China Games
03.24.2008 - 10:14 AMWas the uprising in Tibet predictable? The Times reports today that the Chinese authorities appear to have been caught by surprise. That itself is a surprise, given Beijing’s acute sensitivities about anything that might disrupt the Olympic games scheduled for August.
Arch Puddington, writing in COMMENTARY this past November, surveyed previous Olympics held in unfree countries. The conclusion of his China Games is even more arresting today than it was five months ago:
If the past is any guide, it is the most sinister and shocking features of a dictatorship that are the likeliest to emerge when it hosts the Olympics.
For Germany in 1936 at the Berlin games, it was militarism and anti-Semitism that reared their hideous heads. For the USSR in 1980, it was imperial aggression, with Afghanistan the Kremlin’s most recent victim.
Puddington did not offer any specific predictions about what China might face in 2008. But he speculated that “the Chinese authorities themselves might well be in the dark about what the Olympics finally portend.” This, too, as their handling of the Tibet uprising turns into a fiasco, was a prescient observation.
If the Chinese authorities want to stay abreast of events in their own country, perhaps they should be reading COMMENTARY. Oh, they can’t. It’s locked up behind their Great Firewall.
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March 24th, 2008 at 12:19 PM
We in the West tend to forget that Marxist totalitarianism is every bit as evil as National Socialism (Nazism), but not nearly as prosperous, regimented, or well organized. China’s cultivation of trade capitalism has made her more wealthy than the former USSR ever was, but China is still internally self-destructive in an economic sense, concentrating economic power in few hands, and using capital to achieve mostly international political objectives.
China has always responded to major demonstrations and uprisings with military force, as opposed to handling them with the police. China puts her big money into the military, and uses the police more in the Soviet “zampolit” role: as an arm of the Party, dedicated to intimidating shopkeepers and supervising networks of neighborhood informers (and of course, administering the political incarceration system). This is particularly the case in the hinterland. Beijing has very little interest in keeping order for the benefit of China’s citizens; the police exist to keep the Party leadership informed.
There is also an element of not trusting the police, who have daily contact with the citizens, to operate armed on a city-wide level. That would be an awful lot of firepower under the command of a civilian Party leader who is normally not trusted by HIS superiors. Whereas military units are under the command of the national military structure, and with soldiers having no common stake in outcomes in particular locales.
The odd thing here, really, is that the West is surprised to find China behaving not like the city of Los Angeles and the state of California, but like — well, China.
March 24th, 2008 at 1:38 PM
Just to let you know, Commentary is not yet locked behind the Great Firewall. I visit the website, without any trouble, almost daily from my apartment in Beijing.
March 25th, 2008 at 6:22 PM
Having periodically visited China for over a decade, most recently last summer, I can certify that the country is still socially and morally unfit to host the Olympics. The entire spirit of the games is inimical to that of the Chinese government and population, and vice-versa. Beijing only wants the games for more foreign currency and a patina of international respectability, neither of which it deserves. Anyone with the idea that hosting the Olympics will ameliorate the character of China’s government is as deluded as those who believed that a limited free market economy would lead to political liberalization. There are massive projects underway to clean up the air pollution over BJ, and otherwise clean up the city. Guess they’ll have to clean up their dissidents, as well. China needs cleaning up in all sorts of ways.
April 1st, 2008 at 3:05 AM
The Beijing Olympics are worse than the Berlin Olympics because the Nazis hadn’t committed their atrocities yet. China has.