The Beijing Olympics Closing Ceremonies

So, after seventeen days, the Beijing Olympics are over.

Records have been broken, memories made, stories told.

The opening ceremonies were beautiful and overwhelming.  The closing ceremonies were an incredible sensory overload.

The games were fantastic.  It looked like no detail was overlooked.  Volunteers were everywhere.  The venues were polished and beautiful.  Almost every venue had some sort of Chinese cultural touch.  Everything seemed to go smoothly.

The Chinese people have every right to be proud.  God willing, they will also have something to hope for in the form of increased freedoms within China, encouraged by increased international focus on China.

The coverage had its moments.  As predicted, China’s human rights record was comfortably avoided.  The only mention of it in the NBC coverage was during the interview with President Bush, and, let’s face it, more than half of the country probably fastforwarded on Tivo through that.

Sadly, an opportunity to give the American public a better idea of who China is and what it is becoming was completely squandered.  China is becoming a dangerous major player on the world stage, encouraging pariah regimes in Sudan and Iran.  China wanted to present itself as a country ready to join the community of nations as a fully respected member.  The coverage more presented China as a sort of cute, harmless, somewhat old-fashioned country with weird food and big building projects.  China has done a lot to modernize, but there is a tremendous gap between the life of a successful businessman in modern, glamorous Shanghai and a farmer ekking out an existence in poor, remote Sichuan province with the closest drinking water coming from a muddy stream an hour’s hike away. 

There is also a tremendous gap between China’s modernizing economy and its recalcitrantly autocratic government with egregious and continuing human rights abuses that haunt every Chinese citizen.

In spite of China’s promises to the IOC to allow protesters, nobody was actually granted a permit to protest.  Several people disappeared after going to the protest permit office, presumably arrested by the police.  Two 70-something year old women were sentenced to a re-education camp for showing up at the protest permit office five times to try to get permission to protest the demolition of their homes for the new construction in Beijing, and the government’s complete abandonment of its promise to provide compensation for the loss of their homes.  Critics of China’s one-child policy and other human rights abuses reported that their friends and contacts in China had either been arrested or were under even closer than normal surveillance.  Protesters were deported.

Tomorrow is the first day after the Beijing Games.

Will China really be on the path to becoming a more open and free society, as the IOC said when it chose to award the games to China in spite of its human rights record, its tyrranical government, its awful pollution, and other factors that should’ve disqualified Beijing?  (I would have to note that that was Clinton’s excuse for granting China “most favored nation” status, that it would encourage China to be more like the rest of the free world.  Hmmm… doesn’t seem to have worked yet…)

Or have we just encouraged a renewed sense of the triumph of the Chinese Communist Party?  Have we stoked the nationalism that encouraged most Chinese to frown at Tibet’s efforts to break away from China and shrug that the Tibetans got what they deserved from the heavy-handed military response?  Have we just given the Beijing government an excuse for anything they decide to do next to squash the spreading discontent in China, especially in the rural areas?

In China, tomorrow’s dawn has already come.  What is it illuminating?