‘Totalitarian China’ must get a shot at the Olympicsm

But executing 480 people in a month is no sport

Having ordered the execution of some 480 people through that cruellest April month in a nationwide campaign euphemistically called ‘strike hard’, the Chinese are now biting their nails in the weeks before Friday the 13th of July dawns in Moscow. On that day, the 126-member International Olympic Committee will decide whether the 2008 Summer Games should be awarded to Beijing — despite its human rights record — or whether more propaganda-savvy cities like Paris and Toronto will be allowed to show off their wares.

Increasingly, the Olympics have been getting divorced from Pierre de Coubertin’s turn-of-the-century dream of one big happy global family competing with each other for the glory of sport. For heaven’s sake, there’s so much more at stake, including money. Coca-Cola and Kodak are among the main sponsors of the 2008 Games and America’s NBC television, because of the amount of greenbacks it pays out for broadcasting rights, has emerged as the single largest source of funds for the Olympics.

Small wonder that the bid for 2008 has quickly turned into a free for all, into as much of a blood sport as the gladiator games of ancient Rome. Both Paris and Toronto have the knives out for Beijing, today’s front-runner, accusing its leaders of being modern-day combinations of Chenghiz Khan and Nadir Shah. Only the other day, Claude Bebear — with no resemblance to the lovable Winnie-the-Pooh — in his capacity as both the president and CEO of the 2008 Parisian bid, darkly told journalists that ‘‘when you look in the Olympics Charter, you have to observe human rights... Nobody knows what could happen in China in the next seven years.’’

Nobody knows what could happen in China in the next seven years. What a salvo by Bebear, striking his propaganda-tipped arrow hard, right into the heart of the matter, showing none of the quality of mercy that Western civilisation believes it has imparted to the rest of the heathen world. Bebear was clearly flouting time-honoured protocol about one bidding city not criticising another. Not that he cared. The world had never really set store by its own rules that politics and sport shouldn’t mix.

Communist China, Bebear was really making clear, belonged to the Other Side. Just like the Communist Soviet Union, which foolhardily invaded Afghanistan in 1979 and was made to pay when the US boycotted the Moscow Games in 1980. The Soviets struck back in 1984, boycotting Los Angeles. Soon after the summer of 1989, China was put through the mealie-machine by the West because it had cracked down on its own people building the Statue of Liberty in the heart of Beijing. The Chinese lost the bid for the 2000 Games to Sydney by an excruciatingly narrow margin of two votes.

Ten years later, Beijing’s bidding again. An army of English-speaking Chinamen and women wielding nothing more deadly than CD-Roms crammed with the latest buzz words such as the ‘People’s Olympics’, ‘Green Olympics’ and ‘Hi-tech Olympics’ have swarmed all over key European cities where the IOC has its offices. Last week a technical evaluation put Beijing ahead of not only Istanbul and Osaka, but Paris and Toronto as well, but conceded that the human rights debate in China was ‘‘impossible to ignore’’.

As the political and diplomatic bargaining hots up, a team of US legislators has already objected to Beijing in the the wake of the spy plane crisis — China charged the US government $16,000 for the 11 days the plane crew was ‘‘illegally’’ on its territory — and now on its opposition to the US missile defence shield. Chinese dissidents and Tibetans have joined the call. They’re all focussed on totalitarian China’s anti-democratic record, as exemplified by the recent ‘strike hard’ campaign in which 480 people — criminals and Uighur separatists in Xinjiang, peasants resisting high taxes and corrupt officials — were ordered killed.

So should the clampdown deprive China of the Olympics? The Moscow vote could have some surprises for us all.

Earlier Columns