Thread: Olympic flames, then and now

Olympic flames, then and now

By Serge Schmemann

Published: April 27, 2008

PARIS:

I was in Red Square one day during the 1980 Olympic Games in Moscow when some poor protester apparently tried to set himself on fire. We never learned who he was or what really happened because of the amazing reaction of the authorities, which was caught on film by a tourist.

The first frame shows a tall flame and shocked tourists. In the next, a Volga sedan wheels into the square, then a middle-aged man is stuffed into the trunk. But in this and subsequent frames, the attention of the crowd is elsewhere - every fourth man in the area is grabbing a camera, opening it and exposing the film.

The tourist whose film I saw had been behind a tree away from the action. I suspect his was the only record of what happened. Most witnesses recalled only the fire and the goons grabbing their cameras.

It was an amazing display of the determination of Soviet authorities to allow nothing that would mar their grand show.

"O Sport, You Are Peace," was the ubiquitous slogan on posters, souvenirs and T-shirts, but the Games had already opened under an American-led boycott over the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. That seemed only to redouble the Kremlin's efforts to crush the tiniest hint of discord or dissent.

In the end, the 1980 Games revealed a lot more about the paranoia and ruthlessness of an authoritarian state than about its skill at organizing sports competition - at least to the West.

Now, in the same way, we're learning a lot about China. And just as a lot of Russians then couldn't see a connection between their state's policies and the Games, so many Chinese today seem genuinely angry and convinced that "foreign enemies" are deliberately trying to ruin their coming-out party.

I suspect the International Olympic Committee also has not quite understood that a connection might be made between a country's human-rights record and hosting the Games.

There are limits, of course, to the parallels between the sealed military camp that was the Soviet Union 28 years ago and the wealthy, exploding China of today. But that only makes the similarities in the reactions of the two Communist parties all the more striking.

The West may see China as the economic and military powerhouse of the 21st century, where presidents and magnates seek to find a piece of the action. Yet the ruling party has remained remarkably ignorant of the rules of the open societies with which they deal, and remarkably insecure before every Tibetan or Uighur dissident, every human-rights activist and every Western critic.

A state that sentences a dissident like Hu Jia to prison for "inciting subversion of state power" by linking the Games with human rights is not a self-confident one.

Reared in a secretive, suspicious, paternalistic and highly bureaucratized culture, the Chinese Communist elite can only presume that Western elites are like them, that protests over Darfur, Tibet or the persecution of dissidents are all cynical political maneuvers.

The attacks on the torch, thus, can only be the work of "enemies." And these are everywhere.

On April 17, the Xinhua agency carried a report about a German group's call for protests over Tibet. This, it said, "reinforced an impression about a puppet show going on along with the Olympic torch relay, with the Dalai Lama and his supporters on the stage and anti-China forces behind the curtain. These are the same tricks as some anti-China forces have been playing against a fast-growing China."

Statements like that feed a common notion in the West that protests and boycotts only harden China's views and rally its people around the Party. "Quiet diplomacy," in this school of thought, is the more useful approach. Certainly it is more useful for governments and businesses seeking contracts in China. But is it effective?

A Western diplomat hinting quietly that releasing a dissident would be good for China's image might only feed the sense that human rights are about public relations.

In the end, debating whether mass protests or quiet diplomacy is more effective misses the point. The protests along the torch's route were not concocted by German think tanks, but were mostly an expression of genuine anger by people in free societies. That may not persuade the Chinese of the value of human rights, but they may learn that the cost of cynicism can be high.

Olympic flames, then and now - International Herald Tribune

Food for thought for the Mainland Red Chinese posters.