Entirely Predictable

It's been suggested that the International Olympic Committee might have been experimenting with mind-altering chemicals when it handed the 2008 Summer Olympic Games to Beijing. It was hardly a mystery that China's human rights record came second to almost-none in the world.

Yes, it's a heavy burden to carry, the pacification of sundry and adverse ethnic groups all clamouring for their particularities to be recognized, when the country's dictators are determined to hammer square pegs into round holes. And governing a population the size of China's, the largest of any country in the world, is no easy task.

Particularly when one recalls that this has been largely a peasant, countrified, subsistence farming society where traditionally a large proportion of the population has teetered on the very edge of existence, in perpetual want. And then there's the irritation of a Communist government having to cope with the persistent clamouring of religious adherents to be permitted freedom of worship.

That last is a real bugbear for China's hard-line government who consider the glorious state to in the realm of the sacred, not some improbably theoretical spirit high on ether.

Persecution of minorities, runaway capital punishment, slavery, incarceration of protesters, and of any religious figures incautious enough to challenge government diktat is simply a way of life in China. One that has long been deplored by governments in the West, although that has never stopped them from doing business with her.

China, though, has made great strides in reaching out of her shell of distance and reliance on incommunicado politics. As much as she has also succeeded very well in hauling the greater portion of her population out of dire poverty and distinct starvation.

Her other, control-resistant problems of atmospheric pollution, quality control in trade production, suppression of Christian and Muslim and Buddhist and Falun Gong practitioners sees her remaining intransigent in the cold assertion that these all represent internal matters.

After all, she has succeeded in sweeping the world economy with her cheaply made products, luring international buyers to embrace her wares, and in the process managing handily to destroy entire industries so many other countries have long been reliant on, for their own bottom line.

All of this was well know, well documented, well remarked upon, so why now, at this last-minute stage of Olympics production has the world suddenly discovered that it is in Beijing, China, that the 2008 summer Olympics are scheduled for? It's a conundrum, most certainly. How to convincingly communicate to a giant that its conduct is worthy of outraged reproach?

Impossible to ignore her abuses. She has much to answer for, not the least of which is her brutal treatment of her own citizens. Let alone her conscienceless affiliations with other human-rights-abusing states like Darfur, North Korea and Burma, to name a few. It's moot whether quiet diplomacy could eventually bring China around.

Yet who could blame her for believing that because the IOC chose Beijing over other competitor sites for the 2008 Summer Games, she was finally reaching acceptance. For that matter, the world beating its way to her doors to invest in her manufacturing infrastructures, and signing trade deals would previously have caused her to believe she was deserving of respect.

China, anxious and puffed with pride over her not-inconsiderable advances in some areas, despite her miserable failures in others, felt she would now have the opportunity to show the world how well she has succeeded in hauling herself into the world of today, from the dim world of yesterday and the Communist Revolution with all of its horrendously obscene human rights excesses.

The Games would be her opportunity to demonstrate the pride of the Chinese people, their achievement, their attainment toward (for China) moderation and modernity. Now, a veritable tsunami of blame has swelled world wide and is threatening to submerge China in a sea of condemnation, isolation and an inevitably bitter backlash.

The brilliant promise of world acceptance, admiration evinced toward China's accomplishments, enabling the Chinese to bask in the warm and mellow glow of congratulatory adulation has suddenly vanished from possibility. The Games will likely proceed, but the Chinese people will always nurse a sharp resentment toward the international community for besmirching China's intentions.

The memory of the Olympic torch's tortuous advance across the globe, with raucous, condemnatory protesters interfering with the dignity of the torch-bearing ceremony will always be fresh in the memory of the Chinese people. Who feel pride in their country and its many accomplishments, and who most distinctly feel that the current situation is a result of jealousy and racism.

In that, they may not be too far off the mark.