Self-Defeating Olympic Activism

The tour of the Olympic torch throughout the world was meant to be a celebration of the Olympic spirit and a display of China's emergence as a major global power. However, what it has divulged into has become nothing more than a political circus. In nearly every Western city that the torch relay has been held, it has been swarmed en masse by every anti-China activist group of every shape and color. Calls by these activists and their Hollywood allies have grown every louder in calling for either a boycott of the Olympics, or a boycott of the opening ceremonies by major Western head of states. The argument goes that in boycotting the Olympics, you prevent the Chinese government from using the occasion as political fodder. This in turn will shame the Chinese government and force it to reflect deeply on reform, or better yet, inspire the Chinese masses yearning to break free of the Communist yoke.

How naïve. Such positions are based on a mass of ignorance, both about China and about human psychology, that cannot be underestimated. The torch protests have not changed a single policy of the Chinese government, if anything, they have only hardened policies in the run up to the Olympics as China's security forces were obviously caught off guard during the Lhasa riots. However, these torch protests have certainly accomplished one thing. It has greatly bolstered Chinese nationalism and a seething anger against the West that has always been just below the surface of that nationalism. This anger is evident throughout the Chinese internet and also in the rare displays of nationalism amongst the overseas Chinese communities in the West. If this reaction has puzzled Western activists, their puzzlement only serves to confirm their own ignorance of the worldview of the Chinese people. The vast majority of the Chinese people support the idea that Tibet is a part of China. The Tibetan independence movement has absolutely no grassroots support among the Han Chinese, most of whom are resolutely hostile to the very suggestion of it. Certainly much of this has to do with the tenets of modern Chinese nationalism and the mythology surrounding it, which has established Tibet as an inseparable part of China. Tibet has in fact, for much of past several centuries, been under the sovereignty of the Chinese empire, although it has also enjoyed a significant amount of autonomy and self-rule.

However, when Western activists harp about the human rights problems in China, the Chinese people must be forgiven for perceiving these lectures as self-righteous and hypocritical. Although Tibet has certainly seen an influx of Han Chinese, it remains more than 90% Tibetan despite being ruled by a Chinese sovereign for over three centuries. The fact that many of the Western activists hail from nations, the United States, Canada, Australia, that have been built by the physical, not merely cultural, genocide of entire native populations certainly cause their words to fall upon death ears. The experience of Chinese nationalism itself, only emerged as a reaction to the "one hundred years of humiliation" that China experienced in the hands of the Western imperial powers and later, Japan. During this period, a once proud civilization was reduced to nothing more than a playground for the foreign colonialists who divided the country into spheres of influence and harshly treated the Chinese as servants and animals. This period of humiliation in which the Chinese people watched helplessly as their dignity and sovereignty was spat upon by the West has been deeply ingrained into the modern Chinese psyche. It is in this context that the tenets of modern Chinese nationalism emerged, and if it has more than a tinge of anti-Western sentiment in it, one only needs to delve into a little history to understand it.

The recent events in Tibet have also been perceived in dramatically different fashion in the West and in China. In the West, the riots have been depicted as the natural outgrowth of frustration against Chinese repression. This may have been the case, but it was also a chaotic and violent expression of it. In China, the riots have been depicted as the instigation of the Dalai Lama and his Western hosts causing havoc and violence upon innocent bystanders. The fact that these riots have garnered so much Western support have caused astonishment and fury in China. Imagine for instance, that in the LA riots of 1992, when inner city Blacks exploded with anger and targeted Whites for recrimination, if Chinese activist groups and Chinese political leaders stood up in support of the violence and called for a boycott of the 1996 Atlanta Olympic games over it. Certainly the 1992 riots were an expression of social injustices in the context of the African American experiences over four centuries, but they were also unlawful, violent and reactionary events. The fact that we cannot even fathom for an instance that the Chinese would exploit such events points only to the double standards that many in West uphold towards non-Western nations.

The provocation of Chinese nationalism also holds the potential for danger and conflict. Unlike other non-Western states that are routinely targeted by Hollywood activism such as Sudan or Burma, China is not an isolated and insignificant state. China is the most populous nation in the world and in the past quarter century, has reinvented and transformed itself with unprecedented speed. China's economy is deeply integrated with that of the West, and holds a substantial amount of American debt. Given the rapid progress of the Chinese economy and the likelihood of future robust growth, China is emerging as the primary economic superpower of this century. It is likely that by the middle of this century, China will equal or surpass Western dominance in controlling the instruments of power from finance to technology. Certainly, given the deep integration between China's economy and the West, friction between the two will be a lose lose scenario. Provoking the most virulent nationalism from the next potential superpower and also our primary banker is certainly not a smart thing to do.

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