China’s rulers might wonder whether their decision to host the 2008 Olympic Games was such a good idea. While it has demonstrated China’s capacity to put on a dazzling show, it has also highlighted its ugly side.
Deploying 110,000 army and police personnel and 1 million civilian “volunteers” to stage the Games speaks for itself. On top of that, tanks and missiles ring the city, as if Beijing were expecting an invading army disguised as athletes.
Elsewhere in the country, particularly in Tibet and Xinjiang, non-Han inhabitants have become suspects and potential “terrorists.”
Whether or not China’s rulers are having some doubts about the wisdom of hosting the Olympics is now beside the point.
Things haven’t gone too well, ever since the pesky Tibetans created human rights bravura in March over their continued repression and cultural genocide.
Human rights advocates took up their cause as the Olympic torch passed through London, Paris, the US and Australia.
Some of them even managed to breach the security cordon in Beijing to publicize the Tibetan cause by hanging a banner from a light pole.
To make things worse, an Uighur group claimed responsibility for a string of attacks, including in Kashgar, where they reportedly killed 16 policemen.
The Olympics seem to have become a magnet for people who might not otherwise get due international attention to highlight their plight.
Even more disturbing for the ruling party was the image of a diverse group of Han Chinese displaying placards highlighting their grievances.
They cursed the regime for widespread corruption and misgovernment, and for evicting them from their homes to make way for new, modern buildings.
These are marginalized Han Chinese, part of the huge majority, being swept away by a tidal wave of economic greed that has been pioneered by the communist party and its business cohorts.
The rural areas are paying the highest price for China’s rapid industrialization in the form of land seizures, arbitrary local taxes and depressed economic conditions that subsidize the urban economy. The rural population does show its rage by staging protests. Recent official figures indicate there were as many as 87,000 incidents of unrest in just one year.
Because of the depressed conditions in these areas, large numbers of young people are heading to the cities in search of employment. There is an estimated floating population of about 150 million people in the cities. Their cheap labor — with few or no social benefits — is another form of rural subsidy supporting the urban industrial complex.
The razzmatazz of the Olympics sought to unite the country in a wave of national pride, which has succeeded to a degree among China’s middle classes. But for the mass of people in the countryside, it would be an irrelevant exercise of political theater.
The upsurge of national pride among the well-connected urban youth tends to border on jingoism. This was seen in Chinese counter-protests over the issue of Tibet, with the West being accused of seeking to derail or disrupt China’s glorious Olympics. For China’s ruling class, the Beijing Olympics looked like an all-important exercise in legitimacy.
And there is logic behind this. In the absence of an over-arching ideological and idealistic vision for the country, China’s rulers have the difficult task of creating an illusion of legitimacy. Deng Xiaoping’s (鄧小平) slogan that to be rich is glorious is hardly an enduring basis for building a nation.
It is amazing how a well-orchestrated extravaganza like the Olympic Games, pandering to the nationalism of China’s well-connected middle class, can create the illusion of overall legitimacy for the regime. In this clever exercise, the communist party and the nation have become indivisible. One reflects the other. Anyone who criticizes the regime’s human rights or political record ends up being branded a traitor or a terrorist.
Indeed these critics are more often than not closer to the truth, even though it is not the fashionable thing to say.
Nobody is denying that China has made rapid industrial growth that has expanded its urban middle class. But even in the urban industrial landscape, something terrible is happening. People are losing touch with reality, and traditions are disappearing and being replaced by something lacking deep roots.
As China becomes a vast construction site, with old neighborhoods of traditional hutong houses disappearing, it is like having a memory and watching it gradually disappear, as the celebrated Chinese painter Zhang Xiaogang (張曉剛) has put it.
Zhang was cited in an essay in the Sydney Morning Herald’s weekend magazine as saying that “many Chinese feel safer living in a gap between the present and past, in a virtual-reality world symbolized by the internet and video games.”
The trouble is that even the Internet is sanitized by China’s thought police to make sure its citizens do not stray from what the regime wants them to see and think.
But despite seemingly foolproof security at the Olympics, some Chinese citizens felt bold enough to make their problems and grievances known to the foreign media. And these are serious problems.
It should offend any person’s sensibility that, while its own people suffer in such abysmally poor conditions, China has seen fit to spend billions on preparing Beijing as an Olympic city for an extravaganza meant to prop up its rulers’ national and international image.
Judging by all the excitement, it would seem the entire Chinese population supports the communist party’s efforts to make China a great power and wash away its “century of humiliation” by Western powers and Japan. In other words, it may seem that the communist party and the nation are now indivisible.
But the reality, as reflected in the situation on the ground in vast areas of China and particularly in the countryside, is quite the opposite. Struggling against all odds to make a living, these people have no time for glossy images doled out by the government for the upper and middle classes, consisting of party hacks, their relatives and those co-opted in this robber-baron economy.
It would seem that China’s rulers are starting to believe their own myth-making. And that is when the danger starts.
Sushil Seth is a writer based in Australia.
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