China, gradually emerging as a superpower, was in a braggadocio mood when it successfully sought to host the Olympics this August. It was a way of saying, “Come experience us, admire us, give us a standing ovation.”
The world has already been looking, China, and it has been shrinking in horror — not applauding, but voicing its disgust. The world has been saying that you stink, China.
It has been saying you stink not because of your billion-plus people or your extraordinary history or the cultural wonders your land has produced, nor because of your discovery of how free market principles can wage war against the ravages of poverty better than socialist utopianism any day of the week.
No, it has been saying you stink because of a nationalist, totalitarian, oppressive, dishonest, vile government that is far from donning the mantle of a civilized nation ready to participate responsibly in the world as your changing status demands.
It says you stink — to bring the focus to a specific issue lately in the news — because of your grotesque mistreatment of Tibetans, and your bloody determination to brook no protest.
We know the story. We know how the genocidal, Hitlerian Mao Tse-tung invaded this independent Himalayan country, subjected it to Chinese rule by 1951 and forced the Dalai Lama into exile eight years later while crushing an uprising.
We know how you have shipped Chinese into the Tibetan capital of Lhasa in an effort to make the natives a minority there, how you have annihilated centuries-old buildings to build cheap bars and arcadesand how you have equally been annihilating a way of life by keeping peaceful Buddhist Tibetans in fear of your malevolence.
In recent weeks, though, Buddhist monks and others have stood up angrily in response to a great, grand publicity plan of yours. Runners were eventually to carry the Olympic torch through Tibet and everyone would see what a melodious marvel Chinese governance was, except that what everyone has been seeing instead are pleas for religious liberty and some degree of self-determination and your retaliation. And what everyone has been hearing about are dead bodies, at least 130 of them, perhaps far more.
You have spluttered that the violence is the Dalai Lama’s doing, but what everyone gets is that it is your doing. The U.S. speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, met with the Dalai Lama in India as a way of underlining your lie, and the president of the European Parliament suggested that members of the European Union should consider a boycott of the Summer Olympics in Beijing if you don’t quell your viciousness.
A group of dissenting intellectuals in your own land has said you should drop the propaganda and negotiate with the Dalai Lama, aiming to arrive at a compromise.
Various commentators have suggested what that compromise might be. You can keep Tibet as part of China, while simultaneously granting it extensive leeway in managing its own internal affairs, much as you have done in Hong Kong.
In Hong Kong, your motive for granting a high degree of autonomy was making money. In Tibet, the motive would be decency, a respect for the rights of other people, but in making the move, you would begin to win respect yourself.
You would find people congratulating you not just for your material advances, but for your progress in humane conduct, the evidence of a growing enlightenment.
Do this, and then, when August and the athletes and all the reporters and TV cameras arrive in Beijing, the world can say with much less hesitation than now, “Let the games begin.”
Examiner Columnist Jay Ambrose is a former Washington opinion writer and editor of two dailies. He may be reached at [email protected]
