Being Bullied by Beijing

Every grade school student knows that the worst thing you can do when a bully wants your lunch money is give it to him. If you turn over your nickels and dimes, he’ll come back the next day more brazen than ever. But stand up to him and he’ll cower away, leaving you to eat your lunch in peace.

The international community would do well to remember this lesson in its dealings with China. Beijing is currently seeking something akin to lunch money on a global scale: the 2008 Summer Olympic Games. And Beijing is also a bully of the first order: China continues to perpetrate its unceasing human rights violations. Awarding Beijing the Olympics would wrongly condone these abuses and encourage China to go on flouting the world’s concerns and the dignity of its own people.

Even as the city of Beijing painted its grass green earlier this year to impress visiting inspectors of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), 10,000 members of the Falun Gong religious movement wasted in prisons for the crime of practicing their beliefs. One hundred fifty of the movement’s leaders have already died in police custody. Meanwhile, China continues to try its citizens in lightning-fast court proceedings, executing them for minor offenses like tax evasion and afterwards harvesting their organs without donor consent. Forced labor is common. Tibetans remain oppressed. And hitting closer to home, the Chinese Ministry of State Security has recently detained a string of Western scholars, one of whom is a U.S. citizen, without explaining the reason for detention or the legal course to be pursued.

Each of these wrongs should be roundly condemned, and each provides an independent justification for denying Beijing the Olympic Games. The IOC has a unique opportunity to show China that disregard for human rights and international law is unacceptable, and it should not squander the opportunity.

At the same time, the world should not pursue a policy of isolating China. The truth is that economic engagement, by flooding China with Western business and ideas, is the best way to encourage market liberalization. And as the former Soviet Union so dramatically taught us, when a nation wholeheartedly adopts market reforms, political change inevitably follows.

But while it is one thing to do business with China in the hopes of effecting the eventual fall of Beijing’s Communist regime, it is quite another thing to bestow upon that regime the seal of international approval associated with the Olympics. The free nations of the world often trade with countries whose policies they disagree with while simultaneously encouraging those countries to make political reforms.

But giving Beijing the Games would do nothing to help us promote democracy in China. In contrast, the symbolic meaning of the Olympics would lavish unwarranted praise on China, undermining these efforts. The Olympics have long served as a testament to the need for governments to respect the dignity of individual achievement by bringing the best athletes in the world to compete in a peaceful arena. The IOC must ask whether this ideal is compatible with a government that consistently uses brute force to quash political and religious expression. Letting Beijing have the Games would, at best, send the wrong signal. At worst, it would embolden Beijing to commit even more flagrant infractions by showing that the international community will turn a blind eye to its abuses.

Bullies should not be appeased. The IOC needs to stand up to one of the world’s great bullies by not awarding the 2008 Summer Olympic Games to Beijing. The torch of Olympic idealism simply must not be engulfed in China’s dark night of oppression.

—Jason L. Steorts