This not irony. Just the facts. Yesterday's freedom fighter is today's imperial running dog.
01.05.2008
The Olympics Have Taken China Down A Notch
At the start of the Tibet uprising, I mused that the Olympics--far from being a Chinese propaganda coup, as envisioned by Beijing--might actually wreck China's image abroad.
Now, John Pomfret at PostGlobal thinks this is indeed happening (it's worth reading the piece):
Move over ugly American, make room for the ugly Chinese.
...
For the past decade, China's "soft power" has helped fuel Beijing's rise by attempting to assuage fears of an expansionist China. ... But now across the globe China is dropping in the polls.
It's true. Recent months have seen China's global standing plummet like Bill Clinton in South Carolina. What's more, this has been good for the United States.
I intitially decried China's crackdown in Tibet for moral reasons, but also because it looked like a full-throated assault from the press would reduce China's standing at a crucial time, rehabilitating America in relative terms after a decade of global PR disasters. (Not that China is our enemy, but it's certainly nice to have some leverage over a rising great power.)
After all, China has been getting a free ride for the past decade--playing the anti-America that doesn't intervene in other countries' affairs. This made them popular, in part, because we spent that decade more or less giving interventionism a bad name.
Now, however, they're playing defense--the atmospherics of the Tibet-Olympics affair (with Mugabe and Darfur on the side) have turned their sovereigntism from a selling point into a public-relations liability.
On top of that, their hack apparatchik instincts have begun to show under pressure. What was once smooth diplomatic composure during the good times has given way to reflexive, KCNA-style harangues (China's Foreign Ministry recently called Nancy Pelosi "disgusting"!).
And--it's terrible to say, but true--folks protesting U.S. involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan have had to make space in their calendars to defend the Dalai Lama. Whether or not our policies are correct, it's nice to see someone else condemned for a change.
Now that the torch is safely in Beijing, of course, China might regain some of its composure. But it is clear that China has fumbled badly in Round 1--and the political outcome of these Games will reverberate well into the coming decade.
--Barron YoungSmith
Posted: Thursday, May 01, 2008 6:01 PM with 7 comment(s)
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maxblum13 said:
Bay Area people: UCLA Darfur Action Committee is leading a rally in front of VISA headquarters in San Francisco at 4:00 on May 16th, demanding that they take a stronger stance on human rights and use their position as an Olympic sponsor as leverage on China. We'd love to see you out there.
May 1, 2008 6:43 PM
LISAH said:
So...China's sure not being nice, but it's also doing no more than behaving like a big strong and getting stronger country behaves. There don't seem to be a lot of nice friendly countries coming to Darfur's aid. Tibet left alone is more than a bit like a backward feudal society -- is it really worse off under Chinese overlordship/suzerainity/whatever? Kinda hard to tell.
More than a bit of hypocrisy here, to say nothing of the silliness of setting precedents for future such actions that can and will be taken against just about any country any silly "humanitarian" bunch gets upset about.
It's the real world. Get over it.
May 1, 2008 7:43 PM
LISAH said:
...and if you really wanna get upset at China. how about condemning the air quality in Beijing...???
May 1, 2008 8:02 PM
maxblum13 said:
LISAH, its precisely those sentiments that have led us to conclude that our next protest target will be our own country, which does nothing but issue press statements and won't do anything about genocide because of our intelligence relationship with Sudan. BTW, how do u live with yourself if you consider genocide simply the real world? i would jump off a cliff before I accepted the status quo as inevitable. If you're really that jaded, do all of us a favor and stop involving yourself in politics. And I might add, what right do you have to tell the thousands of Tibetans who say that Tibet is worse off under Chinese rule that they are wrong? If you hold activists to the standard that they have to take up arms against the Sudanese government without any military support in order to avoid being hypocritical than you are simply being ridiculous.
May 1, 2008 8:07 PM
bdgreen said:
Yes, we Americans looked much better posed arms-akimbo against the threat of the Evil Russians and Red Chinese, didn't we? Back in those days, we got away scot-free with our bloody drugs-for-guns-for-terrorists adventures in Central America. And let's not forget that we may have gone to Iraq to fight Al-Qaeda-who-wasn't-there, but we invented the real Al Qaeda in Afghanistan!
Let's see... yep... a few more years of silently allowing authoritarianism to incubate in Russia, and a few more years of shoveling dollars into the Chinese furnace, and we'll have our good old bad guys back again! Hooray! I'm tired of pretending to be scared of Al Qaeda, but ANYONE can be scared of nuclear Armageddon.
May 1, 2008 8:11 PM
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