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Yves Threard | China's Law    [

    The Olympic Games, a Suckers' Market for the Chinese
    By Francesco Liello
    Rue89

    Wednesday 08 August 2007

    For the first time in the history of the Summer Olympic Games, the medals will be made of another material besides the traditional gold, silver and bronze. They will be jade, a stone that, in China, assumes a different value depending upon its color, form and use. These medals will surely be the best contribution from the Beijing 2008 organization to the Olympic Games' history.

    But all medals have two sides - Beijing 2008 also. While only a year remains before the famous 08.08.08 date (and as the opening ceremony will begin at 8:08 p.m., we easily understand that 8 is a lucky number in China), the gap is obvious between a heralded success in terms of organization and a fundamental ambiguity on every other issue: human rights, the environment, the opening up and transformation of China.

    On the one hand, it is likely that the 2008 Summer Games will be a great success of organization. The installations are already architectural, logistical, technological and functional triumphs. The swimming pool is extremely beautiful, as is the stadium, even though there is not a complete consensus on that score. The infrastructure will be topnotch, both for spectators and for athletes. Ticket demand is already high and there is every likelihood that - from that perspective - these Olympic Games will be the most successful in history.

    This success foretold obviously comes at a price. Who will pay it? The answer is Chinese: the people and the country. These Beijing Games are, in fact, an aspect of the suckers' market for the Chinese. They will be superb and well-organized Olympic Games, as beautiful and well-made as counterfeit Louis Vuitton or Prada handbags. The feeling, in fact, is that we are about to participate in an enormous "counterfeit." The joy of the Chinese comes from a phony idea: that the Games will bring them money. The sports event has hardly any significance. Everything is oriented to business, even at the price of making children work to manufacture the souvenir gadgets already on sale. It is true that the Olympic Games had already become an authentic business several editions ago.

    But what will happen when the population realizes (as soon as the Olympic Games are over) that there was no truth to what it had been led to believe for years? The Games are not going to change its life. That will be a wonderful phenomenon, but there will be no lucrative invasion of tourists and a tiny minority only of the population will profit from the Games. So the ever-increasing gap between rich and poor will remain.

    There's already a price being exacted. You can "breath" it. The city of Beijing has admitted that the goal it had set for itself to have clean air in 2007 is almost impossible to achieve. The capital targeted 245 days a year of blue skies, and about 130 are still lacking (with 146 available days before the end of the year). The climate, the smog, the unbreathable air are constants in the life of Beijing. The construction sites do not help either, since they raise dust and it's not only CO2 that fills the air. All of that ends up in the lungs of Beijing dwellers. All because they must rush to organize the first so-called "green" Games in history. When will the real bill have to be paid?

    Go to Original

    China's Law
    By Yves Thréard
    Le Figaro

    Wednesday 08 August 2007

    Human rights advocates may storm, demonstrate, call for a boycott; nonetheless, all the nations will be at the Olympic Games Beijing rendezvous in exactly a year. Between now and then, they will have checked their consciences in the cloakroom. Anything else is unimaginable.

    Forgotten are Tibet, political repression, the muzzling of the press, the death penalty, the Darfur tragedy Beijing refuses to see. Necessity rules. And in this dawning 21st century, it's the Middle Kingdom, with its 1.3 billion inhabitants and double-digit growth that imposes the rules of the game on the rest of the planet. No one would dare dispute that. China is neither the Argentine dictatorship of the World Soccer cup in 1978, nor the Soviet Union of the sulky 1980 Olympic Games. China is more cunning, more powerful.

    With an iron hand in a velvet glove, its leaders have won the globalization bet. They're neither junky nor doddering. They're men of their era.

    The result is that the international community eats from their hand with an obligatory deference and an assumed cynicism. What's the fate of a few political prisoners compared to a perpetually effervescent market? Even the giant Google has modeled its research engine to Beijing orthodoxy in order to cross over the Great Wall. Of course there's pollution. But people get used to it, there as elsewhere.

    Consequently, the 2008 Games will undoubtedly be a success to which the whole world will have willingly contributed. Communist China will put itself on stage for over four billion television watchers who will be awestruck by the monumental infrastructure and the professional organization. Forty billion dollars have been invested.

    A nice stroke of diplomatic - and also political - propaganda. Chinese pride will suffocate the cries of dissidence. Never is the Middle Empire population more at one with its leaders - whom it generally mistrusts - than when the nationalist chord is set to vibrate. And that's the entire art of sports: to know how to excite people. One can be amazed at the athletes' exploits, dream about Coubertin's beautiful expressions, console oneself with the pacifying role of sports. Sports, also serving as an instrument of power and unity in the service of the state.

    China will know how to make use of it, just as the DDR, Cuba, or Soviet Union once did. Without proof, one hardly dares mention the specter of doping that now infects all countries. But China will take care to prepare its champions to launch them, most notably, after the American stars. Fodder for the Olympic spirit, sport is sometimes another - nationalist - means to assert one's strength, one's power, and one's supremacy.

    That is to say that the Olympic Games are momentous for China. If no jarring note troubles the event, China will be able to contemplate the world, come to compete at its feet.