The timing of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games is crucial for China because of significant political issues at play, issues that the spirit of the Games mask, and ones that the international community cannot ignore. China is an unsportsmanlike player--from its poor labor standards to its economic and often political support of the genocide in Darfur, Sudan to the organ harvesting rampant throughout the country to its failure to meet Kyoto environmental standards to the forced sterilization of its populace. In a true Olympic competition, China would be disqualified.
The "Olympic Dream," to most, connotes something that transcends money or power--the universality of the human spirit. Practically, this translates into the world's greatest athletes coming together in one city for what is usually a once in a lifetime chance to show that they are the world's best. But, for the host country, the "Olympic Dream" means something different. Beneath the ideals of sportsmanship and universal personhood is a political narrative, one of power, prestige and the right to be recognized as an equal world power.
Just as every other host nation before it, China will use the upcoming 2008 Beijing Olympic Games as a platform to showcase itself to the world--not for the higher calling of the athletes and the "Dream," but for the opportunity to carve out a political presence for itself as a modern, powerful nation that truly embodies the Games' carefully chosen slogan of "One World, One Dream."
While China is busy presenting an ideal of itself to the world next summer, governments and activists have been hard at work to dispel these illusions and ensure the presentation of the other side of this nation of human rights, labor and environmental abuses. In response, the Chinese government pulls the Olympic card--peace, friendship and universal camaraderie--striving to veil its own political motivations.
There are times when geo-political realities require governments as well as activists to use every resource at their disposal to bring attention to issues that run in such deep opposition to the values that the Games supposedly represent, and the Olympics is clearly one of those resources. In some of the most significant points in twentieth century history, governments have used the Olympics as political tools. Hitler drew upon the 1936 Berlin Games to showcase the vitality and prosperity of Germany and to hide from the world his ensuing war and Holocaust. Once Soviet tanks rolled into Afghanistan in 1979 during the height of the Cold War, President Jimmy Carter saw sending the US team to the Moscow Games the following year as a political hypocrisy, forcing a boycott.
International governments and activists have not only the moral calling but the responsibility to bring attention to China's destructive behavior. Next summer, as the debutante Chinese government presents itself to the world, we risk never exposing a balanced, truthful narrative.
Let us lay to rest the argument that we should dispel politics from the Olympics. Politics underlie host governments' motivations, with China nothing less than the norm. Most Americans agree. A 2007 Zogby poll, published in the September 23, 2007 edition of The New York Times Magazine, suggested that 59 percent of Americans supported human rights organizations using the Olympics as an opportunity to protest China's human rights policies, as opposed to 32 percent who opposed the idea.
China has proven resolute in its unresponsiveness to many of these human rights and environmental claims. If it has responded, it has done so in the form of lip service, showing a deep complicity in a set of power relations that have led to the continued disempowerment of millions of people, whether within the Republic itself or abroad.
If we allow the international community simply to accept the Beijing Games as the Chinese present it, we will concede a great, undeserving misperception. For, the true realization of "One World, One Dream" means the promotion of the human condition--whether Chinese, Burmese, Sudanese, or American. And, in this event, China falls short of even the bronze medal.