Torch the Beijing Olympics

I just saw an advertisement for Visa on television featuring Jackie Chan. I never was a fan of Chan’s movies or his acting, what with his predictable, well-rehearsed stunts and martial arts.

Now that he’s been plugging the Beijing Olympics, starting in August, one wonders if Chan sanctions Beijing’s barbaric annexation and colonisation of Tibet, including the brutality that Chinese security forces have been routinely meting out to pro-independence Tibetans. Is Chan saying Chinese barbarism in Tibet is justified?

Forget Chan; he’s unimportant. The Chinese economy is far more important to the spiteful totalitarian regime of President Hu Jintao. It rules not of law but by law. His pretentious Communist regime is just that - pretentious.

Like Teng Xiaoping’s regime, this one is littered with, in Mao Tsetung’s parlance ‘capitalist roaders’. It’s a regime of gigantic stealth and corruption that reaches Hu’s office. And it includes the murderous armed forces. Unless he has become impervious to Beijing’s shenanigans, Chan would know the extent to which the Chinese army itself has long been directly involved in business in China, Hong Kong and elsewhere.

Doubtless the growth of the Chinese economy has been quite extraordinary. But by international standards, it no more a ‘miracle’ than of Asia’s bearing the same over-hyped name or ‘tigers’. With its state-manipulated currency, suppressed wages and oppressed rights for labour, and starting from a low technological base, the rise of China is, in relative terms, unsurprising. What is surprising, however, is the speed and sustainability of Chinese economic growth and development, and the fact that China has become a net exporter of capital.

This is not to say that the Chinese economy is not without problems. For starters, Chinese growth is highly uneven. Hundreds of millions of Chinese are yet to be swathed by ‘Chinese capitalism’. Regardless of what the pundits and China apologists say, this is not capitalism with Chinese characteristics. It should not be used as an excuse for not delivering social justice to all Chinese. It is, in fact, everyday capitalism - the garden variety found anywhere. Like every other economy, it must be subject to rigorous scrutiny - even if the Chinese regime abhors the idea.

China’s economy is like any in Asia, Africa or South America. Corruption, opacity, shady governance structures and institutions permeate it. China’s political and business elites would not have accumulated vast personal wealth without the Communist Party’s vast patronage networks. And China would have remained a basket-case economy, much like the Philippines, Indonesia or Burma, without the massive influx of foreign investments, Taiwanese and Japanese included.

Nervous Beijing

Despite its growing global presence, China deliberately spawns a loony form of Chinese patriotism, one that exemplifies China’s loony provincialism mentality. It will only take a few big Chinese banks with insolvent balance sheets, hitherto propped up only by state finance, to keel over and the Chinese hyperbole will collapse like a house of cards. If it happens, it will bury the batty Chinese patriotism whilst increasing the regime’s totalitarian control over the 1.3-plus billion Chinese.

Which explains why the Hu regime, on April 18, instructed its official mouthpiece, Xinhua, to issue an edict. In its editorial, approved by the Communist Party’s politburo, Xinhua extolled the virtues of Chinese patriotism, suggesting that it should be “cherished hundred-fold” whilst harnessing “rationally” in the pursuit of “sound and fast development”.

This is Chinese hyperbole at its ridiculous sloganeering best. Beijing is nervous. It fears that the recent state-organised Chinese street protests against criticism by the West of the regime’s barbaric attacks on Tibetan human rights, could turn on the regime. After all, only small number of Chinese, including the political elite, controls the bulk of national wealth. If ordinary Chinese should turn against the regime’s economic and political excesses, bloody mayhem is not imponderable. Recall Tiananmen Square in June 1989, and its bloody crackdown.

To many Chinese, Tibetan lives are pointless and worthless, much in the way that the lives of guest workers in many countries are treated.

Taking Tibet in the name of ‘recapturing’ an old Chinese sovereignty and settling it with Chinese citizens has parallels elsewhere. Indonesia under dictator Suharto engaged in forced ‘transmigration’ of its people to areas annexed through unlawful invasion, such as West Papua and Irian Jaya, and, in 1975, East Timor. Beijing’s brutalising persecution and murder of Chinese Muslims and the Falun Gong approximate Nazi Germany’s of the Jews.

The Chinese are about as remorseful as Islamic fundamentalists and extremists who have a racist penchant to kill innocent people, especially Westerners. Ask Indonesia’s fanatically batty Islamic cleric Abu Bakar Bashir. Or, indeed, ask the Jesuit-raised Zimbabwean president, the equally odious Robert Mugabe. And get this: Beijing happily sent Mugabe a ship full of weapons. This ship is anchored in Durban, South Africa, after the maritime union there continues to refuse offloading and transferring its murderous cargo to Harare.

The organised protests in China are Beijing’s attempts to counter protests during the torch relay run in several countries. China is desperate to save face after it is latest Tibetan odyssey - or misadventure. Premier Wen Jiabao has been peddling barefaced lies that his government has evidence that the Dalai Lama has been orchestrating the Tibetan uprising. The fact that neither Wen nor Hu have delivered the evidence says an awful lot about this detestable Chinese regime’s credibility.

Purists argue that sports must not become entangled with politics. That’s as dumb as saying that religion and politics are mutually exclusive. Or that Tibet is nobody’s business but China’s. It’s every country’s business the way one country brutalises a weaker one.

If China gets away with murder, it’s because of the collective hypocrisy of the West and Asia. All have pervasive economic interests in China. Look at the way French supermarket giant Carrefour suddenly offered huge discounts to Chinese customers in the aftermath of anti-West street protests in Kunming. Add, too, Asia’s conspicuous silence. Such gutlessness is stunning.

It’s staggering and disgusting the way the Asians have kow-towed to China. India, apparently an emerging superpower, staged one of the most farcical torch-relays in Olympic history. Security forces locked down almost all of New Delhi. Only lonely rubbery figures stupidly carried the torch in short steps to an empty audience. It says plenty about India’s spineless foreign policy vis-à-vis China. Similar displays of hypocrisy were exhibited in Thailand, Malaysia and Australia.

It’s precisely because of such despicable and entrenched hypocrisy among nation-states, including the pusillanimous attitude of the International Olympic Committee - all devoid of morality and sensibility - that Beijing will host the Olympic Games. Clearly, it does not deserve the privilege.

The Beijing Olympics should be torched. But powerful and greedy global and Chinese commercial interests, including the Chinese regime, will lord over human decency.

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MANJIT BHATIA, an academician and writer, is also research director of AsiaRisk, a political, economic and risk analysis consultancy in Australia. He specialises in international economics and politics, with a focus on the Asia-Pacific.