More on the Olympics

Shanghai Expat Forum Index » Community Discussion Forums » News and Opinion

Author

Message

shanghaiceltic

Board Royalty

Joined: Sep 20, 2005
Posts: 7588
Location: Perth WA
Status: Offline

Posted: Aug 04, 2007 - 07:30 AM
Post subject: More on the Olympics

From The Age

China's power Games

Mary-Anne Toy
August 4, 2007

IN JUST over a year, at the auspicious time of 8pm on August 8, 2008, as the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games unfurls at the "Bird's Nest" national stadium in Beijing, Liu Yi Tong, 3, will probably be fast asleep. The youngest gymnast at Beijing's Dongcheng Sports School — one of 3000 incubators for Olympic champions across China — can't even dress herself yet but is being groomed for stardom. Her coach, Yang Ke, 46, who entered China's state-controlled elite sports system at the comparatively old age of nine, hugs her youngest charge and says proudly: "Watch out for her at the 2020 Olympics!"

When it comes to Olympic glory, China has started training early. Premier Wen Jiabao is fond of telling how, before the People's Republic of China was established, China was so poor it could only send one athlete to the 1932 Los Angeles Games. Yo Jangjin (also known as Liu Changchun), a short-distance runner, endured the long sea voyage to the US and was exhausted. "He did not win any medals, but he had the support and attention and care of the entire Chinese population. Now it's a different story," Wen told a Harvard University audience in 2003.

Next year, while little Yi Tong sleeps, she will be oblivious to the revelry that the nation's leaders hope will show the watching world that China, for much of the previous century the "sick man of East Asia" has finally recovered and prospered. Three years ago in Athens, China won 32 gold medals, just behind America's haul of 35 (though trailing the US by 40 in the overall medal tally). Next year, nothing less than outright victory is likely to suffice. The Ministry of Sports confirmed after Athens that by 2008 its Olympic budget would be more than 40 billion yuan (about $A6.2 billion). "Our aim is to get more gold medals at the Olympics, and everything we do is for this goal," Wu Shouzhang, vice-president of the China Olympic Committee said after Athens.

The Olympics will be a milestone in China's progress and a crucial symbol for the nation's psyche, but the preparations go far beyond just hosting the world's biggest sporting event for two weeks. China is claiming its place, if not as the centre of the universe as it once saw itself, then certainly as an alternative centre of power to the US. In the words of Chinese sports historian Professor Fan Hong, the Olympics will be the "biggest event in China since the Communist Revolution in 1949".

Hong, head of the Institute of Chinese Studies at University College in Cork, Ireland, says sport has been one of China's most powerful weapons since Mao Zedong's revolutionary army beat the Nationalists for control of the country in 1949. Under Mao, sporting success demonstrated that socialism was superior to capitalism. As China opened to the world under Deng Xiaoping's reforms, sporting success became evidence not only of ideological superiority and economic prosperity "but also a totem of national revival", he says.

The Olympics will be seen as the symbolic expression of a process that has been unfolding for more than a decade. Since the middle of the 1990s, China, for years viewed by Australia and much of the world with suspicion, has been enjoying unprecedented respect and popularity around the world. The communist threat may have been replaced, in the eyes of many Western nations, by an economic threat to domestic manufacturing jobs, but in vast swathes of the developing world, China is being welcomed as a counterpoint to US hegemony.

Joshua Kurlantzick, a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, says China has altered its image in many nations from dangerous to benign partly through a sophisticated diplomatic strategy he dubs "soft power".

In his new book, Charm Offensive: How China's Soft Power is Transforming the Globe, he argues that by delivering aid and investment while promising non-intervention in a country's internal affairs — in apparent contrast to the US model of influence — China's new approach has won many allies in Asia, Africa and Latin America.

Although still itself a developing country and recipient of foreign aid, albeit in dwindling amounts, China, with its trillion-dollar foreign cash reserves, has begun to rival American and Japanese aid programs.

Chinese aid in Asia rose from about $US260 million in 1993 to more than $US1.5 billion in 2004, Kurlantzick says. Just over a month ago, China launched a $US1 billion program to fund investment and trade by Chinese companies in Africa. This is on top of the estimated $US6 billion the country has invested in, or supplied as loans and aid to, African nations including Sudan, Chad, Nigeria, Angola, Algeria, Gabon, Equatorial Guinea and the Republic of Congo, all oil suppliers. From 2002 to 2005, trade between Africa and China leapt from $US9 billion to more than $US32 billion, most of the increase due to China buying oil from Sudan and other countries.

"By adopting a more pragmatic, softer approach to diplomacy, Beijing has begun to mitigate other nation's fears," Kurlantzick argues in his book. "Beijing's growing popularity makes it easier for leaders of oil-producing nations to make deals with Chinese companies; by contrast, if they ink agreements with the US, they risk a domestic popular backlash claiming they are selling assets to the unpopular United States."

Within this context, Kurlantzick says the Olympics aren't necessarily critical to China's goal of altering its image, but if all goes well, they certainly won't hurt.

China's soft power, of course, is intimately linked to its global hunt to secure the raw materials and markets it needs to keep fuelling its surging economic growth — as well as its goal of isolating Taiwan, the independent island democracy that Beijing wants reunited with the mainland — by force if necessary.

Australia's relationship with China has never been closer. Chinese President Hu Jintao is due to make his second visit to Australia next month, for the APEC summit in Sydney, partly because of our importance as a reliable supplier of the iron ore and other resources needed to fuel China's 10 per cent plus annual growth, but also because we are seen as a friendly Western nation with expertise and technology in areas such as environmental and resource management.

Meanwhile, as China's diplomats are skilfully wooing the world, and its sports officials are planning to top the US medal count, Beijing's leaders are trying to give the ancient capital a "modern, civilised face". They are spending $US40 billion to rebuild and clean up one of the most polluted, traffic-choked cities on Earth.

Gilbert Van Kerckhove, one of five foreign advisers to the Beijing Municipal Government, says the makeover goes beyond next year's Games. Beijing is not just getting ready for the Olympics, he says, it is building a capital more commensurate with its ambitions to be a world power. "This is not a luxury but pure necessity to bring Beijing up to the standards of a modern metropolis."

Beijing is being transformed at dizzying speeds. It has overhauled its transport system, building three new subway lines, a train link from the international airport — which itself will have a new terminal the size of Heathrow added to it in time for the Games — and 300 kilometres of new roads.

The country's fourth-biggest steelworks is being moved out of the capital, and entire neighbourhoods are being razed virtually overnight and planted with millions of new trees and shrubs to meet the obligations to provide a "green Olympics".

There are a dozen new venues including iconic additions to world architecture such as the $US500 million national stadium, known as the "Bird's Nest" because of its latticework of steel girders, and the Australian-designed Water Cube aquatic centre with its transparent, bubble-like membrane. Another 11 venues are being renovated and eight temporary venues built.

Beijing's leaders are pleading with citizens to "eliminate the city's dirty, chaotic and backward image" by refraining from spitting, jumping queues and littering. People are being urged to smile more, while the city is considering sending a million migrant workers home in addition to the usual round-up of beggars, dissidents, the homeless and other potential trouble-makers before big events in the capital.

Taxi drivers have been issued with English-language tapes and a blitz on "Chinglish", sometimes the highlight of a visit to China, has led to Beijing's "Racist Park" being changed to its correct "Park of Ethnic Minorities" and the neon sign advertising the Dongda Hospital for Anus and Intestine Disease now reads "Proctology and Intestine Disease".

Even before the recent barrage of negative publicity about Chinese food and product safety, Games organisers had introduced traceable barcodes to monitor the production, transportation and distribution of all food to be put on the table at Olympic venues. White mice will be used to test all food prepared for athletes, and when an athlete eats at the Olympic canteen, their identification card will read and record their chosen meal. If any food poisoning occurs, it will take 10 minutes, officials say, to trace the source.

The relocation of most of Beijing Shougang's (Capital Iron and Steel) production — a decade-long operation said to be costing $US10 billion alone — along with the closure of coking factories and the fitting of emission-reducing scrubbers to big coal-fired power plants will remove some of the city's largest sources of pollution.

This month Beijing will also take a million cars off the roads to test traffic control measures officials hope will ease congestion and pollution. The rumour, sometimes denied by authorities, is that the 9000 or so construction sites in the city will be closed before the Games to reduce dust. All that may not be enough. Authorities are now wrestling with the issue of getting neighbouring provinces to control activities such as farmers burning off fields, which may be contributing to Beijing's choking miasma.

Despite the billions being spent, however, Beijing's tap water will still not be safe to drink except for athletes, officials and others living in the Olympic village. The water leaving the city's new purification plants now passes all 106 tests under a new national standard (Beijing is the only city so far in China to reach this level), but the city's ageing pipes mean the water is sometimes contaminated by the time it reaches households.

And a year out from the Olympics, the smog has often been so dense in the past six weeks that the "Bird's Nest" looks as if it is rising from dirty dry ice.

The smog, in combination with punishingly humid and hot weather, has been punctuated by frequent thunder and rainstorms, which also worry organisers, who fear a soggy Olympics almost as much as a smog-marred one.

Zhang Qiang, head of the Beijing Weather Modification Office, and her battalion of rainmakers with cloud-seeding aircraft, artillery and rockets are on standby. By shooting chemicals into clouds, they can force or disperse rain or hail to ensure sunny skies for the Olympics. However, Zhang admits they can only tamper with light showers at best and can do little to avert a downpour.

And other more fundamental questions remain — perhaps most significantly as to whether this new China really is a benign and benevolent colossus. Beijing won the rights to host the 2008 Olympic Games on the implicit promise that the Games would help further open China and lead to improvements in human rights. Foreign human rights groups and China's emerging civil society — including thousands of largely illegal non-government organisations covering everything from pro-democracy to environmental and cultural groups — give mixed reports.

Amnesty International in April conceded some positive efforts — chiefly giving the Supreme Court oversight of the death penalty and the freeing up of restrictions on foreign media — but warned that authorities were using the Games as "a catalyst (for) a continued crackdown on human rights defenders, including prominent rights defence lawyers and those attempting to report on human rights violations". The report cited cases such as that of Ye Guozhu, a housing rights activist who is serving a four-year prison sentence because he organised a demonstration against alleged forced evictions in Beijing in connection with preparations for the Olympics.

Professor Joseph Cheng from Hong Kong's City University says China's swift reaction to the Save Darfur campaign shows how sensitive it can be to public pressure.

The China-Darfur link caught fire when actress Mia Farrow dubbed the 2008 Olympics the "Genocide Games" because of China's support of the Sudanese Government's role in the slaughter in the region. Farrow pressured Steven Spielberg, who is a consultant on the opening and closing ceremonies, to write a personal letter to President Hu Jintao calling on him to act. In mid-July, the Save Darfur group, of which Farrow is a member, took out full-page advertisements in the International Herald Tribune to try to shame China, Sudan's largest foreign investor, trading partner and arms supplier, into persuading Khartoum to accept United Nations peacekeepers. The UN says at least 200,000 people have died and two million more have been driven from their homes in Sudan's western Darfur region since February 2003.

This week, China backed a unanimous UN Security Council vote authorising a force of 26,000 UN and African Union troops and police for Darfur. It is believed the Sudanese Government agreed to co-operate after China's intervention.

Professor Cheng, a critic of the one-party state, says that despite concessions on Darfur and the easing of restrictions on foreign (but not yet domestic) media ahead of the Olympics, "in the past two years we see the new leadership in China tightening up on non-government organisations, the internet, the media and dissidents.

"The Chinese authorities have their own way of doing things," Cheng says. "It's much more civilised than before when they would put (dissidents) in jail. Nowadays they get a nice holiday somewhere without communications with the outside world and afterwards they are allowed to go home, but this is not freedom of speech."

Joshua Kurlantzick says this is partly due to a culture clash in which "China is becoming much more sophisticated in the world but still doesn't have much idea about dealing with NGOs and advocacy groups".

"I don't think the Olympics has led China to open up, because there are so many forces within China behind domestic change that are much more significant than an international sporting event. One good thing is it has put a greater spotlight on China's international activities — the whole phenomenon of and interest in Chinese investment in Africa and Sudan. All of that has been a good wake-up call, because at some point China was going to have to confront these things."

Kurlantzick says placing too much emphasis on the Olympics could be risky for China. "Australia didn't need the Olympics to prove that it is a First World country. When the Olympics went badly in Atlanta with the bombing and then the false accusation of who was behind the bombing, it was a bad situation but not a catastrophe for the US, because the US hadn't invested all of its international prestige in the Olympics. China has invested so much more than was invested in Sydney or will be in London.

"If it goes badly in Beijing, some of the things that have been thought about China in the past few years will have to be reassessed. Of course the economy will continue to grow at an astounding rate, but if there is some huge prοtest and China deals with it poorly, you might have people reassessing whether China has really changed that much in how it deals with civil society and prοtest, and reassessing whether China should play a larger role in the world."

Mary-Anne Toy is China correspondent.

_________________
I have parrallel bars at home, one for gin and one for whiskey

Last edited by shanghaiceltic on Aug 05, 2007 - 06:25 AM; edited 2 times in total