Op-Ed
Blimps over Beijing, Bombs over Baghdad and Athletic Directors on Crack
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Cosmology on the Rocks
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Just how does one achieve the glorious position in which China now finds itself? That spectacular, burdensome, and thoroughly modern honor of hosting the Olympic Games? The International Olympic Committee shares ...
First, it’s the dog fight to become the glorious host city. And how do you achieve such a pinnacle? The International Olympic Committee shares the following criteria: “government support, public opinion, general infrastructure, security, venues, accommodation and transport.” That is, you have to be a real city! One that the mass media and corporations can descend upon and show off to the globe as properly global. The world wants to see its reflection in you, so clean up, and look nice for the world! Alright, China?
But to be global, it seems you must be modern. Thus the demand of the “international community,” represented by the International Olympic Committee (I.O.C.), is first that you build a ton of modern stadiums and spend billions of dollars on them. In China’s case, that’s 31 stadiums built or renovated, including the modernist National Stadium, which is being called the “bird’s nest” for its massive steel latticework, and will look fabulous from the television cameras in the blimps. But in the several years of construction in China, there have been at least six officially confirmed worker deaths, compared to 14 in the rush up to Athens 2006.
To conceive of just what the I.O.C. is, think of your high school athletic director and a bunch of her friends smoking megalomaniacal crack and thinking they are Kofi Annan. That is, athletic directors on crack, which I shall happily call A.D.O.C.
Anyway, the A.D.O.C.’s second point in the selection of China was that it would encourage human rights reform. Of course, the Chinese government immediately read this as an endorsement of its current social and economic reforms, which haven’t exactly done the trick. But the cracked out Athletic Directors ought to realize that the demand for mass-imposed modern construction, and a radical makeover of a country is not necessarily human friendly. The very stadiums they request—aside from the offense of their sheer excess — have at least those 6 casualties of men building them. And then there’s Hu Jia.
Like modernity as a whole, the selection of China to represent “modernity” back to its Western paragons is just a wager: China might think it has to reform leading up to the Olympics (and it has tried to clean up the air in Beijing), but it also might crack down even further (such as the recent arrest and imprisonment of human rights activist and dissident Hu Jia — see the video Prisoner in Freedom City on YouTube). The crackdown, a Giuliani-hides-the-homeless move on a massive extent, is meant to make the Olympics a pretty picture, which perhaps everyone wants, but no one wants more than governments and corporate sponsors. A pretty picture means it’s a wonderful world with wonderful flags, wonderful capital cities, and wonderful commercial food: that is, Disney World, brought eerily to life.
China has called this world tour of the Olympic Torch the “journey of harmony.” Let’s forget, the Chinese government seems to urge us. Let’s forget about the recent crackdowns on protesting monks in Burma, and brutal suppression of the protests in Tibet, not to mention the broader denial of that national movement, and the support of Omar Bashir’s government in Sudan… in other words, let’s turn political repression into a pretty picture. Let’s aestheticize politics into an absurd, utopian spectacle, says the Party. But China did not invent this.
You see, everyone likes to blame the Nazi moderns for the more distinguishable crimes they committed. But no one likes to talk about what they bequeathed to the postwar world: the uncanny ability to make state-inflicted death look like a pretty picture. And what better example of this than the world-wide tour of the Olympic Torch, a tradition invented for Munich 1936 by Carl Diem, to show off the Third Reich’s modern (but of course barbarous) face?
Many people in the West think that their leaders should boycott the opening ceremonies of the Olympics to punish China, and Gordon Brown of Britain has said he will do just that. Nicolas Sarkozy will probably boycott. Many are asking President Bush to join.
But at that point, the whole thing gets ridiculous. President Bush taking the high road on human rights? The guy commanding over 150,000 occupying troops in another country right now, authorizing the imprisonment of a few hundred people in Guantanamo Bay with no status at all other than being purely human (and thus treated as nonhuman)? The public and their Congress that tolerate all this? When we consider that, it’s no wonder that Western governments are up in arms about China’s abuses: it provides a welcome distraction from certain unsavory things.
If this were the New York Games, the protests would be massive.
But until now I’ve been avoiding the vexing complaint of the hour: don’t politicize the Olympics! Come on! It’s sports! It’s fun! Needless to say, the Chinese government is of this opinion. When the A.D.O.C. hinted on Thursday that China should improve human rights and open up to the media before the Olympics, a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman responded, “I believe I.O.C. officials support the Beijing Olympics and adherence to the Olympic charter of not bringing in any irrelevant political factors.”
The I.O.C. has a concept called the Olympic Truce, in which even antagonists should agree to compete with/against each other (which is it?) in the Olympics. There is a wager here too: will mimicking interstate conflict in sport reduce actual conflict or fan its flames? Will the modern ritual work or not? At least North and South Korean athletes marched under a Korean Peninsula flag in Sydney 2000. A pretty modest record of success, if you ask me.
But the Olympic Movement, in its advocacy for world peace through sport, and its endorsement of the vague category of “universal fundamental ethical principles,” is not a substantively political Olympic Movement. That it is, it has no politics of its own; it then becomes, like that blank letter in Scrabble, an empty symbol which can be used to suit whichever purposes you want. And who better to fill in the blanks of what the Olympics mean than the Americans and Europeans, talking human rights bravado and demanding modern stadiums, but wanting more than anything else to keep the attention off of their own shortcomings? And even more than that, to win medals.
The Olympics are a ritual—the projection of conflict onto sport—with a mixed history: Nazi propaganda, and dead stadium builders, but also true moments of reconciliation. (Can you imagine Israel/Palestine 2020? A joint-hostship? That would be truly redemptive.)
The Games should go on in China, but the protestors are perhaps their most important participants. The heads of state will make fools of themselves, and that will be the Official Olympics, and you can copyright that shit all you want. But it is the unofficial Olympics — the athletes themselves (before they sign endorsement contracts), and the protestors — who matter. Let’s just hope the protests continue, and broaden their scope to boot. Hu Jia, Tibet, and Baghdad and Guantanamo, too.
Jeremy Siegman is a junior in the College of Arts and Sciences. He can be contacted at jsiegman@cornellsun.com. Cosmology on the Rocks appears alternate Fridays.
Awesome. Love the article,
Awesome. Love the article, keep up the good work. I myself have been asking every chinese and chinese american that I know at cornell about the olympic games in peking, and every single one of them reiterates the sentiment of the Chinese government. It seems like the pawns in the party's movement have leaked outside their country. Is this a form of brainwashing?