China clearly didn’t anticipate the Olympic torch fiasco, and neither, it seems, did the International Olympic Committee. Last week IOC President Jacques Rogge described the Olympics as being in “crisis,” and this three months before an athlete has placed a foot in the starting blocks on the Beijing track. The Tibetan protestors whose inspired sense of timing has threatened to extinguish the torch, now appears to be casting a pall as well over the opening ceremony, which will be missing some – and perhaps many – Western leaders. It is hardly the kind of triumphant inauguration to their Olympic extravaganza which the latter-day mandarins around the politburo table had envisaged.
China wanted the Olympics to showcase its friendly, modern face and to celebrate its accession to the world stage as a major power. But it made a critical miscalculation. It underestimated the probability that international attention would be drawn to its dark face as well as to its friendly one in the run-up to the games. And this would have happened whether or not the Tibetans had mounted a violent challenge to their Chinese overlords, given that there is an activist constituency in the West which supports the Tibetan cause, and some of the members of that constituency are both high profile and vocal. Since the grand tour of 21 cities would have been too good an opportunity for them to miss, the Olympic torch would probably have encountered a similar stormy reception to the one which in fact greeted it last week. The violent repression of the Tibetans in Lhasa and elsewhere, however, infused the campaign with especial vigour, urgency and poignancy, and, it might be added, guaranteed it exceptional publicity.
Months before the torch set out on its ill-fated wanderings, Britain’s Channel 4, for example, had sent a Tibetan with a British passport back to his homeland to do an undercover report on what was happening there. It was broadcast the week before the flame reached London. While many people must have known about the oppression in Tibet in an abstract sense, this programme brought home in a far more immediate way the extraordinary brutality of the Chinese administration there, and would certainly have sensitized many viewers to the realities of the oppression in that forsaken province.
Using a hidden camera, there was, among other things, a series of interviews with Tibetans who could not afford to show their faces. The report detailed the horrific torture of political detainees; the forced sterilisation of women (the Tibetan population used to be six million and it has now declined to five); the rounding up of pastoral nomads whose herds have been taken away and who have been forcibly resettled in isolated areas where they suffer enormous privation; and the absence of religious freedom – although the forms are allowed to persist, what the monks say and do is closely monitored.
The ubiquity of the Chinese military and police was evident from the camera shots; it is estimated that there is one Chinese soldier for every 20 Tibetans. The population of Lhasa is now about fifty per cent Han Chinese, since for many years the government has been encouraging migrant workers from China to settle there in order to change the balance of the population. When the younger generation of Tibetans rose up a few weeks ago, inevitably they targeted Han Chinese businesses. It must be said too that Tibet is of considerable economic importance to Beijing, which is an added reason why its independence will not be entertained by the central government.
Now that Tibet has come to international attention at last, China’s record there cannot be ignored. The degree to which Beijing has misjudged the international mood, was evident in relation to the torch. In response to suggestions that it should not be carried through Tibet as originally intended, the Chinese governor of that province insisted that it would be, and that the reaction of his authorities to anyone bent on disruption would not be “merciful.” It was not that anyone disbelieved him, it was simply that his choice of words lent confirmation to the reports about the true character of the Chinese administration there, and by extension did nothing to enhance the reputation of his bosses in Beijing.
Then there was the matter of the strapping, blue-clad Chinese security detail for the torch. Jogging along either side of the flame they bossed the athletes who carried it, and pushed the metropolitan police. Chairman of the British Olympic Committee for the London 2012 games, Sebastian Coe, was overheard calling them “thugs” and said they had physically pushed him around. His description has now stuck. It was some days before anyone discovered who they were; it turned out they were “volunteers” from a para-military organisation called the People’s Armed Police, which is the equivalent of a counter-terrorist group, some of whose members had been involved in putting down the recent riots in Tibet. While their athletic training was clearly impressive, no one had obviously bothered with the niceties of teaching them good manners and diplomacy in other people’s countries.
China has struck back, of course, with a propaganda sally of its own. On Friday it released old footage of Tibetans in China itself rioting. The pictures included shots of Tibetan monks throwing rocks through a shop window. The commentary then launched into a diatribe against the Dalai Lama, and said this proved that he was the organising force behind the violent protests directed against the Chinese state. The problem for China is that no one in the West believes this, even if they know very little about the Dalai Lama. He preaches non-violence, and is not even asking for Tibetan independence; simply respect for human rights and autonomy within the existing political framework. What Beijing seems unable to come to terms with is mass unrest over conditions in Tibet which has nothing to do with incitement on the part of any individual leader.
The political protests over the torch notwithstanding, there is not likely to be a repetition of the 1976, 1980 and 1984 games, which experienced boycotts. At this stage it looks as if all major countries will attend the games – and that is as it should be. It is nevertheless good that the preliminaries involving the Olympic flame in particular have opened up avenues for protestors to draw attention to China’s abysmal human rights record – and not just in Tibet – and cause the host country some well-deserved embarrassment and loss of face.
It seems that when Beijing was selected as the site of this year’s Olympic Games seven years ago, they had made some kind of reference to human rights and a freer media environment, which Mr Rogge described last week as a “moral” commitment and not a legal one. The Chinese for their part just regarded these as mere words devoid of meaning, since as the games approach they have become more repressive and not less so. If nothing else the demonstrators have refused to let them get away with their pretence and have exposed their empty claims that the games should be non-political. This is the year, perhaps, when the symbol of the Olympic flame was obscured in the public mind by the image of the London protestor with the fire extinguisher.
