Critics of the Beijing Summer Games, whose calls for an international boycott have been increasing in frequency and intensity, have recently produced a more extreme version of their argument, which is that the Olympics themselves (rather than just the Beijing version) should be permanently dissolved. Writing in the New York Times on April 13, Buzz Bissinger (the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author of Friday Night Lights) argued that the Olympics have been hopelessly corrupt for decades. The “one way to improve the Olympics,” he insisted, is “to permanently end them.” Bissinger is not alone in this sentiment, and there are many who see the International Olympic Committee’s (IOC) decision to award the games to a cruel dictatorship as proof that the committee is desperately out of touch with its constitutive ideals. Bissinger’s critique raises some important points, but his conclusion is exactly backward. The chief problem lies not with the Olympic Games, but with China itself.
One needs to be clear on this point. The case against the Beijing Olympics has nothing to do with the Olympics per se, and everything to do with deplorable patterns of behaviour demonstrated by the Communist Party of China (CPC) over the past several decades. The most serious criticisms of the CPC can be divided into three large categories: crimes against its own citizens, crimes against other nations and crimes against the environment. The Olympics have brought attention to each of these categories.
The CPC has demonstrated precious little regard for the lives and dignity of the Chinese people. Construction projects related to the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games have led to the displacement of roughly 1.5 million Chinese citizens. Amnesty International has drawn attention to the case of Ye Guozhu, who was forcibly evicted from his home because it fell within an Olympic development site. When he applied for permission to organize a demonstration in Beijing, Ye Guozhu was imprisoned, beaten and electrocuted.
The CPC estimates that the state executes 1,500 people each year (more than the total of all other countries’ executions combined), although international experts suggest that 8,000 would be a more accurate number. By way of comparison, Iran executed 177 people last year, while Pakistan managed only about a 10th of China’s vast execution industry.
Of course it has been less than 20 years since the Tiananmen Square massacre, in which perhaps 800 students, labour activists and critics of the Communist regime were massacred by the military. However, the CPC doesn’t stop with merely murdering enemies of the state. A report co-authored by former MP David Kilgour concludes that Chinese authorities harvested tens of thousands of “vital organs, including kidneys, livers, corneas and hearts,” from political prisoners whose bodies were then incinerated.
China’s behaviour in the global arena is morally execrable. Consider the various ways in which China has enabled genocide in Darfur. Not only does China directly fund Khartoum’s war by purchasing two-thirds of Sudan’s oil, it also sells millions worth of arms to Sudan (including Chinese Nanchang fighter planes, which are specifically designed for ground attacks). In order to perpetuate this profitable arrangement, China uses its veto on the UN Security Council to sink resolutions condemning Khartoum.
Readers are probably familiar with the situation unfolding in Zimbabwe, where Robert Mugabe is widely believed to have lost the presidential election, but has failed to release the election results for a month. Two weeks ago, it emerged that dockworkers in Durban, South Africa refused to unload a shipload of Chinese weapons, which had been ordered by the illegitimate Mugabe regime. China is Zimbabwe’s biggest trading partner and appears eager to assist in Mugabe’s violent repression of democracy in Zimbabwe.
Tibet, of course, is the issue that has galvanized those calling for an Olympic boycott. The Chinese-Tibetan conflict is long and complex, reaching back to events that took place in the Mongol and Manchu empires. Nevertheless, Tibet had been autonomous for decades before Mao’s troops seized it in 1950. The Dalai Lama has described China’s policies, which aim to demographically overwhelm Tibet, as “cultural genocide.” Last month saw hundreds of arrests and as many as 20 deaths when China violently repressed protests in Lhasa.
It is interesting to note that whenever there is an election going on in Taiwan, you can count on the Chinese to conduct “missile tests” across Taiwan’s shipping lanes.
China’s rapid industrialization has wrought tremendous environmental degradation. According to a World Bank report, 16 of the world’s 20 most polluted cities are in China. The government admits that most Chinese cities lack centralized sewage treatment facilities, and that half of the country lacks access to clean drinking water. According to the World Health Organization, air pollution (much of it caused by coal-burning power plants) kills 750,000 people a year in China, and respiratory and heart disease are the leading cause of death in the country. Despite being a signatory to several international environmental protocols, China is the world’s largest emitter of carbon dioxide.
There is, then, a vast archive of evidence to support the calls for an Olympic boycott. However, such a boycott, on its own, is little more than a pious vanity. A more serious and muscular response would involve boycotting Chinese exports with the aim of depriving the CPC of the financial resources with which to wage its cultural and actual genocides. Such a boycott would, of course, have painful economic consequences for us, as well as for China.
In the likely event that a boycott fails to materialize, is there a Canadian athlete with the guts and moral integrity to dedicate his or her medal to the thousands of African and Asian victims of CPC policies? Is there an athlete who will find the courage to salute Ye Guozhu and the other Chinese whose lives have been destroyed to host these games? Or will they continue to hide behind the cowardly and ignorant refrain that sports are apolitical? The world will be watching.
