of athletes forced to wear pollution masks, of protest suppressed, of a country that, despite all the cars and clothes, is still a demonstration that you can gorge on the fruits of capitalism without sowing the seeds of democracy.
Patrick Martin: And now to Oxford and Margaret MacMillan (who was most recently in China a few months ago)...
Margaret MacMillan: Another Olympic Games are nearly on us. I always say I will never watch another one but I know that yet again I will find myself glued to my television watching sports I have never heard of.
Do I expect much more from the Games than entertainment? Not really. There has been a lot of talk about how China is changing and becoming more open and democratic and how the Games are somehow going to help this. Or on the other side we hear fears that a successful Olympics will somehow confirm in place an authoritarian regime. I don't think the Games is going to change China one way or the other.
We are shocked - dismayed, appalled -- that the Chinese are cracking down on dissent and whistling protesters, ticket touts, ethnic minorities, prostitutes and other undesirables out of Beijing. What did we expect? The regime was authoritarian and undemocratic when the International Olympic Committee (equally authoritarian and undemocratic) awarded them to Beijing. And it's not as if we haven't seen it before -- remember Moscow in 1980 or Mexico City in 1986?
If China is going to change, as Russia and Mexico did, it will be because the Chinese people themselves get fed up with the incompetence, corruption and unresponsiveness of their own officials. There are plenty of signs that is already happening. I am hopeful that in the next decades China will see greater openness, increased rule of law, and more participation by ordinary people in their own government. I wish I could say the same for the IOC.
So let the Games go on and the athletes do their best but let's not expect them to change the world or even Beijing.
Patrick Martin: Marcus Gee, in Toronto...
Marcus Gee: The irony about the Olympics is that an event intended to show how progressive and modern China is may instead serve to underline how backward it still is in many ways.
Visitors to smog-shrouded Beijing will be reminded how an unresponsive, undemocratic and often uncaring government has failed to control the environmental effects of China's impressive economic advance. Those who notice or read about the curbs on free speech, the arrest of dissidents and the controls on the Internet will be reminded that China has failed to protect the basic rights that are an essential part of modernity. If demonstrations are disallowed, suppressed or shunted aside, it will show how insecure the current regime is behind its strutting display of self-confidence. The Olympic spotlight was supposed to illuminate the glories of the New China. Instead it is revealing the cracks in the magnificent facade.
Patrick Martin: Camilla Gibb in London....
Camilla Gibb: For all we criticize China's miserable human rights record we reward it the job of hosting the Olympics. More than a million people have been displaced in preparation for the Games. Perhaps as many as 1.5 million people evicted, their homes erased. Blatant and unapologetic action on the part of government prepared to sacrifice people's lives for sensational projects.
With a billion people, one of the fastest growing economies in the world, and six thousand years of history, China is going to do it their way, thank you very much, and that's not going to be the Western way of liberal democracy. China is entitled to become its modern self in a way that protects Chinese interests, but the combined legacy of Confucianism and communism ascribes very different value to the worth of a human life.
The fact that the Chinese government has no reservation about razing neighbourhoods and shunting people aside by force if necessary to get its Olympic site built shouldn't surprise us in the least�the building of the Three Gorges Dam has displaced millions upon uncompensated millions � but this time, we're all complicit. We know exactly what this government is capable of, yet we've given them the permission to blunder ahead. What government or corporate interest hasn't sought an ally in China? What company isn't seeking access to that market, both its labourers and consumers? While we feel we can make noise about Chinese action in Tibet and relations with the Sudanese government we turn away from the carnage that litters the road to Olympic glory as if we consider it a domestic issue in which we can't interfere.
Patrick Martin: John Polanyi, the Nobel prize-winning scientist at the University of Toronto, has a different point he'd like to make...
Prof. John Polanyi, Everyone agrees that it would be a pity to 'politicise' the Beijing Olympics.
They should not be used as an occasion to draw attention to the abuse of human rights in China, to mischief in Tibet or Darfur, nor to China's carelessness in regard to the environment. Chinese officialdom concurs, proceeding to rebut each of these charges.
Quite naturally this spectacular event is turning the political spotlight on China, reminding us that China is not home to a different species, nor even exempt from the laws of physics.
There is, in fact, another Olympiad which China would love to host; the international competition in science. Recently China has made great strides in this direction, though still having far to go -- as have we, in Canada -- to break the U.S. hegemony. Scientific exchange between the world's most competitive laboratories and China has never been more lively. China benefits, and increasingly we all do.
As in sport, science is merit-based and rule-based. Like the Olympics, it transcends nationality, religion and ideology.
The scientific community welcomes China's new openness to science, as the best path to the spread of civilized values. But this must not stand in the way of criticism of governments. Our Chinese colleagues would not expect that, nor respect it.
It goes without saying that we unite in opposition to the 'politicization' of science.
Patrick Martin: Clifford Orwin wants to weigh in all the way from Helsinki....
Clifford Orwin: I'm not an expert on China, so I'm inclined to defer to those Salonistas that are. I opposed awarding the Games to Beijing, because the world takes that for an honour, and the regime deserved no such honour. Its claim to fame was that it combined economic efficiency with political despotism and a ruthless foreign policy, and no doubt the IOC was counting on the regime's efficiency to see China safely through the Games. That would have been a public relations coup for a despotic regime, and therefore bad. If in fact the Games do prove (or, as Mark Kingwell thinks, have already proved) a public relations disaster, that's good as far as it goes. (Likewise a public relations disaster for the IOC is much to be relished; I liked Margaret MacMillan's parallel between it and the Beijing regime.)
I incline to agree with Margaret that the Games can't be expected to change China in any essential way, but then the following thought occurred to me. If the public relations disaster is colossal enough (because the debacle on the ground is colossal enough), the regime might react to that, in ways unpredictable at least by non-experts like me.
Patrick Martin: Ahem, Margaret Wente, in Creemore, is itching to get a word in here....
Margaret Wente: I get the sense that a lot of people are rubbing their hands with glee at this fabulous opportunity to bash China for its many sins against democracy, human rights, the environment, etc. etc. All true enough. But let me make a couple of contrarian points.
First, China's astonishing economic progress of the past 20 years has done more for human rights than all the human-rights groups put together. Its economic policies have liberated hundreds of millions of people from rural serfdom and freed them to pursue better lives. This applies especially to women. Girls in rural China are regarded as nearly worthless. If they're not aborted, they can expect to spend their lives up to their knees in rice water, while their brothers will get much better access to education. Now millions of those girls are making their own money ( $100 a month isn't much, but it's better than nothing) and have far better life prospects.
Let' s not forget, either, that we are literally indebted to China for some of our own prosperity. By keeping their currency low, they're subsidizing our way of life with cheap TVs, computers, microwave ovens, etc. etc. They hold piles of Western debt. The West and China are deeply dependent on each other. So beware of what you wish for. The worse it goes for the, the worse it goes for us.
Patrick Martin: Clifford Orwin wants to weigh in all the way from Helsinki....
Clifford Orwin: I'm not an expert on China, so I'm inclined to defer to those Salonistas that are. I opposed awarding the Games to Beijing, because the world takes that for an honour, and the regime deserved no such honour. Its claim to fame was that it combined economic efficiency with political despotism and a ruthless foreign policy, and no doubt the IOC was counting on the regime's efficiency to see China safely through the Games. That would have been a public relations coup for a despotic regime, and therefore bad. If in fact the Games do prove (or, as Mark Kingwell thinks, have already proved) a public relations disaster, that's good as far as it goes. (Likewise a public relations disaster for the IOC is much to be relished; I liked Margaret MacMillan's parallel between it and the Beijing regime.)
I incline to agree with Margaret that the Games can't be expected to change China in any essential way, but then the following thought occurred to me. If the public relations disaster is colossal enough (because the debacle on the ground is colossal enough), the regime might react to that, in ways unpredictable at least by non-experts like me.
Patrick Martin: Ahem, Margaret Wente, in Creemore, is itching to get a word in here....
Margaret Wente: I get the sense that a lot of people are rubbing their hands with glee at this fabulous opportunity to bash China for its many sins against democracy, human rights, the environment, etc. etc. All true enough. But let me make a couple of contrarian points.
First, China's astonishing economic progress of the past 20 years has done more for human rights than all the human-rights groups put together. Its economic policies have liberated hundreds of millions of people from rural serfdom and freed them to pursue better lives. This applies especially to women. Girls in rural China are regarded as nearly worthless. If they're not aborted, they can expect to spend their lives up to their knees in rice water, while their brothers will get much better access to education. Now millions of those girls are making their own money ( $100 a month isn't much, but it's better than nothing) and have far better life prospects.
Let' s not forget, either, that we are literally indebted to China for some of our own prosperity. By keeping their currency low, they're subsidizing our way of life with cheap TVs, computers, microwave ovens, etc. etc. They hold piles of Western debt. The West and China are deeply dependent on each other. So beware of what you wish for. The worse it goes for the, the worse it goes for us.
Patrick Martin: Brian Flemming in Halifax.....
Brian Flemming: When it became China's "turn" to be awarded the Olympic Games, many thought this might be an opportunity to replicate what happened in 1988 when the Games were held in Seoul, Korea. Those Games led to greater democratic freedoms in Korea.
But China is not Korea. The current leadership in Beijing fears Tiananmen-like street chaos more than anything. Public order trumps all in today's mainland Chinese zeitgeist. So, the Korean democratic miracle had little chance of happening in China.
The Beijing commissars wanted to celebrate the political and economic "success" of the new China and to close the book on the country's 19th and 20th century humiliations by the West. Those humiliations make ones touted by separatists in Quebec look tame by comparison. And China would achieve its goals like the Tailor of Gloucester -- in one (Olympic) stroke.
But the best laid plans of Beatrix Potter's mice and the men of Tiananmen appear to be cratering on the eve of the Games. An inability to get rid of Beijing's Dickensian industrial smog and the revival of widespread Stasi-like snooping on one's neighbours shows what an asymmetric "power" China really is.
Democracy may come to China some day but it is more likely to arrive as it did in Taiwan in 1996, not through the over-hyped Olympics.
Patrick Martin: Okay, Margaret Wente wants to add something....
Margaret Wente: Some people seem to be suggesting that a public-relations disaster for the games might be a good thing, because it might somehow undermine the credibility of China's authoritarian regime. I think that's completely wrong.
Negative press in the West will only reinforce popular Chinese opinion that we are against them -- that we resent China's rise to power and refuse to recognize their legitimate claim to a place on the world stage. Negative press in the West will have the opposite effect of undermining the Chinese leadership. It will merely reinforce Chinese nationalism and people's support for the regime, which, whether we like it or not, is very solid.
I was in Vietnam this spring and I also got the sense that even though the Vietnamese people don't like the Chinese very much, they see the Olympics as a symbol not just of China's emerging power but as a recognition of the rise of all of Asia. In other words, there's a lot of Asian pride invested in this event too.
Patrick Martin: Political adviser and author John Duffy in Toronto wants to say something....
John Duffy: It seems clear from the discussion that the Beijing Summer Games are likely to enter the unlucky circle of "controversial" Olympiads.
These "politicized" Olympiads are nobody's favourites. Berlin 1936 amounted to a two-week Nazi Party Day; Moscow 1980 was a grim exercise in East Bloc dominance, made the more dreary by the US boycott. The jingoism of LA 1984 was Reagan's America at its most grating.
It hasn't been hard to see coming the enrolment of Beijing 2008 in this unpopular club. What I am finding most fascinating is to see the charges against the Beijing Olympics set forth: Tibet. Human rights abuses. Denial of internet access. Air pollution. Age-faking of athletes. Algae blooms.
From a PR perspective, all that's missing is locusts, boils and the slaying of the first-born.
Perhaps the most interesting part of these negative narratives is how they reflect the mix of great contemporary issues. China's rise is one of the great historic dynamics of the past 30 years, and managing the rise of a new power is one of the supreme challenges to any system of global security. Accordingly, the Olympic frame has been occupied by Tibetans and their friends, bravely calling attention to China's anachronistic, imperial approach to peace and security issues. The drive towards democracy and human rights is also one of the great themes of our time. The Chinese regime's severe deficiencies in this regard has thus been a major Olympic story, gathering the threads of dissident suppression, internet access denial, and (less seriously) the general disreputability that goes with state-sponsored cheating by authoritarian governments.
But, I would argue, the most enduring image of the political Olympic Games playing out before us will surely be that of the Bird's Nest stadium wreathed in smog.
In any era when the global polity is facing up to the scale of our environmental challenge, the invasion of one of the world's premiere stages by a kind of planetary "darkness visible" makes for an extraordinarily compelling and instructive spectacle. Is it the moral density of the image -- a human structure bent humbly to reflect nature wrapped in any atmosphere twisted all out of shape by human blindness -- that compels most? Or maybe just its eeriness? Whatever the reason, I imagine this image will endure in the collective memory of the early XXIst century.
Patrick Martin: Michael Higgins at St Thomas University in Fredericton...
Michael Higgins: Perhaps it was the tortuous flight, the slightly maniacal schedule, or the sun-extinguishing pall over the city, but my trip to Beijing last autumn to address Canadian university graduates working in the financial chambers of the new Goliath was a body and mind-wrenching experience.
I lack the wisdom of the professional sinologist and can rely only on my limited empirical experience but it isn't just the dust that is ubiquitous. If you could quantify human energy, Beijing could transform the world. Such focus, such discipline, such order. But at what cost? Deferred maintenance that imperils the durability of hotels, the erasure of historical sites (not the Forbidden City, of course, because that ensures a profit), the displacement of non-native born citizens of Beijing -- are all part of the cost, a cost that has yet to be fully tallied in individual and human terms.
The Olympics provides the perfect backdrop: the ultimate validation and the ultimate disclosure. We see the order and the chaos -- even if only indirectly -- and we are likely to be seduced by the splendour of the Games. But at what cost to us in the West?
On the very eve of the celebrations comes Beijing Coma, a novel by Ma Jian, that reminds us all that the defining event of the new China is Tiananmen Square, not the Olympics. A claim that is as subtle as a coma.
Patrick Martin: From New York, here's Irshad Manji....
Irshad Manji: As many of us are castigating China's abysmal human rights record, let's remember that supposedly progressive ideals, such as global interdependence, aren't helping matters.
Put simply, the more interdependent countries are, the more offense they take at statements about the need for human rights within their borders. And the more democratic societies have to compromise their sovereignty to avoid causing further offense.
Case in point: China's reaction, last October, when the Dalai Lama received the Congressional Gold Medal. Tibet's exiled spiritual leader couldn't have been more humble or conciliatory in his acceptance speech. But that didn't stop China from threatening retaliation -- against the West.
At the time, hints abounded that Beijing would undermine US-EU efforts to stop Iran from developing nuclear weapons. Surely this is among the reasons that the U.S. hasn't boycotted the Olympic Games.
Last fall, George W. Bush insulted Chinese officials by attending the ceremony in honor of the Dalai Lama. This month, Bush tells us that to skip the opening of the Olympics "would be an affront to the Chinese people." Causing affront didn't matter nine months ago.
As I've written in The Globe's pages, we can see this dynamic at work in other cases. Consider Turkey's response to the Armenian genocide bill introduced in the U.S. Congress. Turkey lobbied feverishly against American legislation that declared the early 20th-century slaughter of Armenians to be a genocide.
More than merely protest with words, Turkey promised to block its borders to U.S. war planners, who desperately need Ankara onboard so they can move troops and equipment in and out of Iraq.
Not only did the Bush administration side with Turkey (surprise!), but key Democrats in Congress also withdrew their support for the anti-genocide bill. They decided that it was too inflammatory to the Muslim world at this fragile moment. Odd. These same lawmakers didn't think so a week before. What changed?
Nothing more than Turkey's outrage. And in an interdependent world, that translates into the need for self-censorship for the sake of conserving your allies.
Patrick Martin: Now, from Clifford Orwin, in Helsinki: he'd like to reply to Margaret Wente ...
Clifford Orwin: Just for the record, Margaret, what I suggested was that a public relations debacle might be a bad thing in its influence on the evolution of the regime. Yet if the foul up on the ground is big enough, the Chinese will react not just to the bad press that they've received, but to the mismanagement that led to it, won't they? But how will they react?
Isn't it sophistic to claim that China has worked miracles for human rights just because it has achieved economic development? Presumably you would have had to say the same thing for the Soviet Union. Since when does economic development that tramples ruthlessly on human rights qualify as a victory for human rights -- because that is what you're saying, isn't it? Didn't Mao's economic policies lead to the deaths of 70 million people? True, the regime has since abandoned Marxist economics, while still doggedly perpetuating Communist political tyranny. But as the country's environmental and water crises suggest, it may be hell bent on self-destruction. To cite an example known to both of us, how about the Three Gorges Dam -- a typical example of Chinese economic development -- is that a triumph for human rights?
Patrick Martin: And Marcus Gee would like to make something clear... To Margaret Wente's comment about driving China into a corner:
Marcus Gee: Yes, sure, a PR disaster at the Olympics could push a wounded China into a corner. China's strong resentment about the past "humiliations" it suffered at the hand of the West has made it hyper-sensitive to criticism. But it's also possible � just possible � that China might draw some more useful conclusions from an Olympic black eye: that it really should do something about the awful pollution that is blighting its landscape and overshadowing its future; that there is more to being modern than shiny buildings and superhighways; that a country that puts people in jail for do nothing more than speaking their minds is not going to be accepted as modern by the rest of the world no matter how quickly its GDP grows.
Whether or not Beijing learns those lessons, I don't think the West should stop saying what it thinks just because China might feel hurt. If China wants to be a great power, it has to learn to accept honest criticism. Great powers, like mature adults, don't throw a temper tantrum every time someone raises an objection to something they do.
Patrick Martin: Salonistas, Professor Wenran Jiang, of the University of Calgary, has been following this discussion today and wants to make an intervention...
Except for Professor Polanyi and Ms. Wente, our group of respected experts have so far fallen into the emerging Western narrative of Beijing 2008 Olympics: China promised to behave and improve its human rights records back in 2001 in exchange for hosting the games but it has back-tracked on its promises: there is more repression of Tibetans and other minority groups, more jailing of dissidents, more harassment of foreign press, more pollution, more propaganda ... Nothing is good, China is not democratizing, and this is building up to be the greatest disaster of all the Olympics.
Well, there is some truth to all these claims, only some. But the day-to-day reporting of the bad news leading to the Olympics, and such narratives have missed the bigger picture. First, quite contrary to many critics who love to hate the Chinese government with very good reasons, the Beijing Olympics is really for, by and of the Chinese ordinary people. It has been the case from day one, and more so when the protests against the Olympic Torch relays happened in London, Paris, and other cities in Western countries. The Chinese people are not particularly fond of their government but they were outraged by those who call Beijing Olympics "genocide Olympics" or "1936 Nazi games." They want to have good sports, they want to have a good time, just like everybody else around the world. They don't like to be thrown together with their government, and they are resentful that the occasion is being exploited for political purposes.
Second, nobody I talked to in China buys this story that somehow China made promises of any kind in gaining the Olympics back in 2001. The very-well informed Chinese would tell you that since then, China has lifted another 100 million people out of poverty. There has been an explosion of progress in all areas, even in the political sphere. China has the largest group of Netizens (over 300 million), largest cell phone users (over 550 million who do tens of billions of short messages a day), and they push for human rights, more openness, and challenge the authorities with more and more success. Yes, the government still interferes, still rounds up harsh critics, and makes life more difficult for foreign reporters since the Tibetan crisis. But the Chinese people tend to say look at the forests rather than trees, and I have to agree with that.
Third, let's look at the long-term impact on China's development from a societal point of view. China is a very open country now, more so than people in the West really realize. But the Olympics will push that openness further, and make Chinese people more aware of the outside world. I grew up in Harbin, northeast part of China, and when I was a child, there was no TV, no access to the outside world. It was the Cultural Revolution. But when a propaganda documentary was shown to glorify how great the Chinese table tennis team was doing in Japan and other Western countries (during the so-called Ping Pang Diplomacy), what attracted my attention was not the government propaganda, but how wonderful the Japanese city Nagoya looked like, and all the other things I longed to know more about the "capitalist world." Well, I then ended going to Japan ... The current games will in nature have the same impact on the Chinese youth, although the context is different. Let's measure things with a bit of historical depth, and stopping being so bitter.
Patrick Martin: Salonistas, Professor Wenran Jiang, of the University of Alberta, has been following this discussion today and wants to make an intervention...
Wenran Jiang: Except for Professor Polanyi and Ms. Wente, our group of respected experts have so far fallen into the emerging Western narrative of Beijing 2008 Olympics: China promised to behave and improve its human rights records back in 2001 in exchange for hosting the games but it has back-tracked on its promises: there is more repression of Tibetans and other minority groups, more jailing of dissidents, more harassment of foreign press, more pollution, more propaganda ... Nothing is good, China is not democratizing, and this is building up to be the greatest disaster of all the Olympics.
Well, there is some truth to all these claims, only some. But the day-to-day reporting of the bad news leading to the Olympics, and such narratives have missed the bigger picture. First, quite contrary to many critics who love to hate the Chinese government with very good reasons, the Beijing Olympics is really for, by and of the Chinese ordinary people. It has been the case from day one, and more so when the protests against the Olympic Torch relays happened in London, Paris, and other cities in Western countries. The Chinese people are not particularly fond of their government but they were outraged by those who call Beijing Olympics "genocide Olympics" or "1936 Nazi games." They want to have good sports, they want to have a good time, just like everybody else around the world. They don't like to be thrown together with their government, and they are resentful that the occasion is being exploited for political purposes.
Second, nobody I talked to in China buys this story that somehow China made promises of any kind in gaining the Olympics back in 2001. The very-well informed Chinese would tell you that since then, China has lifted another 100 million people out of poverty. There has been an explosion of progress in all areas, even in the political sphere. China has the largest group of Netizens (over 300 million), largest cell phone users (over 550 million who do tens of billions of short messages a day), and they push for human rights, more openness, and challenge the authorities with more and more success. Yes, the government still interferes, still rounds up harsh critics, and makes life more difficult for foreign reporters since the Tibetan crisis. But the Chinese people tend to say look at the forests rather than trees, and I have to agree with that.
Third, let's look at the long-term impact on China's development from a societal point of view. China is a very open country now, more so than people in the West really realize. But the Olympics will push that openness further, and make Chinese people more aware of the outside world. I grew up in Harbin, northeast part of China, and when I was a child, there was no TV, no access to the outside world. It was the Cultural Revolution. But when a propaganda documentary was shown to glorify how great the Chinese table tennis team was doing in Japan and other Western countries (during the so-called Ping Pang Diplomacy), what attracted my attention was not the government propaganda, but how wonderful the Japanese city Nagoya looked like, and all the other things I longed to know more about the "capitalist world." Well, I then ended going to Japan ... The current games will in nature have the same impact on the Chinese youth, although the context is different. Let's measure things with a bit of historical depth, and stopping being so bitter.
Patrick Martin: Now, back to Margaret Wente, in Creemore....
Margaret Wente:Let me respond to Clifford Orwin and John Duffy. What I'm saying is that the concepts of "freedom" and "human rights" look a lot different if you're living in a dirt-poor society. Rising prosperity brings a lot of good stuff with it --- more choice, more education, more mobility, a better chance that your kid will will survive childhood, escape from a life of crushing toil and backward superstition. Human rights don't mean much if you're living on rice and spinach. And being able to afford a family motor scooter brings an astonishing amount of freedom.
The most striking thing I learned during my brief stay in China is how very differently the bright young Chinese kids view their world. For example, to us Tiananmen Square is a seminal moment in the history of tyranny. To them (if they know anything about it), it was a regrettable but necessary act to quell a bunch of troublemakers. For us, China is a symbol of environmental disaster. They regard this attitude as nothing more than Western hypocrisy. After all, our own industrial revolution wasn't very pretty either. And now we want to deny them a chance to achieve what we have.
Patrick Martin: Salonistas, there's a report out of Beijing today that IOC officials actually agreed to allow China to block certain websites (such as Amnesty International's, the Falun Gong's etc) during the Games. An official was quoted as saying that the openness that China promised only applied to sites concerned with the athletic competition.
"I regret that it now appears ... that there will be limitations on website access during Games time," IOC press chief Kevan Gosper said, referring to Beijing's Olympic organizers.
"I also now understand that some IOC officials negotiated with the Chinese that some sensitive sites would be blocked on the basis they were not considered Games related," he said.
Interesting wouldn't you say?
An now, back in Toronto, John Polanyi wants to add a comment following up on something Professor Orwin said...
Prof. John Polanyi Thank you Clifford. I had been hoping someone would raise the case of the USSR; its increased engagement with the rest of the world in the 1960's and 1970's and its subsequent collapse in the 1980's. No cases are the same, but there are nonetheless lessons for the case of China.
Together with colleagues, I travelled to the USSR in the 1960's and '70's on scientific-political (specifically arms control) errands.
Concurrently I wrote (e.g. in this newspaper) and spoke about the inhumanity of the regime.
The assumption underlying this was that there were people in the USSR who would agree, and who would be encouraged by support for their views.
It seems to me to be as valid an assumption in the case of China.
Continuing in this personal vein, I was taken aback in about 1970 to be accosted by the Soviet ambassador to Canada, Alexander Yakovlev, who assured me that he was in full agreement with all my views. When, much later, Yakovlev became policy adviser to Gorbachev, it became evident that he had not merely been referring to the need to control armaments, but also to the cruelty of the regime.
Patrick Martin: Two comments from Margaret MacMillan in Oxford.....
Margaret MacMillan: The first on Irshad Manji's point about interdependence making countries wary of criticizing each other. Well, yes and no. Germany and Great Britain were each other's chief trading partners before the First World War but that certainly did not stop their politicians and newspapers saying very rude things about each other.
The other thing, surely, is that the more interdependent we are the more we know about each other. We have worldwide campaigns to support independence movements in Timor, to stop the slaughter in Darfur, or to ban land mines. (We also get other sorts of worldwide campaigns of course -- to encourage violence and intolerance.)
My second comment is on Professor Jiang's assertion that most of us in the salon are falling into (and I assume that he means that critically) the 'Western narrative' that China promised to be good if it got the Olympics and now it is being painted in the blackest colours. I am not sure what he means by 'Western narrative' except that it sounds to me as though he is saying anyone who points to China's shortcomings in such areas as human rights is doing so to further some Western agenda to keep China down. It is not 'Western' to be concerned about human rights or democracy. Labelling such concern as such serves to make it illegitimate and trivial. Perhaps I have misunderstood Professor Jiang and he can explain to us what he means by the 'Western narrative'.
Patrick Martin: And now, over to John Duffy in Toronto...
ohn Duffy: Dr. Jiang is right to point out that an Olympic pile-on about what's wrong with China is neither fair nor productive.
True, the modern Olympics are a mirror we hold up to the places in which they are held. Because of that, the Chinese regime's deficiencies are being remorselessly revealed. Two things, however, mitigate that negative impression somewhat. First, I sense that the greatness of the Chinese people -- their stoicism, their pride in what they have achieved, their aspirations for the future -- will grow as a story line in the weeks ahead. Showcasing their achievements is simply bound to draw admiration for the remarkable people that has come so far, so fast.
Second, the mirror is held up to the times in which we all live, not just to the specific place called Beijing. It is perhaps tempting to see this year's Olympic environmental narrative as one of proud Pharaoh's stiff-necked arrogance confronted by the vengeance of The Lord. Tempting, but misleading. That enduring image of smog-wreathed stadium is emblematic of much more one country's over-reliance on fossil-fuel electricity generation. It reflects what all of us are doing, on a worldwide scale, to imperil our common planetary home. The smoggy-stadium image is not some mote in China's eye, but a smear in the mirror we are holding up to ourselves as a global community.
It's not a pretty sight.
Patrick Martin: Now, let's go to Burlington, Ont., and Lorna Dueck...
Lorna Dueck: We need to add to this debate the role of media to do more than profit from the Games. Every agency that can tell a story is responsible to protect the gift of human rights and now is the moment to leverage that for China. A religious leader from my Canadian city is languishing in a Chinese jail and has lost hope he will ever see the outside world again. Huseyin Celil's crime appears to be his faith, he is a member of the Muslim Uyghur minority in China, was travelling on a Canadian passport when he was arrested in Uzbekistan two years ago and handed over to Chinese officials. Beijing accused him of terrorism and sentenced him to life in prison in April of 2007. His wife and six children are neighbours to those in our town who feel sick about cheering for any Olympics. Few Canadians know about Mr. Celil and he has never been granted access to Canadian consular officials. Read the Amnesty International appeal. The media is his only voice for justice.
Two weeks ago, Xie Fenglan, a Beijing woman who believes much the same as I do, collapsed under torture in China. Her crime was that her husband, a pastor, had met with American officials and was seen to be "destroying the harmony of the Beijing Olympic Games."
We have the media power to support human rights in an unprecedented way during these Olympics, and while China may be proving to be a good host of the Games, those involved from democratic agencies like the Western media have failed to activate their responsibility for story telling of this need. It saddens the experience of the Games, these Olympics have already emerged as a vastly under utilized opportunity for human rights.
Patrick Martin: Marcus Gee has something to add...
Marcus Gee: I'd also like to chime in on the Soviet analogy. I think it's worth remembering that many used to say the same thing about the U.S.S.R. as they are saying about China now: that people don't care much about rights when they are hungry; that the regime had won the support of the masses by delivering order and economic growth; that people in the West had no right to judge the Soviets for choosing a different path to progress. They were saying it right up until the Soviet Union collapsed in a monstrous heap in 1991.
I wouldn't try to argue that the same thing is going to happen in China. Its economic progress, unlike the Soviets', has been real and Margaret Wente is right to say it has lifted countless millions out of poverty.
But I still think it's wrong to assume that because Chinese are getting richer that they are perfectly content with the way things are (China has thousands of riots, protests and other disturbances every year) or that they don't care that their rights can be casually trampled. I also think it's wrong to assume that the Chinese have invented a way to deliver order and prosperity without democracy. Behind the Olympic fa�ade, China is a troubled country with a frightened, brittle, rather ineffective government. It would be wise to reform before it's too late. The Olympics in that sense are a tragic missed opportunity.
Patrick Martin: Back to Marcus Gee....
Marcus Gee: This idea that China is being bullied by the West is just too ridiculous. Western leaders are simply tripping over themselves to ingratiate themselves with Beijing. Countless presidents, prime ministers, premiers, mayors and alderman traipse over there � panting businessmen in tow � to peddle Western goods and know-how. The most they do is mumble a few perfunctory words about human rights before raising a glass with their unelected hosts to the glories of Chinese progress. China has been welcomed into the World Trade Organization with open arms. It exercises a permanent veto on the United Nations Security Council. How, exactly, is it being persecuted? China's belief in a Western plot to exclude it from world councils is nothing less than a conspiracy theory, the fevered result of a severe inferiority complex that China must outgrow before it can be regarded as a mature world power.
Patrick Martin: Back out to Calgary, and Preston Manning...
Preston Manning: China's hosting of the Olympic Games could be beneficial in a political sense (a) if it generates serious discussion world wide re: China and democracy/human rights, and (b) if that discussion focuses on examining and challenging the Chinese government's approach to democracy and human rights ideologically as well as in practice.
Over the last dozen years I have had three substantive opportunities to discuss both these concepts in depth with officials of the Communist Party of China. On each occasion the party line has been first to argue that they are committed to a hierarchy of rights � with collective rights such as the right to order at the top and individual rights like freedom of speech and association further down on the list � and, secondly, that where the exercise of these lower rights (such as occurred in the demonstrations at Tiananmen Square) conflicts with a higher right (order) the state is justified in intervening and suppressing the exercise of the lower rights.
Of course this conception of human rights is quite compatible with authoritarian government and very much at variance with our western conception of both human rights and democratic government. But this Chinese (Communist) conception of human rights is very thoroughly developed and the Chinese government is making a major and increasingly successful effort to communicate it to politicians and opinion leaders in Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East as a superior alternative to "western" conceptions of human rights. If the west wants to effectively compete internationally with this position, or to put pressure on the Chinese government to modify their position, we are going to have to do much more than simply "protest" what we regard as Chinese abuses of human rights. In addition, we should be substantially sharpening and deepening our own conception of human rights (and the appropriate balance between collective and individual rights), discussing/arguing/promoting it at every opportunity with our Chinese contacts, and making a much greater effort to communicate it effectively to the rest of the world.
If western politicians trained as hard and as thoroughly to win the gold in promoting human rights and democracy internationally as our athletes do to win gold at the Olympics, the world (including China) would be a better place.
Patrick Martin: Professor Wenran Jiang would like to respond from Calgary...
Wenran Jiang: On Professor Macmillan's question of the "emerging narrative" in my comment: I might be a bit over-generalizing but it's a simple fact in recent weeks. Western press and opinion leaders have mostly fallen on the negative side. There is, of course, a market for controversial issues. Bad news is often the best news that attracts attention. There is no conspiracy implied. And it is absolutely legitimate to criticize the Chinese government so it can feel the pressure to live up to a much higher standard in the Olympic year. What I tried to point out is that such universal story lines lack balance, especially the people in the West who have very little knowledge about China, nor the kind of changes China has gone through in recent decades.
But I disagree with Ms. Lorna Dueck in her assertion that somehow human rights groups are not pushing enough this year, and it's going to be a missed opportunity.
The question is: What happens to China, to all the problems and challenges China faces at the end of next month when the Games are over?
First, let's learn from a few lessons from the Tibetan crisis and the torch relay protests a few months ago that the kind of protests have been counterproductive; they angered the Chinese public, pushed them to rally around the Chinese government, and strengthened the hands of the hardliners. Second, let's remember that no external forces will change China. The changes will have to come from within, and to be managed by Chinese themselves, at their own pace. The Chinese people, including those forces within the government for further reform, want human rights and democracy no less than we Canadians.
We certainly should not think they demand less or deserve less. What we can do the best is to support those progressive forces in China to move that country forward as in the past 30 years. The pace may be not as fast as we wish but we need to manage our expectations, just as the Chinese people have managed theirs.
Lorna Dueck Lorna Dueck: Let me clarify my concern for Professor Jiang, it is not the human rights groups that have not been pushing enough on this story, rather the media has failed to treat those human rights advocates as newsmakers with the same discovery as they have on other aspects of the Games.
They have not brought the who, what, where, when and why of the abuses to surface in the same way they tell of other issues like pollution, facilities, or tourism. We've not seen faces, places, people, families, systems, very little of what the abuse looks like has been accessed while the world's eyes are on China. When it comes to human rights, journalism is not a neutral profession.
Patrick Martin: Well Salonistas, that brings us to the end of our second globeSalon.
Many thanks for your stimulating contributions to our discussion, and thanks to all the readers who joined us.
Enjoy the rest of your summers.