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Why China
should not get the 2008 Olympics
AC Grayling
When the International
Olympic Committee meets in Moscow this weekend
to choose a host city for the 2008 Games, the
front-runner will be China's capital Beijing.
Its main rivals are Toronto and Paris, but Canada
and France have twice hosted winter or summer
Games. In addition, the IoC's retiring President,
Juan Antonio Samaranch, is a keen supporter of
China's bid, and was disappointed when Sydney
beat Beijing for the 2000 Games by just two votes.
As his last presidential act he wants to be able
to declare Beijing the IoC's choice.
China is obsessively keen
to be awarded the Games. No other country is as
eager to appear as a leader on the world stage.
It strained every sinew to get the 2000 Games,
and suffered terrible disappointment at failing.
This time it feels it has even more face to lose,
and if the Games go elsewhere, its chagrin will
be boundless. But China should not be awarded
the Games; and if it is, those Games should be
boycotted. The reason is China's appalling human
rights record. It is a country run by an arbitrary,
repressive, undemocratic tyranny, in which dissent
is brutally suppressed, and every civilised norm
of constitutional and legal behaviour flouted.
Its Communist Party rules by force, and it brooks
no opposition, as witness its current response
to the Falun Gong religious sect, and the health
and exercise movement called Zhong Gong, the crime
of both of which is that they have too many adherents.
Two concerns about China's
human rights failings should be enough to make
it an international pariah. One is its gulag of
forced labour camps in which scores of thousands
are imprisoned without trial for "re-education
through labour" – meaning re-education
into the Party's ways of thinking. These camps
contribute substantially to China's economy; many
exported commodities are wholly or partly manufactured
by slave labourers, a fact which the WTO needs
to take into account when it decides on China's
membership later this year. Getting into the camps
is easy; annoying a policeman can be enough. Getting
out can prove exceedingly difficult, and many
ex-inmates find themselves exiled to the town
neighbouring the camp they have just left.
The other concern is China's
widespread and arbitrary use of cruel and inhuman
punishments, most notably the death penalty. There
are 68 capital offences in China, including fraud,
tax evasion, smuggling, accepting bribes, "separatism"
(which means desire for independence on the part
of people in territories occupied by China, such
as Tibet and Xinjiang), and many besides. The
list of capital offence grows and changes unpredictably,
depending in the current mood of the Party leadership
and how it wishes to nudge economic activity.
For example, the Party tolerated smuggling as
a way of undercutting import costs and getting
technology from abroad which it could illegally
copy (China's People's Liberation Army was itself
a major smuggling organisation until recently).
But when it wished to increase excise revenue,
it started shooting smugglers instead of encouraging
them.
Trials are a mockery, with
no proper defence; often they last just a few
minutes, with condemned prisoners being taken
out and shot in the head in public directly afterwards.
In many cases corneas are removed from prisoners'
eyes before execution, and kidneys and other organs
afterwards, for use in transplant surgery. Such
organs are not infrequently sold for use abroad.
As Amnesty International's
just-published report reveals, China's own official
figures show that it executes more people every
year than the whole of the rest of the world put
together. But these official figures represent
only the tip of the iceberg.
China's government orders
periodic "Strike Hard" campaigns, arresting
thousands in police sweeps, and holding mass public
executions to intimidate the populace. The choice
of misdemeanours targeted in such campaigns is
unpredictable; a certain practice (as with smuggling)
is long winked at, then suddenly and savagely
punished. The effect is an arbitrary reign of
terror consciously used as an instrument of political
control.
Some members of the IoC
say that they are irritated by the pressure put
on them by human rights lobbies, which makes them
more inclined to favour China's bid. If they choose
Beijing the IoC will provide an even better chance
for the international community to express its
condemnation of the Chinese government's human
rights record, by the simple but powerful expedient
of boycotting the Games. This indeed might be
a more forceful way of bring about the South Africa
Effect, for it will persuade the Chinese government
that until it observes civilised norms of acceptable
behaviour on the human rights front – which
means observing the United Nations Covenants to
which it is a signatory, though a persistently
and severely in-breach one – it deserves
to remain an outcast among nations.
China and the IoC can be
sure that if Beijing is chosen, it will mark the
beginning of a massive boycott campaign by human
rights organisations, which will make a shambles
of the Games and prove a bigger embarrassment
for China than if it had lost the bid outright.
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