The two faces of China

Over the past fortnight, China has given the world much cause for wonderment in the way it has organised the Beijing Olympics and the manner in which it has demonstrated its ascent as a sporting superpower. The world, in turn, has been sufficiently impressed with, and even rapturous about, what it's seen of Chinese prowess, both at the spectacular opening ceremony and subsequent sporting action.

The story of how China's state-sponsored institutions have marshalled an army of gold medal-winning sportspersons to rise to the top of the medals ranking is truly inspirational, particularly when seen from a country of about the same population that has huffed and puffed its way to a solitary gold medal.

Away from the sporting arenas, however, several other aspects of the Olympics atmospherics, and Chinese authorities' knee-jerk responses to them, have shown up a side of China that hasn't exactly burnished its international image. In fact, they have served to reinforce and validate some of the worst stereotypical impressions and images of China in the minds of foreign audiences. These are of a paranoid, authoritarian regime that lies and envelopes itself in secrecy.

When China bid for and won the Olympics in 2001, and later when it sealed the deal with the International Olympic Committee, it made a clutch of promises as a concession to the libertarian spirit and "universal values" associated with the Olympic movement.
These related, in the main, to opening up, even if only a crack and solely for the duration of the Games, China's closed society, which is characterised by strict censorship of the media and a pathological intolerance of dissent. Accordingly, the world's media was promised unfettered freedom to report on China during the Olympics, and so-called "protest areas" were to be set up in Beijing, where demonstrations were to be permitted, subject to approval by public security officials.

Within the first week of the Games, China  trampled on these promises with heavy jackboots, inviting criticism that its officials had "lied through their teeth". Foreign media reporting on random Free Tibet protests have been physically restrained, and have otherwise had their work interfered with. In one case, a British TV journalist was detained after  his hands were stomped upon by policemen.

More perversely, Chinese authorities have used the establishment of the "protest zones" as a honeypot to entrap and arrest disenchanted Chinese who, acting in good faith, applied for permission to stage protests. It was a chilling throwback to Chairman Mao Zedong's 'Hundred Flowers Campaign' in the 1950s, when non-communists were first encouraged to speak out, and when they did, were persecuted as counter-revolutionaries.

In other areas, and even on the playing field, suspicions of Chinese foul play have been compounded by the authorities' inept handling of controversies. Doubts that a gold medal-winning Chinese woman gymnast was underaged were reinforced by archived online articles in official Chinese media, which showed her up to be less than the required 16 years. But rather than addressing the criticism,  authorities clumsily covered their tracks by first deleting the giveaway articles and then reposting them with post-facto revisions of her age.

Chinese social relations are characterised by the concept of 'face', which is an important marker of social standing. China has certainly 'gained face' with its  Olympics organisational capabilities and its sporting excellence: the spectacular  venues that showcase the country's rise as an emerging economic superpower.

But the Olympics have also shown up the other, far less attractive face of China, where a paranoid, insecure regime hides its authoritarian streak beneath a mask of mass-manufactured goodwill. On those counts, sadly, China has seriously 'lost face' at these Olympics.
—venky@dnaindia.net