You know the "old Chinese curse" (supposedly): May you live in interesting times. I find myself thinking along those lines with regard to China's Olympics, which open today in Beijing.
When I'm thinking with my head, I believe that it's in the world's interest for China to have a good Olympics. China's is one of the world's great cultures. Its rise cannot be stopped, only accomodated, and it's better for peace and stability that the Chinese people, given their nationalism, have reason to feel proud on the world stage, and not have their noses rubbed in their failings.
When I'm thinking with my heart, though, my thoughts run along the lines of, "You ChiComs deserve to have the world see that you're a bunch of environment-fouling, Christians-repressing, Falun Gong-beating, Tibet-crushing goons who have earned only the world's fear, not its decent respect, given your record on human rights and the environment."
I suspect the truth is somewhere in between.
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I was in China for 3 weeks this spring and 8 years ago. 8 years ago I witnessed the beating of a Falun Gong demonstrator and was held in police custody for about 2 hrs while they tried to figure out what to do with me. (I was not harmed and only needed surrender the videotape I'd taken that captured the beating as it literally took place 100 ft away from me.)
I have complex feelings about China: the everyday people that I met who wanted to simply speak English with me or have a picture taken with me, the tour guides, the staff and children at the orphanage we visited: I enjoyed meeting these people immensely, and in a couple cases actually got to have lengthy conversations with them about the cultural revolution (the 1989 Tiananmen Sq crackdown was off-limits), their excitement about the future but also worries about the loss of a way of life.
Not wishing to have Manning's Corollary tossed at me, but I think we should be careful to differentiate between the Chinese people themselves, who have borne many hardships and who, by and large, have worked hard and sacrificed to get where they are, and their government. Just as many foreigners differentiate between Americans and the policies of this administration. I think we must extend the same courtesy to the people.
Naomi Klein has an essay up today about how China has used the Olympics as a reason to drastically intensify its police state:
"Chinese corporations financed by U.S. hedge funds, as well as some of American's most powerful corporations -- Cisco, General Electric, Honeywell, Google -- have been working hand in glove with the Chinese government to make this moment possible: networking the closed circuit cameras that peer from every other lamp pole, building the "Great Firewall" that allows for remote internet monitoring, and designing those self-censoring search engines....
"Many human rights groups have pointed out that China's security upgrade is reaching far beyond Beijing: there are now 660 designated "safe cities" across the country, municipalities that have been singled out to receive new surveillance cameras and other spy gear. And of course all the equipment purchased in the name of Olympics safety -- iris scanners, "anti-riot robots" and facial recognition software -- will stay in China after the games are long gone, free to be directed at striking workers and rural protestors."
http://www.alternet.org/story/94278/china_unveils_frightening_futuristic_police_state_at_olympics/
One blogger called the Olympics "a tradeshow for totalitarians."
Hillary
I have a long-standing interest in China and I think the Chinese people have produced wonderful things. I am disconcerted that even some overseas Chinese feel any negative statements are about them as a people, which it's not for me. I mean I'm really rooting for Taiwan whether I watch or not.
I might watch some of the opening ceremonies after all. The US flag-bearer is apparently a member of something called "Team Darfur."
http://teamdarfur.org/
May you have an interesting Olympics indeed. Anyone want to hazard a guess how many people have been killed in fighting in Georgia? If that video feed was for real (hundreds of rockets being launched in the course of two or three minutes), and old Cold Warriors we have in our unit have made a good estimation, it could be in the thousands.
I'm having trouble concentrating on the Olympics, considering the ramifications, which aside from number of casualties, include the fact that we have some kind of a military relationship with Georgia. Why would we have formed this with a country at loggerheads with Russia? What did we think the endstate would be?? I hope the two countries come to some sort of a resolution. God knows our position in the whole thing will now be complicated, when it should have been loud condemnation coupled with complete and total non-involvement.
I think that belongs on the post about the Georgian-Russian thing. Granted there is no such post at the moment, but presumably there will be if it remains important.
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