Olympic Focus - Chinese World Domination?

I found this article very interesting. For those of you who are still reading the blog from Comparative Gov't last spring, I think it will make some real sense. Will China go the way of Nazi Germany? Will the aging of China force it to turn it's attention inward? One thing is for sure,the opening ceremony was dazzling and that is exactly the way China wanted it to be. Those ancient drums sent a chilling, and I dare say, militaristic message to the West. So serious was this event, that even Costas was saying they had to tell the drummers to smile more. Read this article below from the British Newspaper The Telegraph.

By Charles Moore

Until yesterday, the most famous athletic moment in Chinese history was a solitary swim. On July 16, 1966, Mao Zedong, then aged 73, was filmed crossing the Yangtze River. He appeared, wrote his doctor, to be swimming "faster and further than an Olympic champion", but this was an illusion produced by the swift flow of the Yangtze: "Mao had only floated on his back, his giant belly buoying him like a balloon, carried down the river by the current."


China wowed the world with its opening ceremony
Mao chose to put on this show for political reasons. Having created the Cultural Revolution, he had stood back from the intended chaos to see what would happen. Now he was reasserting power: "Mao's swim in the Yangtze meant that his self-enforced exile was over. He was returning to the political stage. Two days later … he returned to Beijing. Henceforth, the Cultural Revolution would follow his direction."

Beijing Olympics opens with dazzling ceremony
Read more by Charles Moore
Looking at yesterday's astonishing scroll of Chinese glories rolled out on the floor of the Bird's Nest stadium, one sees, once again, a political purpose. "This is a historical chance for us," says the Chinese sports minister, "…we are burdened with a glorious mission." One World, One Dream, says the slogan. Whose world? What dream?

We all know that China has only become the great power it is today because it has abandoned Mao's economics. Deng Xiaoping, who emerged as leader after Mao's death, broke with the past and opened China up to markets. By 2020, it will be the second economic power in the world; by 2050, perhaps, the first.

advertisementBecause the economic change is so great, we pay less attention to the political continuity. Of today's top nations, China is the only one that has not had to abandon its totalitarian past in order to be accepted. The Communist Party remains in control. A vast portrait of Chairman Mao still looks down on Tiananmen Square. The greatest political murderer of all time is still canonised.

This is not to say that Beijing any longer believes that the world should be ruled by dogmatic Marxism-Leninism. But China's current leaders are in the line of Mao, and they are achieving what he attempted and failed - an illiberal form of rule that, in a sense, works.

In The End of History, the book which marked the high tide of Western post-Cold War cultural confidence, Francis Fukuyama noted that China, by killing students in Tiananmen Square in 1989, had "become just another Asian authoritarian state", and "lacked internal legitimacy". Because it had suppressed freedom, he suggested, it would suffer. That judgment was made in 1992. It does not, unfortunately, feel right this morning. In yesterday's ceremony, huge, illuminated footprints in the sky walked between Tiananmen Square and the stadium, while thousands cheered. Modern technology seemed to give physical form to the country's traditional "mandate of heaven".

China has prospered, while those that tried freedom - most notably Russia - have suffered. Even as they fret about human rights protests, the Chinese leaders must also congratulate themselves. "We are still here," they can say privately, "richer and more powerful than ever. Repression works."

But they cannot say it directly in public, and that is where the Olympics come in. Spectacular sporting displays are the classic means of projecting totalitarian power without talking about it.

If it all goes according to plan, those returning from the next fortnight will say how wonderful it was. Sportsmen will extrapolate from the comforts and respect offered to them, and declare that China is a splendid place. "It's like you're in a Marriott," reported one American competitor from the Olympic village, as if that were a form of paradise.

I have in front of me a dispatch from The Spectator in August 1936: "Competent foreign residents here [Berlin] say that the German Government and people really do desire peace … and one has seen several things in this festival which suggest that Germany wants to impress her Olympic visitors not only with her efficiency … but also with her desire to be friendly." "Harmony", proclaimed the dominant Chinese character formed by the heaving choreography last night.

I am not predicting that, in three years' time, the West will be at war with China. But I am pointing out the similarity of totalitarian political purpose. Youth! The future! Unity! National greatness! Cheering crowds, awed foreigners, dissent crushed! The Olympics offer all these things.

You might retort that China may be a global power, but it has become so because it has westernised, and will really succeed only when it has westernised some more, and become a democracy. We in the West have not fallen for a Chinese ideology or way of life. None of us has Chinese heroes. Few of us dress Chinese or look to Chinese entertainments. They are coming our way.

Yet suppose that, rather than westernising, China simply understands more coldly than we how the world now works. It has noticed that Westerners have become consumers and borrowers, and so it has become a producer and a saver. It has noticed that we live in a dream-world of our own films and computer games and celebrities, and it is happy to profit by furnishing the technological materials for these dreams. We play: it works: it wins.

Besides, the Olympic opening ceremony shows that China is now ready to glorify its own culture (not mentioning Communism, of course). "We Chinese invented writing and paper and printing and gunpowder and the compass," it in effect told us yesterday, "and we spread our power by land and sea. We are exquisite, resourceful and unique." "We are a high and ancient civilisation, growing in strength" was the message, conveyed with breath-taking elan. I bet the London Olympics in four years' time will not dare tell Britain's equivalent heroic stories.

What we are witnessing is impressive, but also frightening. If China really does become top nation, nothing in our history will have prepared us for such a thing. And nothing in its history suggests that freedom will be on its agenda.

The late, great Sir Denis Thatcher, bored at a formal dinner for the President of Finland, turned abruptly to the President's wife and asked: "What do the Finns think of the Chinese?" She explained that Finland was closer to Russia: the Finns did not think much about the Chinese. "Well, it's about time they did," said Denis, "because there are more than a billion of the buggers."

Indeed; but this brings me to the one hope we have when confronted with dictatorships - that they are undone by their own cruelties. A great evil of Chinese Communism has been its One Child Policy, assaulting family life and creating a nation of only children with 117 boys for every 100 girls (it's 105 to 100 in free countries). The good news for the rest of us is that, just as it is poised to overtake America, China will therefore find itself burdened with an aged population - roughly 300 million pensioners by 2035. If the East is grey, rather than red, it may thus deny itself the gold medal of world domination.