Published: August 05, 2008 10:50 pm            

Stephanie Salter: China has a lot more than gold medals riding on the Olympics

TERRE HAUTE — This will come as a shock to regular readers, but I agree with something George W. Bush is doing this week:

Showing up for the Beijing Olympics.

This does not mean I’m fine with China’s abysmal human rights record anymore than it means I agree with most of the U.S. president’s actions. What it means is, Bush’s official presence at the Games is the sort of diplomatic gesture that carries huge, positive weight among the Chinese but no practical application for affecting the immediate civil rights of ordinary Chinese citizens.

Given our commitment to the Games and to trade with China, a presidential snub at this late date would accomplish nothing — and just might impede progress with, and within, the People’s Republic.

Our athletes and news media are in China. Hundreds of our corporations and billions of our dollars have been there, growing, for decades. China is deep in the United States, too, from the stocked shelves of Walmart to multi-billion-dollar joint ventures with U.S. corporate giants such as Boeing and IBM.

The time for meaningful official protest is long past. The 2008 Summer Olympics were awarded to Beijing in 2001. Besides, by receiving the Dalai Lama at the White House last October, the Bush Administration delivered one of the sharpest U.S. diplomatic elbows to China in recent history. (And that’s a second move of W’s with which I agree.)

The more effective stance for all Westerners to take is a long view of the Beijing Olympics. Because of the 2008 Summer Games, China’s leadership, and millions of its citizens, actually care what their global neighbors think of them. That concern is a good thing for humanity.

Among the scores of analysis/observations of China that have appeared over the last several months, one of the clearest belongs to author and China expert Orville Schell. A longer version appeared in the New York Review of Books, a shorter version in the Aug. 4 Newsweek.

For reasons dating back to the mid-1800s and involving many nations, Schell writes in Newsweek, “The Beijing Games present a fraught and sensitive moment.”

Schell, who serves on the board of Human Rights Watch, emphasizes that he is “the first to admit that the Chinese government gives ample cause for protest.” Nevertheless, he advises, “this is not the time — and not just because any unauthorized protest is quite likely to fail.”

“China has made a Herculean effort to prepare the way for this spectacle, in which ordinary Chinese, not just their leaders, can announce themselves to the world as having regained their national greatness,” Schell explains. “Protests would almost certainly spark the kind of nationalist and autocratic backlash that they’re meant to remedy.”

For evidence, Schell points to China’s retaliation for demonstrations in Tiananmen Square in 1989. The result was “a nearly 20-year period of reaction and restoration from which China has still not recovered.”

Schell is an award-winning investigative reporter, former dean of the University of California-Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, and he holds a Ph.D. in Chinese history. He has been studying China since the 1960s.

The roots of identity

To make the most of this fraught, sensitive moment, Schell encourages Westerners to understand — in modern parlance — where China is coming from. Although it may surprise Americans who see China only as a powerful, threatening monolith, the nation is coming from a place of deep humiliation.

Whether it was China’s defeat in the Opium Wars of the mid-19th Century, “the shameful treatment of Chinese immigrants in America,” the spoils of the 1919 Treaty of Versailles or Japan’s occupation of mainland China during World War II, a sense of humiliation “at the hands of foreigners” pervades Chinese self-perception, Schell writes.

That perception has led to, among other efforts, China’s “series of assaults on its culture and history” and a succession of attempts at “self-reinvention” that have “cast the Chinese adrift, with an uncertain sense of cultural and political direction.”

Within the 20th Century, China went from denouncing its traditional cultural roots to embracing the West to denouncing Western culture via Mao’s communist revolution to embracing the unique capitalist dictatorship it presents today. Such shifting of national identities, says Schell, has helped produce a “proud prickliness” with which we all must contend.

The Olympic Games in Beijing are supposed to show everyone that, at last, China has its formidable act together.

“In one grand, symbolic stroke, a successful Games was meant to cleanse China’s messy historical slate, overthrow its legacy of victimization and allow the country to spring forth on the world stage reborn,” Schell writes.

Little wonder that Chinese leaders and much of the citizenry have spent the last seven years virtually moving mountains and rivers — and trying to roll back time, itself, with regard to air pollution — in preparation for this moment on stage.

To protest Beijing’s hosting of the Summer Games would serve as an affront to far more than the Chinese government and its record on human rights, Schell says. Likely, it would inspire a defensive, isolating national fervor that would take all Chinese, and relations with their neighbors, backward.

Instead, we Westerners should keep in mind the “complex, psychological landscape” of China and remember “just how deeply implicated we are in how China came to experience and view the modern world,” Schell says.

“Despite the fact that China has gotten closer than ever to escaping from this past, it’s important to understand that its leaders and people are still susceptible to older ways of responding to the world around them. Now is not the time to provoke them further and impede their progress toward a new, more equal and self-assured sense of nationhood.”

Stephanie Salter can be reached at (812) 231-4229 or stephanie.salter@tribstar.com.

        

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