Apr
24
Will Olympic boycott go on
April 24, 2008 | | 1 Comment
Kitty XIE Rui (4)
When 15 U.S. politicians wrote in a letter “it would be clearly for you to attend the Olympic Games in China, given the increasingly repressive nature of that country’s government” to Bush, the White House said Mr. Bush would attend the opening ceremony in Beijing.
Then several demonstrators scaled the Golden Gate Bridge to show “Free Tibet” banners during the torch relay in San Francisco and the White House reiterated that Bush’s plan to attend the opening ceremony had not changed.
Now, all the Republican and Democratic presidential candidates urged Bush to miss the ceremonies, the White House still said Bush would attend Beijing Olympics but did not announce his specific schedule and rule out the possibility of Bush missing the opening ceremony.
Bush seems to compromise, however, he has not given any definite indication he will skip the event even though British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Nicolas Sarkozy all have announced that they would not appear at the opening ceremony in Beijing after riots in Tibet.
Everyone is paying attention to Bush’s final decision and some said his final decision might cause a challenge to U.S. role as the symbol of democracy and human rights.
But is there any possibility for Bush to demand that China’s government reform itself and receive west-style democracy overnight as a condition of his attendance? If four-year Iraq war and thousands dead has not brought freedom and democracy to that nation, how can Bush’s several-hour attendance change China’s politics agenda?
“A lot of countries say, ‘ well, if we say that we are not going to the opening ceremonies, we’ve checked the box on Tibet,’ That’s a cop-out,” U.S. national security adviser Stephen Hadley said at the interview of Fox News Sunday.
He also suggested that what the world ought to do was sending the message clearly to the Chinese that this was an opportunity, with the whole world watching, to show that China took into account and were determined to treat their citizens with dignity and respect.
For U.S., the opening ceremony is a much closer access to talk with China and a much bigger stage to show her respect to democracy and human rights. So do other countries.
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While it would be very easy to refute the premise that the Chinese Government is “pure evil” (as politicians and pseudo-reporters have suggested) by showing the economic and social indicators of China for the last 20 years, I will only focus on the situation in Tibet in order to be as objective as possible.
For more than 50 years Tibet has been legally a part of China. Before that, Tibet was a very impoverished region, most of it due to the wrongly distribution of resources (most of the land belonged to a small group of nobles). In 1956, when China implemented a program of redistribution of land in order to benefit the poorest people, the Dalai Lama together with the nobles and their servants raised against the Chinese Government. The end result was the death of many innocent people and the exile of the Dalai Lama and other nobles to India and other countries.
Until these days the Chinese Government, although being communist, has supported the beliefs, culture and religion of the Tibetan people. Therefore, after more than 50 years you can find dozens of monasteries in place and many hundreds of monks practicing their religion in Tibet. At the same time, China has been strengthening the economic development of this region. The GDP of Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR) today is thirty times that of before 1950, there are now 25 scientific research institutes, while there was none before 1950, infant mortality has dropped from 43% in 1950 to 0.661% in the year 2000, life expectancy has risen from 35 in 1950 to 67 in 2000. In addition, the Central Government exempts Tibet from all taxation and provides 90% of Tibet’s government expenditures. As a result, the Tibetan population in Lhasa administered Tibet has increased from 1.2 Million to almost 3 Million since the Chinese economic policies are in place.
While there is obviously a lot of work to do from the Chinese Government, especially in the case of freedom of speech, the situation in the Tibetan region has dramatically improved while preserving their religion and culture. Therefore, a “free Tibet” will only bring a redistribution of the land benefiting the exiled nobles, a disruption of the relations between China and Tibet and the possibility of further province separations from the territory of China.
At the end, a boycott to the Olympic Games will nurture further tensions among China and other nations (not helping to the geo-political scenario), will produce less economic stimulus for the people of China (due to less tourists and advertisement) and will not produce a “free Tibet”, which at the end would be unfavorable for Tibet.
In summary, the Media is not being fair with China because the pseudo-reporters and politicians are only using rhetoric to show a negative China without signaling the real challenges that China has been overcoming during all this time and without showing factual information and indicators about the real situation in Tibet. Unfortunately, there are many people who do not know this and who do not even know where Tibet is but feel sympathy because they saw “Seven Years in Tibet” and go to the streets to ignorantly protest.