Beijing Olympics: Let the politics begin

BEIJING — The Communist Party expends much effort trying to remove politics from daily life in China, and now it wants to remove politics from the Olympics, too. Beijing Olympic officials are taking the line that political protesters agitating about China are violating the spirit and charter of the Games.

Poor sports, so to speak.

But if anything was evident last week when Beijing staged a one-year countdown to the 2008 Games, it was that eliminating politics from the Olympics was about as likely as eliminating medals. Beijing may have envisioned a public relations opportunity, but so did an array of advocacy groups that spent the week whipsawing China on human rights violations, press freedom and Tibet.

If a few stunts were daring - protesters unfurled a "Free Tibet" banner on the Great Wall - the criticisms were not new. What did change was the way the Olympics amplified the dissent, even for a nonevent like the one-year countdown. Media attention intensified merely because the Olympics were in town.

"All of these voices are going to become stronger and stronger, not weaker and weaker, as the Games approach," said John MacAloon, an Olympic historian who has advised the Beijing Olympic committee on managing the traditional torch relay. "All Olympic Games are, of course, highly politically charged and sensitive in some regions of the world. How could they not be?"

For about as long as the modern Games have existed, they have served as a stage for politics as much as sport. Berlin 1936 was Hitler and Jesse Owens. Helsinki 1952 was the beginning of the Cold War. Mexico City 1968 was the Black Power salute. The blood of 11 slain Israeli athletes stained Munich 1972. Moscow 1980 meant boycotts, as did Los Angeles 1984.

Beijing knows politics cannot really be tabled. Even before China was selected in 2001, international opinion was sharply divided between those who thought the Games could help reform the world's largest authoritarian state and those who thought they would simply validate the regime. Politicization has only deepened in recent months with controversies over pollution and the safety of Chinese products (including some Olympic trinkets).

One historical comparison studied by the Communist Party and its critics is Seoul 1988. There the Olympics reshaped political history when public anticipation of the Games fed demonstrations that toppled an authoritarian regime and ushered in democracy.

Does anyone really believe that that kind of political collapse is possible for Beijing? Almost no one. But in the abstract, Seoul gives sustenance to those mindful of an Olympic formula that can at least accelerate political liberalization and create more official tolerance for dissent in China: An authoritarian state, eager for validation, wobbles under the heat of international scrutiny and criticism and then loosens its grip.

The Communist Party is eager to stage a successful Olympics, and the Chinese public is ecstatic about holding the Games. China regards the event as a coming-out party to highlight its economic rise and emergence as a world power. But that eagerness is also providing an opening for the critics.

That was clear when the actress Mia Farrow criticized China for contributing to the atrocities in Darfur through its huge subsidies to oil-rich Sudan. China had seemed indifferent about international criticism over its role in Sudan until Farrow wrote an article in The Wall Street Journal in March that popularized the phrase "Genocide Olympics." The article pointed to Steven Spielberg for his involvement in the staging of the opening ceremonies in Beijing. Boycott talk then picked up a bit of steam. By August, China was suddenly part of a unanimous UN Security Council endorsing peacekeepers for Darfur. Some politicians in Europe and the United States have continued to promote a boycott, but the chances seem slim.

Still, other advocacy groups got the message. In April, the Chinese authorities arrested four pro-Tibetan independence protesters who had climbed to the Mount Everest base camp and hung a banner to protest plans to take the Olympic torch through the Tibetan Himalayas.

Countdown week presented another opportunity. Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International released reports denouncing China as failing to honor its Olympic obligations on human rights. The Committee to Protect Journalists said China was still impeding foreign journalists and jailing domestic ones, despite promises to allow unfettered reporting. Reporters Without Borders managed to stage a protest in Beijing, only to see the police briefly detain the foreign journalists covering it.

Lhadon Tethong, an advocate for Tibetan independence, said she thought the Olympics might finally have created some space for open dissent in China. She flew to Beijing from New York and spent countdown week filing updates on her Tibet blog. She went to the hotel where Jacques Rogge, president of the International Olympic Committee, was staying and shouted out questions about Tibet. The police later confronted her with printed pages of her blog and deported her to Hong Kong. She said the protesters who had hung the Tibet banner on the Great Wall were deported on the same plane.

"In the end, we weren't surprised they got us kicked out because we know they are not open and free," Tethong said by telephone after landing in Canada on Thursday night. "No IOC, no press and no Olympics are going to change the way they rule that place."

MacAloon, a cultural anthropologist at the University of Chicago, said the torch relay, which begins in March, could cause major political friction.

He also predicted that press freedom would become an increasingly prominent issue because it directly challenges the control that the Communist Party is accustomed to wielding. Tensions already emerged last week, and MacAloon predicted more friction if officials, for fear of bad publicity, refused to allow reporters to follow the torch through the restive regions of China.

Many dissidents in China say the ultimate barometer of success is whether the Olympics force the Communist Party to further open up society and advance political reform. Hu Jia, a prominent Beijing dissident, said the party considered domestic dissidents, more than foreign protesters or advocacy groups, the most serious challenge to staging the Olympics.

"The reason for a 'politicized' Olympics lies with the Chinese government," Hu said. "It's repressing dissidents and activists under the name of the Olympics. At the same time, it is trying to prove the legality and validity of its rule through the Olympics."

Hu should know. He has spent much of this year under house arrest.

John Vinocur is on vacation. The Politicus column will resume Sept. 4.