Beijing 2008China Performs Plastic Surgery Before the Olympics

The 2008 Beijing Olympics means a lot more to China than the Salt Lake City Olympics meant to the United States, no matter how much Mitt Romney tries to play up one-half of his political experience. China, not just Beijing or a presidential candidate, has something to prove to the world next summer. Success in leading the Games has become vital to China’s self-esteem. The Games have become synonymous with China’s self-worth on the world stage and preparation for the Games has found much grassroots support among the Chinese people, who still mostly worship their highly-centralized Communist government. Chinese leaders have always claimed to their people, and the world, that the West unfairly marginalized their great country. Now they have to prove to their own people, and the world, that they deserve to become leading members of the world community.

To put all this pressure on a sporting event may sound absurd, but such a description is appropriate for so many international political power plays. In order to prove their worthiness for entering into a class of world leaders, Chinese officials are performing political plastic surgery in an attempt to rewrite history. China is attempting to completely revamp the image it presents to the thousands of journalists – and their readers – that will descend upon Beijing in the time leading up to the next Olympic Games. China is to show itself as strong but humane, powerful but polite, influential but a member of the world team. China has all this to accomplish while making sure no journalists die from their processed food.

Official rhetoric in China has regularly dwelled on the “humiliation” China suffered at the hands of foreign powers from the mid-19th century to the Communist takeover in 1949 – frequently using the West as a scapegoat for its own failings. It appears that they believe their own rhetoric. The award of the 2000 Olympics to Sydney fueled a militant brand of Chinese nationalism. Many Chinese officials blamed America for the loss – both to their people and an unimpressed world – claiming that American legislators undermined Beijing’s chances of being selected by stating that China’s human rights record made it unworthy to host the Games. Chinese citizens were indoctrinated to see the International Olympic Committee vote on where to hold the 2008 Games as a vote on China itself – not just a vote on Beijing’s suitability to hold a major sporting event. Having won the bid, the Communist government now views the 2008 Games as a way to prove that China is no longer the “sick man” of Asia.

China’s neighbors have long been hoping for the Beijing Olympics in order to guarantee protection against the growing giant. For example, Taiwan’s president, Chen Shibian, openly supported Beijing’s bid for the Games in 2001. The Olympics bring with it a Chinese desire for positive press, on which neighboring countries are counting for their own security. Many in Taiwan believe that China would be unlikely to attack the island if such aggression were to bring bad press or disrupt the Games. Asian officials have suggested that the victory for Beijing in 2001 was the only way to preserve stability in Asia and are rooting for a successful Olympic Games next summer for the same reason. After the announcement that China would host the Games, the Economist wrote: “No one wanted to deal with a sullen China, bent on finding scapegoats for its defeat.”¹ The success of the Games is vital not only in China’s eyes but in the concerned eyes of its neighboring states and the world who fear a disappointed China, which could have resorted to more violent ways in order to show its strength.

One challenge China’s government is confronting is its (not far-fetched) international image of being closed and oppressive, seeing as it would prefer to present a modern and humane face to the world in 2008. Of course, this image is only a façade, as destruction of the Hutongs and exportation of millions of “illegal immigrants” to Beijing from its rural surroundings show. Chinese officials are finding it hard to present their country as a thiriving capitalist society where citizens are happy and free, without using Stalin-like tactics to suppress the unhappy and poor among the citizenry, and without inflating the economy with a widely-inaccurate peg of currency and over-ambitious government spending.

Not surprisingly, China began using political plastic surgery to attempt to adjust the international image of the sole ruling party before the official announcement that the Games would be held there. At a July 1, 2001, celebration of the eightieth birthday of the Communist Party, then President Jiang tried to present a new image of the Party as a party for everyone, hinting that even private entrepreneurs, still referred to as “exploiters” by party conservatives, would be allowed to join. The fact that such pronouncements occur at the same time that the Falun Gong sect alleged that the Chinese police tortured to death fifteen of its followers, further demonstrates the challenges that China is facing.

What you will not hear Chinese officials discuss are the abuses of their “people’s party.” Human rights conditions in China deteriorated to an appaling level in 2006, according to a report by Human Rights Watch that was released in January 2007. The report indicated that over one hundred activists, lawyers, writers, and academics were subjected to police custody, house arrest, incommunicado confinement, pressure in their jobs, and surveillance by plainclothes security forces. Authorities also shut down more than seven hundred online forums and ordered eight Internet search engines to filter “subversive and sensitive content” based on ten thousand key words, according to the report. In the first half of 2006 alone, there were thirty-nine thousand cases of “public order disruptions,” or large protests, four times as many as ten years ago, according to data from the Public Security Ministry, indicating greater dissatisfaction with the government among the people. Lawyers who represented peasants that were protesting mistreatment were badly beaten, detained, and arrested, the report indicated.²

Chinese authorities have even reached out to the Vatican, a longtime foe of the anti-religious Communist government, to improve their political image prior to the 2008 Games. In January 2007, two of China’s top bishops attended a two-day meeting in Rome with church officials. At its close, the Vatican announced that Pope Benedict XVI would send a letter to Catholics in China and would work on establishing diplomatic relations with Beijing. Ties between the Chinese government and Vatican were severed in 1951 after the Communist Party took over. Currently, Catholics in China are officially only allowed to worship in government-controlled churches of the Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association, which supports the Pope as a spiritual leader but reject direct papal control. While this is a large step forward for the Communist government, it is estimated that as many as ten million Chinese attend Catholic services in underground churches allied with Rome.³

China’s leaders are worried that the international attention focused on China in the lead up to the Games may encourage disaffected citizens to express their grievances. The Tiananmen Square protests in 1989 were largely motivated as a response to the hundreds of foreign journalists who poured into Beijing to cover the first summit meeting between China and the Soviet Union since the end of the Cold War. The protesters, like those the Chinese fear will come out at the Games next summer, figured that party authorities would not want to tarnish the country’s image in front of the Soviet president, Mikhail Gorbachev, and the world’s media. Of course, the day after President Gorbahev left, the government declared martial law. In 2008, more than twenty thousand foreign media representatives will descend upon Beijing, providing protestors an international audience for their grievances. Other developing countries that have recently hosted the Olympic Games do not provide a good example of how to handle dissent. Both Mexico City in 1996 and Seoul in 1988 saw large anti-government protests prior to the main event. The protest in Mexico City ended in a bloody crackdown.

However, unlike China, the governments of both Mexico and South Korea lacked popular support among their people. Opinion surveys suggest that the Chinese government still has a considerable degree of support among the populace, despite frequent public protests in both urban and rural areas. In a phenomenon quite contrary to American politics, where seemingly everyone has a distaste for Congress as a whole, but loves their local senator or representative, the Chinese government becomes increasingly unpopular further down the hierarchy. This follows a traditional Chinese view of government that “there’s a good emperor there if only we can get through to him,” according to Anthony Saich of Harvard University. Angry peasants resent rural authorities, and not central or Communist Party leadership. Thousands of people go to Beijing every year to ask the central government to redress local grievances.

Beginning in January 2007, the Chinese government has allowed foreign journalists unprecedented – that is, unprecedented for China – access to the countryside in the lead up the 2008 Games. Foreign journalists based in Beijing or Shanghai had previously been required to obtain provincial government permission to travel to and report from any province. This requirement had been in place since the early 1990s. Foreign journalists will even technically be able to travel to Tibet without government authorization, being required only to get prior consent from the organizations or individuals they wish to interview, according to director of the information department of Chinese foreign ministry, Lui Jianchao. Visiting journalists in the past also had to be accompanied by government officials on such travels; this rule has now been withdrawn. The government has also lifted a ban on the ability of foreign journalists to hire Chinese citizens to assist them, though the ban on hiring Chinese citizens to work as journalists for foreign organizations remains. Many suspect that local governments will use deniable thuggery to frighten reporters and their sources, and that the new rules are just another piece of political plastic surgery, not an effort towards real freedom of press reforms. This belief is seemingly confirmed by the fact that the changes openly expire on October 17, 2008, immediately after the Games close.

Next summer’s Olympic Games, and the lead up to it in the international press, will be a test of China’s ability to play at the grown-ups table in international affairs. So far, the evidence is strongly indicating that the world’s newest “superpower” is going to need a year at a prep school before making it to the academy. The human rights abuses keep piling in and the ruse of a less restrictive government has not fooled many. For example, within the first month of the enactment of the new press rules, a Chinese reporter investigating abuses at a licensed coalmine was beaten to death. China has a lot of reformation through which to go before it earns its seat at the adult table in world affairs – most importantly, a complete overhaul of its government attitude towards its people, itself, and the world, is necessary.

1. ”Beijing gets the gold”. The Economist. 16 July 2001. [↩]
2. Fan, Maureen “Report: China’s Human Rights Deteriorated Significantly in 2006.” The Washington Post. 11 January 2007. [↩]
3. Iritani, Evelyn. “Pope Steers Toward Improving Relations with China.” Los Angeles Times. 21 January 2007. [↩]