Should China have been allowed to host the Olympics?
By Sam
Earlier this week, Chinese officials detained six Americans for protesting Chinese rule in Tibet. This is the latest round of aggressive action taken against foreigners during the Olympics. As the New York Times details:
Two photographers at the scene for The Associated Press were also roughed up and taken into custody, according to news agency reports and press freedom advocates. After the photographers were questioned separately for 30 to 40 minutes, the police confiscated the memory cards from their cameras.
In the past month, the Foreign Correspondents Club of China has received dozens of complaints from overseas journalists who were detained, trailed or had equipment damaged by the police.
Chinese citizens have also felt the government’s heel during these games. Although the regime invited discontented citizens to apply for official permission to protest within designated areas, not a single application has been approved as the government claims that they opted to simply address the concerns of aggrieved parties. In a bizarre and disturbing twist, two women who ignored the regulations and protested against displacement from their homes to facilitate redevelopment were sentenced to “re-education” in a labor camp. Both of the women are in their late 70s.
China’s repressive approach to free expression does not come as news to outside observers (or its own citizenry). Despite assurances that the Olympics would herald a new era of openness in the communist government, was awarding the games to China tantamount to complicity in its authoritarian tactics?
Jacques Rogge, president of the International Olympics Committee (IOC), argued that awarding the games to China would help welcome it into the liberal order. This is carrot and stick reasoning, that to offer China incentives would hasten its willingness to accompany ongoing economic liberalization with a commitment to political liberalization.
Implicit in his advocacy of the ‘carrot’ position is the acknowledgement that China is, in some fundamental sense, illiberal. Rogge did not, for example, argue that China is not the repressive regime that critics charge. The primary moral question is, therefore, ‘What is the correct ethical response to China’s transgressions?’
The entire Olympic selection process, however, tends to bury this question within a larger set of other questions about the desirability of China as a host site. Political context seems to play a subsidiary (or at least tangential role) to other questions, such as a city’s capacity to host the Olympics, its infrastructure, the putative economic and developmental benefits, and the rotation of host countries and continents.
This balance between competing interests is hardly surprising, but in China’s case, it has proven rather unfortunate. That China commits some number of ethical transgressions is universally accepted, although the scope and gravity of those offenses remains in controversy. The question of whether it is right to engage with or spurn such an offender remains one of the most fraught in the international world today. The legacy of the Second World War opened a new discussion of how we confront crimes against shared moral principles and that discussion has erupted in numerous contexts since: Cambodia, Rwanda, the former Yugoslavia, South Africa, Myanmar.
Despite China’s seeming unwillingness to budge on freedom of expression, many hope that the Olympics will effect a tangible change in the regime and the populace. It may well do so, but the debate over the best way to open China will always be subsidiary of that over whether it is right to engage in the first place. If China one day adopts a liberal constitution and outlook, we may look back on this Olympiad and claim it was to the net moral good, but that will not determine whether allowing it was itself a moral wrong.
Comments
One Response to “Should China have been allowed to host the Olympics?”
Leave a Reply
[...] Original post by The Public Philosopher [...]