damianIf you were an Olympian would you speak up about China?
August 26th 2008 03:30
"Free Tibet!"
The slogan that appeared to become the unofficial catchcry for many westerners has been nothing if not pervasive over the past three weeks or so. There have been no shortage of academics, Tibetan exiles and permanently pissed-off protesters willing to shout it from the rooftops, but what Media organisations covering the games are really clamouring for is criticism of China coming from athletes themselves.
Just why this is the case is somewhat puzzling for a number of reasons. Firstly, as an olympic athlete, the chances are you will be pretty well looked after by the host nation - whoever that may be - for the duration of the games, and would have precious little to complain about personally. Secondly, these people are elite athletes, not foreign polic'y specialists, and have most likely been spending the time before the games preparing their bodies for competition, rather than reading up on China's human rights record.
Now there may be a case for arguing that sport cannot completely be removed from politics - think of the sporting boycott of South Africa during apartheid, for example. However, China is a slightly different situation from South Africa, in that it is territorial integrity, rather than racism that seems to be at issue here.
Of course, a human rights violation is a human rights violation, regardless of the circumstances, and there is no doubt that China has a long way to go in improving things like freedom of speech and freedom of the media. Nonetheless, it is hard not to feel that there are subtle elements of western superiority complex at play here - in other words, that we have a right and responsibility to shed light on the situation in China, borne out of our supposed cultural superiority.
Consider this excerpt from a newspaper article as an example:
'As it was, from his powerful platform, IOC boss Jacques Rogge eschewed commenting on the two 60 year-old women who were given one years' hard labour for protesting on the streets of Beijing and instead chided Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt for his supposedly "unsporting" celebration.'
(Richard Hinds, "Iceland's fantastik silver", The Age, August 24, 2008)
Now while it may sound severe to us that merely the act of protesting can earn a sentence of a year's hard labour, the way in which this comment is phrased makes it seem like the Olympics should be some sort of trojan horse; a means by which to get into China and proceed to display their social backwardness to the world.
I am hardly suggesting that China's human rights record is without blemish, or that we shouldn't be working to improve that, but it seems that to constantly be looking to criticise the Chinese government, without offering it any kind of support is going to be counterproductive. The Olympic Games appeared to bring out a nationalistic streak in the Chinese people, in the same way that any other country would be proud to host such a major event, but there is now a dnager that they will look to the west for some kind of recognition of their achievements and find only a sea of criticism. Rather than encourage them to continue pressure on their government to modernise and reform, this could in fact make the average person more resistant to change if they see it to be merely done at the behest of western countries trying to interfere with their affairs.
So while we shouldn't be totally silent on the human rights situation in China, we should perhaps be slightly more tactful in the way we go about commenting on it. After all, if this is not at all to do with some kind of subconscious colonial attitude about 'bringing culture and civilisation' to China, why then do we never hear about "freedom for South Ossetia?"
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