It is no surprise that China has become such a potent force in the 21st century world. Even Napoleon characterised the country as being a sleeping giant even more in his times of the late 18th and early 19th century. It can easily be argued that China would have assumed its role of a Power in the world far sooner if it had not had a string of poor rulers and policies which have disrupted its economy and led to starvation and millions of deaths. China was a victim of imperialism both in the 19th century from European powers notably the British, French and Germans and in the 20th century from the Japanese conquest of much of the country 1931-45. However, it has long had the largest army in the world and exploded its first atomic bomb in 1964 and its first hydrogen bomb in 1967. It was a superpower alongside the USA and USSR but aside from small conflicts with the USSR which fortunately did not escalate into anything larger, its focus was generally internally, especially when the ideology and internecine fighting of the Cultural Revolution 1966-76 disrupted so much of the economy and society of China.
With the death of Mao Zedong and leaders from the era of the final phase of the revolution of 1945-50, China began to look out into the wider world and effectively became a Communist state with a capitalist economy. Its huge resources notably of workers meant that it was destined to always be a strong player in the world an if it had not been for Mao's insanities it may have reached this position in the 1960s rather than the 1980s and 1990s. What has not changed is the political structure which has overseen this vast economic growth. There has been the liberalisation of things such as where people are allowed to live, necessary to allow the rural-urban migration which has brought cheap workers to the cities though periodically older regulations are enforced to clear out slums. Anyone who has done business in China knows that influence with leading local members of the Chinese Communist Party is vital for achieving anything. This political power over economic activity unsurprisingly, as in so many other states, has led to corruption. Again periodically the corrupt are purged (often facing the death penalty) in some propaganda seeking attempt to reassert the supposed values of Communism but this does nothing to reverse how corruption is an integral part of the economic boom of China. Of course, there is a lot of ingenuity and hard work done in China, most of which was choked off in the past, so it is unsurprising that the economy prospers.
Despite all the economic shifts in China it remains a totalitarian state that Mao would still recognise. The suppression of the Tianamen Square protests in 1989, continued occupation of Tibet, suppression of the Falun Gong religion and of Uighur nationalists are all characteristic of a country unwilling to tolerate any political shift especially from ethnic and religious minorities. People forget that China has 56 ethnic minorities which are highly over-represented in terms of absolute poverty, i.e. earning less than equivalent to US$1 per day. Thus, while people become multi-millionaires in Shanghai, in Xinjiang province they are as poor as in Third World countries. Despite the strength of its military and its vast economy, which is now the second strongest in the world, China continues to pretend somehow that it is a poor, defenceless countries bullied by the old Western imperial states.
This dichotomy between China's real strength and how it expects to be treated in the world has come out on a number of occasions recently. In the 1960s, despite being a Communist superpower, China tried to present itself as being in the 'non-aligned' group of nations. However, it was as happy to spread its ideology, a rural-focused brand of Communism to developing countries, feeling it was more appropriate than the heavy industry focused Soviet Communism. Similarly these days China still portrays itself as a victim of imperialism, though the last imperial forces left in 1945 and even if you count the British and Portuguese leaving Hong Kong and Macao as late as 1997 they have all gone now. Chinese people become indignant if you suggest that actually China is behaving like a (neo-)imperial power. They characterise their investment especially in African states like Zimbabwe and Sudan as being utterly different from the neo-imperialism through investment that the USA, Britain, France and the USSR adopted in the 1970s, when in fact it is no different. Chinese staff supervise Zimbabwean workers on Chinese projects in the country. The Chinese steps to secure raw materials across the world even in developed countries does not differ from the efforts of the UK, France and the USA to secure natural resource supplies. However, always, China says that it is different and is still a victim of imperialism when in fact it is now an imperialist power itself. Do not even mention the Spratly Islands where the imperialism is even more old fashioned.
China is a totalitarian state. People seem to keep forgetting that so it is worthwhile emphasising. It has possibly over 1.6 million prisoners, second only to the USA, with 2.3 million, which has about a quarter as many people. The difference for China is that the 'crimes' of many of these people are political and they are being 're-educated'. Bizarrely unlike the US system that seems to think people cannot be changed, the Chinese prison system believes that they can, though to the bulk of us the methodology would appear like brainwashing and certainly involves torture which the USA has only comparatively recently adopted as a method and then only for its political prisoners. The US population should be utterly ashamed that, as a supposedly liberal democracy, they can be bracketed with a totalitarian regime in this respect. Anyway, China has censorship, it always had. With the expansion of the internet promoted in a large part by the rapid economic growth the country has experienced in the past three decades, this censorship has had to expand to the internet. Singapore has struggled to maintain its censorship system when dealing with the internet. China with its vast resources has been more successful using a combination of electronic means such as the police officers that appear on screen when you access certain websites, to arresting blogging dissidents, to compelling Google to ban the searching of certain phrases. Now, in its hacking into Google accounts of dissidents and the launching of a sophisticated cyber attack the Chinese authorities have even angered Google which is now holding back on introducing a new generation of mobile phones to the country. The Chinese have found that there are sometimes limits even to the powerful renminbi (the Chinese currency often still called the yuan). The Chinese have not said 'well, we are a totalitarian dictatorship, so we censor' again they have whined that they are victims of imperialism. They complain that there is an imbalanced 'global information order' again in favour of the West which is trying to impose its culture on China. In fact China is giving heart to those who want to censor internet activity (of course, leading this is the USA with its desire for a war on terror in all facets) and the UK which has long monitored all email traffic. China whines that it is being bullied, when in fact we are suffering as a result of the dictatorial, suppressive measures it is pressing on the world.
At the recent Copenhagen climate change conference, powerful China was again portraying itself as the weak country in need of support from the supposedly rich West (even though China's economy is now more powerful than all Western states bar the USA). It was seeking financial support for steps to ameliorate the impact of climate change, despite China having US$2.272 trillion in foreign currency reserves in September 2009. This tactic help divert attention from China's appalling record on industrial damage to the environment which has caused poverty and disrupted the lives of millions of its citizens and no doubt contributes heavily to global climate change. The fact that the government ceased traffic flow during the Beijing Olympics because the air pollution was so severe, indicates the impact of China's booming industrial and transport sectors that have barely been affected by the global recession. China should be one of the industrialised states looking to reduce its pollution but instead it whines that it is only a developing country which needs support to do this. The amount of money the USA owes China is sufficient for China to effectively buy the whole US economy and close down every factory and stop every vehicle there, that is not a country which needs help reducing its pollution impact on the world, it is one that needs to be leading the way.
China is immensely strong in so many ways, but it seems constantly to pretend that it is the victim and rebuff any claims that it should comply with international standards on the basis this is bullying by other states. I have not even mentioned its unwillingness to comply with copyright law. There is unsurprisingly, given the nature of the regime, an immense arrogance from China that it can behave with impunity in the global context and that its stated values, i.e. censorship, freedom to exploit people and the environment, imprisonment on issues of conscience, continued occupation of a foreign country, should not even be challenged by the world community. Of course, many powerful states engage in these kinds of policies, but perhaps the irritation with China is that it somehow pretends that it is the best society and that any criticism is based on myths and motivated by a desire to imperially suppress China. It attacks other states for in fact things it is doing itself. I guess this is one reason why we find taking official China's statements so hard. They are both hypocritical and seek to conceal atrocities that we all know are going on beneath an incredibly pathetic line that China is weak and a victim of bullies. All of us who support freedom of thought, contact, communication, conscience, must keep challenging China (as well as the USA, UK and other states that are doing wrong) and one first step is for the Chinese state to actually admit it is a bully, not a victim.
Showing posts with label Tibet. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Tibet. Show all posts
Friday, 22 January 2010
Tuesday, 8 April 2008
Comment Is Free? Radio Presenters and Bigotry
As regular readers know I drive a lot, around 360-400 miles per week so I listen to a lot of radio. I am not interested in talk radio, I want music with the occasional witty comment thrown in between the songs. However, even on mainstream local music radio there seems to be an increasing desire by the presenters to make comments which I feel are increasingly bigoted. I protested about a couple of presenters on one local radio station whose area I used to pass through regularly. Often they would complain about immigration and how people from abroad were talking school places and how every doctor they met in a hospital was a foreigner and so on. I know this view is popular in the UK at the present, but it is not the kind of thing that I want rammed down my throat every day I could hear it in any bar or cafe that I choose to visit. My complaint was dismissed as I was the only person who had complained and one of the senior staff at the radio station came back at me all indignant saying my complaint was an insult given all the work the station did to promote racial equality. I had no dispute with their policies off air, but in fact that suggested the management should give more guidance to their presenting staff whose declarations on air not only offend but are clearly out of step with the ethics the management feel the station has. Of course I took the response that remained open to me and simply stopped listening to that station.
Back in the same area today I listened to one of the original station's rivals and their presenter tries to set up controversial topics though generally quite safe, such as who do people think killed Princess Diana. The one that infuriated me and showed the situation in which such presenters should not embark on making comments without doing some research. The presenter thinks that the ritual around the Olympic Flame is silly anyway and yet he was more angered by the pro-Tibet protests made during its passage especially in France. He said that no-one should make a fuss about Tibet as it has been Chinese for thousands of years and anyway was a backward, theocratic state, so in terms of human rights was hardly better than China itself. Of course Tibet fell from being an empire itself in the 8th to 11th centuries and formed part of the Mongol, not the Chinese, Empire from the 13th to 16th centuries. Whilst the Chinese and British Empires chipped away at the Tibetan Empire through the 19th century, with the British forcing it out of Nepal, Tibet only really became a vassal state of China in 1856 and its military were expelled in 1895. In 1904-11 Tibet was invaded by the British. Subsequently the Chinese asserted their claims to Tibet but in the warlord period of 1911-27 were unable to reassert it. By the 1940s Tibet was acting as an independent state with relations with Britain, India and the USSR amongst others.
Tibet was invaded by China in 1950-1 and has effectively been an occupied country ever since. This event may have occurred a year before the presenter was born (though the fighting for Tibet did not end until 1959) but it is hardly thousands of years of domination. Ireland was controlled by Britain for far longer and yet no-one would complain that its battles for independence were not justified in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Cornwall has been controlled by England since the 10th century and been part of the Kingdom of England since the 11th century and yet that does not stop many people campaigning for it to become separate. Similarly Scotland was bound to England in 1707 and yet again people are campaigning for independence and have gained more than the Tibetans have for their area of China.
As for human rights every citizen in the world has a right to protest about the abuse of their fellow humans, that is not a local or a national issue, it is a global one and no-one should shy away from protesting against the bad treatment of others. The British seem more willing often to protest over the rights for animals in other countries than they are over the rights of people. China's poor human rights record has now been sustained for almost 60 years under the same regime making it far more enduring and affecting millions more people, say, than the regime of Saddam Hussein (1979-2003) or the Taliban in Afghanistan (1996-2001) both of which the USA felt it right to overthrow.
Why are the British so happy to almost literally kow-tow to the Chinese? It comes down to the philosophy that 'might is right' and might not in military terms because as was seen in the 1980s Western governments were happy to challenge the nuclear-armed superpower the USSR, but might in terms of economic power which China has cannily added to its arsenal which already included the largest army in terms of troops, nuclear weapons, satellites and missiles. I wonder if the radio presenter has shares in a company involved in China or seeking to invest there. I accept that the government of Tibet could hardly be seen as enlightened and the world is not sympathetic to theocracies. However, importantly it was the government of Tibet for Tibetans, not a foreign colonising power as China is. Once the Tibetan government is restored then we can begin talking about changing the country's political system. However, a government in exile will always find it impossible to alter to reflect democratic demands and if Tibet had remained independent it is most likely it would have evolved politically anyway. Currently its system is frozen in the 1950s and that has to change.
Radio presenters do have a duty to stimulate thought, though probably not on music radio. He could go on to Radio 4 or some other talk station and fit in far better. What they have to realise is that they do wield a lot of power and the attitudes they express influence thousands of people very easily. Given the widespread condemnation of China's role in Tibet and human rights record it is terrible that such a barbaric approach receives airtime support in parts of the UK with no opportunity to be challenged.
Back in the same area today I listened to one of the original station's rivals and their presenter tries to set up controversial topics though generally quite safe, such as who do people think killed Princess Diana. The one that infuriated me and showed the situation in which such presenters should not embark on making comments without doing some research. The presenter thinks that the ritual around the Olympic Flame is silly anyway and yet he was more angered by the pro-Tibet protests made during its passage especially in France. He said that no-one should make a fuss about Tibet as it has been Chinese for thousands of years and anyway was a backward, theocratic state, so in terms of human rights was hardly better than China itself. Of course Tibet fell from being an empire itself in the 8th to 11th centuries and formed part of the Mongol, not the Chinese, Empire from the 13th to 16th centuries. Whilst the Chinese and British Empires chipped away at the Tibetan Empire through the 19th century, with the British forcing it out of Nepal, Tibet only really became a vassal state of China in 1856 and its military were expelled in 1895. In 1904-11 Tibet was invaded by the British. Subsequently the Chinese asserted their claims to Tibet but in the warlord period of 1911-27 were unable to reassert it. By the 1940s Tibet was acting as an independent state with relations with Britain, India and the USSR amongst others.
Tibet was invaded by China in 1950-1 and has effectively been an occupied country ever since. This event may have occurred a year before the presenter was born (though the fighting for Tibet did not end until 1959) but it is hardly thousands of years of domination. Ireland was controlled by Britain for far longer and yet no-one would complain that its battles for independence were not justified in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Cornwall has been controlled by England since the 10th century and been part of the Kingdom of England since the 11th century and yet that does not stop many people campaigning for it to become separate. Similarly Scotland was bound to England in 1707 and yet again people are campaigning for independence and have gained more than the Tibetans have for their area of China.
As for human rights every citizen in the world has a right to protest about the abuse of their fellow humans, that is not a local or a national issue, it is a global one and no-one should shy away from protesting against the bad treatment of others. The British seem more willing often to protest over the rights for animals in other countries than they are over the rights of people. China's poor human rights record has now been sustained for almost 60 years under the same regime making it far more enduring and affecting millions more people, say, than the regime of Saddam Hussein (1979-2003) or the Taliban in Afghanistan (1996-2001) both of which the USA felt it right to overthrow.
Why are the British so happy to almost literally kow-tow to the Chinese? It comes down to the philosophy that 'might is right' and might not in military terms because as was seen in the 1980s Western governments were happy to challenge the nuclear-armed superpower the USSR, but might in terms of economic power which China has cannily added to its arsenal which already included the largest army in terms of troops, nuclear weapons, satellites and missiles. I wonder if the radio presenter has shares in a company involved in China or seeking to invest there. I accept that the government of Tibet could hardly be seen as enlightened and the world is not sympathetic to theocracies. However, importantly it was the government of Tibet for Tibetans, not a foreign colonising power as China is. Once the Tibetan government is restored then we can begin talking about changing the country's political system. However, a government in exile will always find it impossible to alter to reflect democratic demands and if Tibet had remained independent it is most likely it would have evolved politically anyway. Currently its system is frozen in the 1950s and that has to change.
Radio presenters do have a duty to stimulate thought, though probably not on music radio. He could go on to Radio 4 or some other talk station and fit in far better. What they have to realise is that they do wield a lot of power and the attitudes they express influence thousands of people very easily. Given the widespread condemnation of China's role in Tibet and human rights record it is terrible that such a barbaric approach receives airtime support in parts of the UK with no opportunity to be challenged.
Monday, 11 February 2008
The Olympics and Dictatorships
The modern Olympics started in 1896 and so far, since then have been held only twice in non-democratic countries:
1896- Athens
1900- Paris
1904- St. Louis
1908- London
1912- Stockholm
1920- Antwerp
1924- Paris
1928- Amsterdam
1932- Los Angeles
1936- Berlin
1948- London
1952- Helsinki
1956- Melbourne
1960- Rome
1964- Tokyo
1968- Mexico City
1972- Munich
1976- Montreal
1980- Moscow
1984- Los Angeles
1988- Seoul
1992- Barcelona
1996- Atlanta
2000- Sydney
2004- Athens
2008- Beijing
2012- London
Now you could argue about Seoul in South Korea in 1988 could count as it had only had had democratic elections restored in 1987. To some extent this shows the power of the Olympics. In 1980 the USA and some British teams boycotted the Moscow Olympics over the USSR's invasion of Afghanistan the previous year at the height of the so-called Second Cold War. The USSR at the time was clearly a one-party dictatorship, but of course the Olympics are planned well in advance as you can see from the list regarding London and back in the mid-1970s when the location had been established it had seemed that the Cold War had been thawing with detente and Ostpolitik. The other, probably more (in)famous Olympics were those held in Berlin in 1936 at the height of the Nazi regime. These had been allocated to Germany in 1931, two years before Hitler came to power. Adolf Hitler attended the games but was humiliated by the success of the Black US athlete Jesse Owens who won four gold medals seemingly disproving Hitler's beliefs in the superiority of Whites. Hitler left so that he did not have to present the medals to Owens. The Olympics for both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union were about showing the best of the country to the democratic media and trying to demonstrate that they were people that could be done business with despite all the human rights abuses going on behind the scenes. China is using them in the same way. Hitler released a number of political prisoners before the games, only to have them re-arrested afterwards. China, as I have noted, is busily doing the opposite, seemingly fearful that dissidents will have freer access to outside media during the Olympic period.
The reaction of democratic countries to the Olympics hosted by dictatorships has varied. In 1936 whilst there were no national boycotts of the Olympics though Barcelona hosted the so-called People’s Olympic Games (Olimpiada Popular) in July 1936, the week before the official one in Berlin, and 22 nations signed up to it. It particularly attracted competitors from workers' sports clubs which were common at the time. The Spanish Government was a centre-left Popular Front and wanted to provide an alternative to the games in Berlin which were emblazoned with Nazi insignia. Unfortunately the coup which triggered the Spanish Civil War broke out before all the competitors had arrived and these alternative games had to be abandoned.
In 1980 the USA still under Jimmy Carter boycotted the Moscow Olympics in protest at the invasion of Afghanistan. Argentina, Canada, Chile, China, Indonesia, Israel, Japan, Norway, South Korea, West Germany and many others barred their athletes from attending. The UK, France and Greece supported the boycott but allowed their athletes to make up their own minds and most from the UK went (though notably none of the horse jumpers); four athletes from New Zealand defied their country's boycott to attend. There were the so-called Olympic Boycott Games in Philadelphia. For the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics there was rather a tit-for-tat reaction and the USSR and 14 Communist states bar Romania which was pursuing an independent line, did not attend. The Soviets blamed anti-Soviet propaganda in the USA, which had actually been very prevalent in the previous three years since Ronald Reagan had come to power in 1981 and started talking about the 'evil empire'. The Soviets put on the so-called Friendship Games in Moscow. Since these tense days of the late Cold War things have settled down.
Political issues have not been confined to tension between states. The one incident that the media is currently pointing to is the Black Power salute given by US sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics. They wore black gloves and black socks rather than shoes to reference Black poverty in the USA. This was at a time of sharp battles in US society over civil rights for Blacks. In 1972 at the Munich Olympics, the Palestinian terrorist organisation, Black September shot dead eleven members of the Israeli team and one West German police officer. There intention had been to draw the world's attention to the Palestinian situation in Israel and surrounding countries.
Boycotting of sports activities in apartheid South Africa began in 1956 and stepped up from 1963 onwards as more sports bodies came on board. South Africa was barred from the 1964 Tokyo Olympics and thrown out of the IOC the Olympic organising body in 1970. Some bodies took more persuading, but there was an increase in the face of public protests through the 1970s, of those sports cutting ties to South Africa. These boycotts were not lifted until the disassembling of the apartheid system in 1991. Thus, despite people constantly saying that sport and politics should be separate in fact they often inter-mingle.
So, what is the response to China. It has not actually invaded anywhere since 1979 invasion of Vietnam. The Chinese have, however, occupied Tibet since 1951 and surely this is as worthy of protest as the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, a country they left in 1989 whereas China remains in Tibet. The number of Chinese political prisoners is uncertain but over 800,000 people were arrested in 2004 alone for crimes that threatened the state. It is likely that millions of people in the country are held for what are called 'crimes of conscience', some on religious grounds, others for political reasons including pro-democracy and pro-human rights protests. China has over 700 prisons and other prisoners are detained, as they used to be in the USSR in psychiatric institutions. Torture and the death penalty are commonly used in China. As we know from Tianamen Square in 1989, the Chinese government will suppress pro-democracy movements brutally. We only hear about a fraction of protests in China and it is estimated there were over 10,000 local protests in China last year, not all aimed at political change, but at altering economic and environmental aspects too. So why is not the USA boycotting the 2008 Olympics? Why have British athletes had to sign a document saying they will make no comments on China's human rights record? South Africa in the 1970s and the USSR in the 1980s were weak economically whereas China is rapidly becoming the dominant economy in the world. Germany in 1936 was seen as strong and a bastion against the threat of Communism, so like China today, it was fine to go there. Attending the Olympics in China gives credibility to the dictatorship which persecutes millions of its people. Ordinary people will think, 'well if all those athletes are going it must be an alright country'. This is what China wants.
So, you can conclude, yes the Olympics and politics have nothing to do with each other, what it is about is the Olympics and money, as money and trade deals suppress any qualms about the kind of society that generates them. Come on athletes, recognise that China's policies are an anathema to the Olympic spirit: there is no equality for ethnic groups there and there is no opprtunity for any athlete to succeed who does not bow down before the will of the Chinese Communist Party. Boycott Beijing 2008.
1896- Athens
1900- Paris
1904- St. Louis
1908- London
1912- Stockholm
1920- Antwerp
1924- Paris
1928- Amsterdam
1932- Los Angeles
1936- Berlin
1948- London
1952- Helsinki
1956- Melbourne
1960- Rome
1964- Tokyo
1968- Mexico City
1972- Munich
1976- Montreal
1980- Moscow
1984- Los Angeles
1988- Seoul
1992- Barcelona
1996- Atlanta
2000- Sydney
2004- Athens
2008- Beijing
2012- London
Now you could argue about Seoul in South Korea in 1988 could count as it had only had had democratic elections restored in 1987. To some extent this shows the power of the Olympics. In 1980 the USA and some British teams boycotted the Moscow Olympics over the USSR's invasion of Afghanistan the previous year at the height of the so-called Second Cold War. The USSR at the time was clearly a one-party dictatorship, but of course the Olympics are planned well in advance as you can see from the list regarding London and back in the mid-1970s when the location had been established it had seemed that the Cold War had been thawing with detente and Ostpolitik. The other, probably more (in)famous Olympics were those held in Berlin in 1936 at the height of the Nazi regime. These had been allocated to Germany in 1931, two years before Hitler came to power. Adolf Hitler attended the games but was humiliated by the success of the Black US athlete Jesse Owens who won four gold medals seemingly disproving Hitler's beliefs in the superiority of Whites. Hitler left so that he did not have to present the medals to Owens. The Olympics for both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union were about showing the best of the country to the democratic media and trying to demonstrate that they were people that could be done business with despite all the human rights abuses going on behind the scenes. China is using them in the same way. Hitler released a number of political prisoners before the games, only to have them re-arrested afterwards. China, as I have noted, is busily doing the opposite, seemingly fearful that dissidents will have freer access to outside media during the Olympic period.
The reaction of democratic countries to the Olympics hosted by dictatorships has varied. In 1936 whilst there were no national boycotts of the Olympics though Barcelona hosted the so-called People’s Olympic Games (Olimpiada Popular) in July 1936, the week before the official one in Berlin, and 22 nations signed up to it. It particularly attracted competitors from workers' sports clubs which were common at the time. The Spanish Government was a centre-left Popular Front and wanted to provide an alternative to the games in Berlin which were emblazoned with Nazi insignia. Unfortunately the coup which triggered the Spanish Civil War broke out before all the competitors had arrived and these alternative games had to be abandoned.
In 1980 the USA still under Jimmy Carter boycotted the Moscow Olympics in protest at the invasion of Afghanistan. Argentina, Canada, Chile, China, Indonesia, Israel, Japan, Norway, South Korea, West Germany and many others barred their athletes from attending. The UK, France and Greece supported the boycott but allowed their athletes to make up their own minds and most from the UK went (though notably none of the horse jumpers); four athletes from New Zealand defied their country's boycott to attend. There were the so-called Olympic Boycott Games in Philadelphia. For the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics there was rather a tit-for-tat reaction and the USSR and 14 Communist states bar Romania which was pursuing an independent line, did not attend. The Soviets blamed anti-Soviet propaganda in the USA, which had actually been very prevalent in the previous three years since Ronald Reagan had come to power in 1981 and started talking about the 'evil empire'. The Soviets put on the so-called Friendship Games in Moscow. Since these tense days of the late Cold War things have settled down.
Political issues have not been confined to tension between states. The one incident that the media is currently pointing to is the Black Power salute given by US sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics. They wore black gloves and black socks rather than shoes to reference Black poverty in the USA. This was at a time of sharp battles in US society over civil rights for Blacks. In 1972 at the Munich Olympics, the Palestinian terrorist organisation, Black September shot dead eleven members of the Israeli team and one West German police officer. There intention had been to draw the world's attention to the Palestinian situation in Israel and surrounding countries.
Boycotting of sports activities in apartheid South Africa began in 1956 and stepped up from 1963 onwards as more sports bodies came on board. South Africa was barred from the 1964 Tokyo Olympics and thrown out of the IOC the Olympic organising body in 1970. Some bodies took more persuading, but there was an increase in the face of public protests through the 1970s, of those sports cutting ties to South Africa. These boycotts were not lifted until the disassembling of the apartheid system in 1991. Thus, despite people constantly saying that sport and politics should be separate in fact they often inter-mingle.
So, what is the response to China. It has not actually invaded anywhere since 1979 invasion of Vietnam. The Chinese have, however, occupied Tibet since 1951 and surely this is as worthy of protest as the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, a country they left in 1989 whereas China remains in Tibet. The number of Chinese political prisoners is uncertain but over 800,000 people were arrested in 2004 alone for crimes that threatened the state. It is likely that millions of people in the country are held for what are called 'crimes of conscience', some on religious grounds, others for political reasons including pro-democracy and pro-human rights protests. China has over 700 prisons and other prisoners are detained, as they used to be in the USSR in psychiatric institutions. Torture and the death penalty are commonly used in China. As we know from Tianamen Square in 1989, the Chinese government will suppress pro-democracy movements brutally. We only hear about a fraction of protests in China and it is estimated there were over 10,000 local protests in China last year, not all aimed at political change, but at altering economic and environmental aspects too. So why is not the USA boycotting the 2008 Olympics? Why have British athletes had to sign a document saying they will make no comments on China's human rights record? South Africa in the 1970s and the USSR in the 1980s were weak economically whereas China is rapidly becoming the dominant economy in the world. Germany in 1936 was seen as strong and a bastion against the threat of Communism, so like China today, it was fine to go there. Attending the Olympics in China gives credibility to the dictatorship which persecutes millions of its people. Ordinary people will think, 'well if all those athletes are going it must be an alright country'. This is what China wants.
So, you can conclude, yes the Olympics and politics have nothing to do with each other, what it is about is the Olympics and money, as money and trade deals suppress any qualms about the kind of society that generates them. Come on athletes, recognise that China's policies are an anathema to the Olympic spirit: there is no equality for ethnic groups there and there is no opprtunity for any athlete to succeed who does not bow down before the will of the Chinese Communist Party. Boycott Beijing 2008.
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