A Lesson In Watching Out What You Wish For

The Chinese are getting their nation in order for the Olympics, which is supposed to be a coming out party for the New China. Unfortunately, "getting their nation in order" comprises more than building tourist hotels and sweeping the streets. There's a heavy dose of crushing political dissent to be accomplished.

The Chinese wanted the Summer Games for the same reason everyone else does: the P.R. value of having everyone in the world stop by when the house is clean and the kids are in their Sunday best. The Chinese government promised, in effect, to not be itself -- abandoning it's longstanding policy of horrifying oppression and cruelty in pursuit of a perfect society.  Landing the games was a triumph, but I wonder now if there aren't a few high in the bureaucracy massaging their foreheads and asking themselves, "What were we thinking?"

China has itself in something of a jam. Company's coming, and the problem children of the various Chinese and Tibetan pro-freedom movements are planning a coming out of their own. Despite China's best intentions, it's pretty clear that once the living room is filled with noshing eyewitnesses, the problem children are going to come out and start showing their bruises to the world. The Chinese government doesn't want that, of course, and is banking on a pre-show crackdown to keep the kids away fro mthe visitors and quiet. 

Unfortunately, the guests they've invited for a visit know the kids are upstairs and are going to ask to see them, and they're likely not going to take "no" for an answer. Olympic athletes are young, beautiful, comparatively wealthy and travel with an assumption of individual privilege. They're a high profile elite and "no" is not something they're used to hearing.  The hundreds of thousands of tourists that follow the games assume they can go wherever they want, talk to whomever they want, and do pretty much whatever they want, so long as they leave a big enough tip to clean up the mess. Following the traveling circus will be the largest media gaggle in the history of the world, thousands upon thousands of cameras and microphones and reporters speaking in every language known to man. Every single one of them has time and column inches to fill, and every one of them understands there's a bigger chance at career advancement covering breaking political news than there is covering the triple jump. You could microwave an elephant in seconds using the satellite feeds that are going to be beaming out of China, and there's not a damned thing the Chinese government can do about it without, basically, launching themselves back into the economic and political isolation of the 1950s.

As Communism crumbled in Europe almost 20 years ago, a pro-Democracy movement imagined it had a chance in China. Bubbling-under for months, what came to be known as the June 4th Movement sensed its moment when Mikhail Gorbachev, the Russian who engineered the dismantling of the Soviet behemoth, arrived in China for a state visit. With hundreds of reporters and cameras on the scene, the protesters took to Tiananmen Square, erected their statue of liberty, and declared their intent to be free. The whole world was watching, and the protesters took advantage of it.

The Chinese government crushed them, in some cases literally. The Tiananmen Massacre, as it came to be known, was bloody and largely unseen by the outside world. It was still possible, then, to stage a military operation in the heart of a major city and have little or no video of the slaughter leak to the outside world. The Chinese government could seal the press delegation in its luxury hotels and roll the tanks.

Soon, an entirely different world will arrive in China, armed with inexpensive video cameras the size of a deck of cards and high-speed Internet connections. The Chinese lovers of freedom know they're coming, and they're going to rise up, in one way or the other, to make themselves seen and heard. It is an opportunity too good for them to pass up, and every act of government suppression will be videotaped and YouTubed around the world. China will find itself confronting a choice, liberalization or isolation. The Chinese government will either loosen its death grip on its people, or it will suffer the consequences of revealing itself to be not a New China, but an old one. The New China is going to have to put up or shut up.

The time between the August 8 opening ceremony and the close of the games nearly three weeks later recalls the familiar Chinese curse: May you live in interesting times. Those three weeks are going to be very interesting indeed.

 

Comments

[fish]

I see you've read Changs book. He gave China until 2010, thought that admission to the WTO would do it. Maybe this shakes the old guard loose!