Not since Marco Polo has anyone traveled so far up China's Silk Road with such amoral élan. But there was Jacques Rogge, president of the IOC, knight of the court of King Leopold's Belgium, three-time Olympian in the grand sport of yachting, standing astride Beijing at the close of the 2008 Olympic games. In front of 90,000 at the Games' he said, "Tonight, we come to the end of sixteen glorious days which we will cherish forever. Through these games, the world learned more about China, and China learned more about the world."

But what did the world really learn? From NBC's coverage we learned that China is totally awesome, Michael Phelps can really swim and Usain Bolt is way fast. Oh, and there are pandas there. some of whom died in the Sichuan earthquake. We can't forget about the pandas.

As the Washington Post's veteran columnist Thomas Boswell wrote in his last missive from Beijing:

In all my decades at The Post, this is the first event I've covered at which I was certain that the main point of the exercise was to co-opt the Western media, including NBC, with a splendidly pretty, sparsely attended, completely controlled sports event inside a quasi-military compound. We had little alternative but to be a conduit for happy-Olympics, progressive-China propaganda. I suspect it worked.

I applaud Boswell for his honesty, but it is hard to not have contempt for the aside that "we had little alternative" but to dance the infomercial shuffle.

Boswell and the press made a choice the moment they stepped on China's soil.

They chose not to seek out the near two million people evicted from their homes to make way for Olympic facilities.

They chose not to report on the Chinese citizens who tried to register to enter the cordoned off "protest zones" only to find themselves in police custody.

They chose not to report on the Tibetan citizens removed from their service jobs by state law for the duration of the games.

They chose to not point out the bizarre hypocrisy of seeing Michael Phelps--with full media fanfare--taking a group of Chinese children to their first meal at McDonalds. (Even though Phelps famously eats 12,000 calories a day during training, I can't imagine much of it comes from Mickey D's.)

They chose not to report on the foreign nationals who as of this writing, are still being held in Chinese prisons for daring to protest. (According to the Associated Press, the US Embassy today urged China to free those jailed for protesting at the games. The embassy gently suggested, that China could stand to show "greater tolerance and openness.")

They chose not to ask why George W. Bush was the first US president to attend the Olympics on foreign soil, and why the State Department last April took China off its list of nations that commit human rights violations.

They chose not to ask whether it was a conflict of interest for General Electric to both own NBC and be one of the primary sponsors of the games as well as the supplier of much of the games' electronic security apparatus, including 300,000 close circuit cameras, which will most likely remain in place once the world has turned its attention elsewhere.

They chose not to ask and re-ask the question of why the games were in Beijing in the first place, when Rogge and Beijing organizing committee head Liu Qi both promised that the Olympics would come alongside significant improvements in human rights.

As Sophie Richardson of Human Rights Watch said:

The reality is that the Chinese government's hosting of the games has been a catalyst for abuses, leading to massive forced evictions, a surge in the arrest, detention and harassment of critics, repeated violations of media freedom, and increased political repression. Not a single world leader who attended the games or members of the IOC seized the opportunity to challenge the Chinese government's behavior in any meaningful way.

The legacy of these games will be in no short order: China's dominance, in winning more gold medals than the US; the brilliant performances of Phelps; Bolt and the dominance of the Jamaican sprinters. But we should also remember the ravaging of a country, sacrificed at the altar of commercialism and "market penetration." And we should recall a mainstream press, derelict in its duty, telling us they had "little alternative" but to turn this shandeh into a globalization informerical.

Liu Qi called the Olympics "a grand celebration of sport, of peace and friendship." Instead it was a powerful demonstration of the way the elephants of the east and west can link trunks and happily trample the suffering grass.

England, you're next. And you thought the blitzkrieg was rough.

Comments (18)

1. "Sorry, I'm not as easily conned as Dave Z.! IF Boswell has spent "decades at The Post" and assuming he's done more than a few reportings of geopolitical events from NON-democratic countries, he either has been exceptionally naive (until Beijing) or is quite simply a liar to claim `first' recognition of being co-opted!"

   I disagree with what you write, but probably agree with the spirit of it. I'm sure Boswell believes the press is always doing its democratic duty and sniffing out and reporting important stories; etc. and this was the first time, to his mind, it has been co-opted from its noble purpose. Whatever one's feelings on the slant of the media, or rather, which way it slants, this is ludicrous, but it is probably not a lie. Which is actually worse than lying.

   Posted by onthehelm at 08/24/2008 @ 8:53pm

2. Come on what a load of tripe. It was a brilliantly choreographed sports event, being widely touted as the best ever by other correspondents from the West, with nationalistic undertones but which modern Olympic games hasn't been?

   China has come a million miles since it has opened itself up to the world but it is vital to remember it, unlike the US, has no tradition of democracy. So why on earth be surprised that is behind the West in human rights.

   It was an heirarchical feudal society that became a communist state with no democratic transition Further its cultural religion, confucianism, fosters the idea of an ordered society which implies the need for a controlled society. IN other words our individualistic Western values do not sit well culturally with most Chinese.

   L

   Posted by lrjones4 at 08/24/2008 @ 9:40pm

3. Come on what a load of tripe. It was a brilliantly choreographed sports event, being widely touted as the best ever by other correspondents from the West, with nationalistic undertones but which modern Olympic games hasn't been?

   China has come a million miles since it has opened itself up to the world but it is vital to remember it, unlike the US, has no tradition of democracy. So why on earth be surprised that is behind the West in human rights.

   It was an heirarchical feudal society that became a communist state with no democratic transition Further its cultural religion, confucianism, fosters the idea of an ordered society which implies the need for a controlled society. IN other words our individualistic Western values do not sit well culturally with most Chinese.

   L

   Posted by lrjones4 at 08/24/2008 @ 9:40pm

4. (Pushed the wrong button). But like Russia, that has had no tradition of democracy, China will have to move to a form of democracy in tune with its cultural values and history.

   Posted by lrjones4 at 08/24/2008 @ 9:44pm

5. It's important to get both sides, so I appreciate Dave's perspective.

   Still, I must believe that China is in a world of its own. Just look at it's history. A 4,000 mile wall? I saw a documentary (The First Emperor) which suggested that 100,000 citizens died building it. Most of them, they continued, were probably used to fill it.

   So, everything is on a different scale.

   Dave, you mention London ... and after watching the Closing Ceremony, which was spectacular no matter how you slice it, and the handover at the end, I keep wondering what kind of a slob this Mayor of London is, really. Did anyone else notice that? I felt like he was a metaphor for the West, visually, compared to the crispness of the Chinese officials. Is this how the London Games will look compared to Beijing? On the other hand, will he singlehandedly prove out that it's not what's on the surface that counts, as Dave points out about Beijing?

   Posted by claude203 at 08/24/2008 @ 11:37pm

6. "...why on earth be surprised that (China) is behind the West in human rights?" Not so fast. We are hardly in a position to criticise when we have a president who glorifies torture, who has changed the symbol of America from the Statue of Liberty to the hooded prisoner at Abu Ghraib, who brought global shame, disrespect and disgrace to America, who invaded a sovereign nation with lies causing the death of 1.2 million people and who did blow all when Katrina hit his own country, while we watch much of the rest of the world rise while we sink inexorably into the abyss.All the gold medals in the world cannot erase those facts.

   Posted by mystic at 08/25/2008 @ 12:01am

7. Posted by mystic at 08/25/2008 @ 12:01am

   I did say West (which is America plus) but despite all you mention, as an Aussie I still regard America as the greatest bastion of freedom in the world today. Even this little journal along with many other US sources does its part, without government interference, to highlight human rights abuses such as those you mention. That is the essence of democratic freedom.

   All foreigners don't share your position on Iraq or Bush for that matter. This one happens to think that the Iraq war, with all its mistakes, is about the most moral thing the US has done since it helped remove the scourge of German Nazism and stop the expansion of Japan's military imperialism in WW2.

   Australians are particularly grateful wrt to stopping Japan which bombed our mainland and entered Sydney Harbour with submarines during that war.

   Posted by lrjones4 at 08/25/2008 @ 12:25am

8. There was once a land that was inhabited by tribes native to its soil. To this land came invaders from far away, some supposedly fleeing persecution in their own lands, others in search of opportunity in a brave new world. These invaders called the natives savages and rid the land of most of them. Those that remained were pushed into tiny enclaves on their ex-homeland and bludgeoned over time into a material dependency on liquor and casino revenues.

   The early descendants of these barbaric invaders wrote a document that proclaimed that all men were born equal and were entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Of course, the "all" men they spoke of did not include the decimated natives of the land now declared "independent", nor did they include the African slaves these advocates of freedom imported and kept in bondage. (Women, of course, didn't enter the picture.)

   The latter-day descendants of these genocidal, hypocritical invaders use more sophisticated tools to acquire and control other lands that they covet. They claim the right to impose on the world noble concepts that they themselves neither understand nor practice, the most prominent ones being DEMOCRACY (typified by the completely undemocratic system that allowed the 2000 coronation of King George II and by the unapologetic creation and/or sustenance of such democratic icons as Reza Shah Pahlavi, Saddam Hussein, Ferdinand Marcos, Manuel Noriega, Augusto Pinochet, the House of Saud, Pervez Musharraf...) and HUMAN RIGHTS (exemplified by Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, the Patriot Act, Hiroshima, My Lai...)

   China's record in human rights is indeed dismal. But can the USA afford to throw stones, living as it does in a house of the most fragile glass?

   Posted by oneworld at 08/25/2008 @ 01:35am

9. Posted by oneworld at 08/25/2008 @ 01:35am

   The same of course happened in Australia with our Aborigines but the British settlers called it terra nullius.

   "Aborigines lived in Australia for many thousands of years before Europeans discovered the continent. Claiming the land as terra nullius -- 'empty land' or 'land belonging to nobody' -- Europeans set out the foundation of land law that was to last more than 200 years and have devastating effects on the original inhabitants of the land."

   "Land rights"and compensation is a fairly recent legal development and the time honoured appropriation of land did not begin with Europeans but is the way new homelands were founded from time immemorial. I Suppose if you European and Latin Americans are prepared to go back to your former homelands , the Indians could live happily ever after. Failing that it's a bit hard to think of a good solution.

   Posted by lrjones4 at 08/25/2008 @ 01:58am

10. "Land rights"and compensation is a fairly recent legal development and the time honoured appropriation of land did not begin with Europeans but is the way new homelands were founded from time immemorial. I Suppose if you European and Latin Americans are prepared to go back to your former homelands , the Indians could live happily ever after. Failing that it's a bit hard to think of a good solution. Posted by lrjones4 at 08/25/2008 @ 01:58am

    If the West can grant unquestioning support to Israel's 'right' to occupy vast tracts of Arabian land based on a 2000-year-old myth, why can it not recognize the rights of natives displaced, *as a matter of recorded history*, less than 500 years ago? The Holocaust is used as justification for the former; was the genocide of natives in North America and elsewhere any less of a crime against humanity?

    Posted by oneworld at 08/25/2008 @ 06:48am

11. hee hee

    reading the guvt hating neo-cons fawning apologetics for the largest communist authoritarian regime on Earth makes me want to puke, after laughing.

    Gee, maybe Saddam Hussein should have held the Olympics, then LR and Co could have said things like " unlike the US, has no tradition of democracy. So why on earth be surprised that is behind the West in human rights."

    but, who are "we" to protest. In Denver a warehouse has been converted into a massive jail to hold protesters, and a "free speech zone" has been erected. I guess the idea of the whole of The Land of the Free being a free speech zone went out with the bath water and Chimpy McFlightsuits fearful reign of error.

    Even I, though, will be having Olympic withdrawal for the next few days.

    Posted by crabwalk at 08/25/2008 @ 07:33am

12. See, I thought "conservatives" were against guvts evicting people from their homes to make way for guvt improvements.

    Till Chimpy ran the Rangers, then it all changed.

    Posted by crabwalk at 08/25/2008 @ 07:36am

13. "If the West can grant unquestioning support to Israel's 'right' to occupy vast tracts of Arabian land based on a 2000-year-old myth, why can it not recognize the rights of natives displaced, *as a matter of recorded history*, less than 500 years ago? The Holocaust is used as justification for the former; was the genocide of natives in North America and elsewhere any less of a crime against humanity?"

    Posted by oneworld at 08/25/2008 @ 06:48am

    I don't think that the Holocaust was the justification for the establishment of the modern Jewish state of Israel. The movement for a Jewish state seriously began in the 19C and received its greatest impetus from the Balfour Declaration of November 1917, before Britain had conquered Jerusalem and well before the Nazi Holocaust.

    Then of course the United Nations Special Commission on Palestine (UNSCOP) recommended that Palestine be divided into an Arab state and a Jewish state. The commission called for Jerusalem to be put under international administration The UN General Assembly adopted this plan on Nov. 29, 1947 as UN Resolution (GA 181), owing to support of both the US and the Soviet Union.

    Contemplation of the Holocaust by the UN may have caused it to look more sympathetically at a Jewish state but the spade work for a modern Israel certainly preceded it.

    You mention myth in relation to Jewish claims on Palestine. Is it not that mythical-spiritual connection to the land that undergirds most if not all claims of native title to the land? So, if as you say, Israel's claim is a mythical and hence spiritual one, why is their claim not as significant as say that of the American Indians or the Australian Aborigines?

    Posted by lrjones4 at 08/25/2008 @ 09:08am

14. Posted by crabwalk at 08/25/2008 @ 07:33am

    You're a good lad Crabs because your heart is in the right place but you still tend to stuff up with the organ above your shoulders.

    China is changing, maybe too slowly for some, but for the better. I mentioned it has never had an era of democracy and its history means it will need to learn from those who have and then form democratic institutions consistent with its culture. On the debit side of democracy the self-absorbed individualism of many within Western democracies is something China and the Chinese may want to give a miss but that is up to them.

    The Cultural Revolution, which decimated the intellectual and academic classes in China, has no doubt had some slowing effect on China moving closer to Enlightenment values, which in part are responsible for our freedoms.

    China has some way to go in terms of human rights and its welcome to and by the rest of the world in such events as this brilliantly staged Olympic games can only encourage it on that path.

    Unlike your tribe, Crabs, we conservatives are not constrained or limited by fundamentalist inclinations and without too much trouble can distinguish between things that differ.

    Posted by lrjones4 at 08/25/2008 @ 10:02am

15. My God, clods like oneworld and crab must really hate the US.. Posted by JOMAMMA at 08/25/2008 @ 09:22am

    I don't hate the USA but I do dislike two specific American traits: sermonizing without looking at one's own record on the same or similar issues; kneejerk responses to having it pointed out that, the Founding Fathers' liberal ideals notwithstanding, this is a nation that *is* founded on genocide. If in your book that amounts to hating the USA, so be it.

    Posted by oneworld at 08/25/2008 @ 11:17am

16. Sure you can make a moral distinction between the rapist and his victim.

    Posted by Darin_the_Troll at 08/25/2008 @ 09:02am

    Indeed I can. The only problem is, I also have the objectivity to see that the USA has taken the role of rapist far too often for comfort. This is a case of one rapist calling another rapist names. The victims - be they the inner country peasants paying the price for China's material success in its showpiece cities or the tens of thousand of hapless innocent Iraqis slain since March 2003 - have no voice, no visibility.

    One should perhaps add China's name to the list of despotic regimes propped up by US support. Were the US to decide that it would import nothing from China till the latter's human rights record improved, how long do you think China's prosperity would continue? (Of course, what China's retaliation could mean to the US economy is another matter altogether!)

    Posted by oneworld at 08/25/2008 @ 11:33am

17. You mention myth in relation to Jewish claims on Palestine. Is it not that mythical-spiritual connection to the land that undergirds most if not all claims of native title to the land? So, if as you say, Israel's claim is a mythical and hence spiritual one, why is their claim not as significant as say that of the American Indians or the Australian Aborigines?

    Posted by lrjones4 at 08/25/2008 @ 09:08am

    (Even though the latter claims have much greater *historical* validation than the Jewish claim to Palestine,) assume for a minute that all these claims are equally valid . Have you ever seen any Western power try to give to the native peoples of Australia or North/South America a millionth of the support they have provided for Israel to capture and retain its 'Biblical' land? Can you see the United Nations passing a resolution to partition the USA or Australia to give back to the native inhabitants land to which they have *at least at much* right as Israel claims in Palestine?

    Posted by oneworld at 08/25/2008 @ 11:44am

18. Leeroy, I too do not hate the US, but I do hate many of the things the US has done in the past. I have zero problems highlighting those things, unlike JOMMAMa and crowd that would like to gloss over Abu Graib, Trail of Tears, Japanese internment, 250 military bases spread across the world.

    Please do not join in with the neo-cons in making the jump from refusing to be a Nationalist to being a Hater.

    Again, I hear this "china is changing" mantra too oaften. I have been hearing it for a decade now. their economy has gone through massive reorginazation, millions are better off than under the "intellectual elite" hating Maoists. However, Maosim is still the state doctrine, authoritarianism is the state policy, they still have "work camps", they still do not tolerate dissent, they still occupy Tibet (where they killed 2,000,000 tibetans).

    If I applied your China standards to Iraq...well it would be Reagan 1984 all over again and Saddam would still be an ally to the US, beacsue they are "changing".

    Pots and kettles, my friend. A pot is not necessarily a kettle, but both may be dark in color and should not attemp to vie to see who can absorb the most light. They should both aspire to be "shining cities", not just a source of cheap labor.

    Posted by crabwalk at 08/25/2008 @ 11:54am