China is chasing the wrong kind of dream
I'm not a great fan of the Olympics generally (I wish they weren't coming to London, and can't understand why anyone wants them), and of the Beijing Olympics I am very much an unfan. What's there to like? The people of China may be enthusiastic about the games, but the truth is, we can't really know what they think. I sat next to a Chinese student in Cambridge at a dinner last year - she was young, about 25 I think, and studying business with the aim of working in the City of London. She was pleasant and talkative, but everything she said might have been scripted in Beijing. Unflagging on the excitement of the Olympics (and this was last year, remember) and on the Chinese economic miracle, her good English suddenly became useless - she in fact became silent - if I mentioned anything about democracy in China, or even the situation in Hong Kong. On subjects like that she really did say absolutely nothing.
That doesn't of course tell you all you need to know about a vast and varied country like China. But it does tell you the most important thing, the most salient fact from which so much else flows. China ain't a free country. Yes, the opening ceremony of these games was magnifique in its bizarreness, impressive like those interminable military parades in Red Square used to be, but I found its aggressive coordination of collective effort both ominous and oppressive. Only a dictatorship can achieve something like this, I thought. And of course it turned out to be fake, the pretty little girl not only having mimed, but having mimed to another girl's singing. Why wasn't the world shown the girl who really could sing? The fireworks, too, were faked. It's not true that all the tickets have been sold, either. That lie has been exposed because it's obvious the organisers have bussed people in to support the games. And they're not the only achievements the Chinese regime is going to fake. The other night there was an excellent programme on BBC Radio 4 explaining how new versions (made among other places in China, as it happens) of the popular performance-enhancing drug EPO, which is especially helpful to endurance athletes, is nearly impossible to detect and probably won't be detected given the pathetically lax standards applied by the International Olympic Committee. That's not China's fault, but you have to be naive in the extreme to think that the Chinese athletic system will not do everything it can to top the medal table at these games. The Chinese political system is not unlike that of Russia and East Germany in the 1970s. Remember how those countries wowed us with their athletic achievements? I certainly remember Marita Koch, Marlies Göhr, Bärbel Wöchel and those others who blew the Americans away, as well as Donna Hartley and Verona Elder, sadly. I expect to see many a smiling Chinese gold medallist at these games, and I wonder whether we'll ever know the truth about the Chinese training systems, as we now know what happened in the old Soviet bloc. Have we learned nothing? I've learned enough to say that Tirumesh Dibaba is the fastest woman ever over 10,000 metres, having broken Paula Radcliffe's world record in winning the gold today. I doubt you'll hear that on the BBC, although I suspect people like Brendan Foster agree with me and Wikipedia rather than the version put out by the BBC's website.
Incidentally, I think our media is being craven about the clear abuses by the Chinese regime right now. Only a few days a former American athlete was refused a visa because of his views about Tibet. Why is this scandal not the story of the games? Since then, an ITN journalist was arrested simply for reporting a protest. Again, why isn't that a big story? It should be.
One more thing. Everyone says and thinks just now that China is the coming world superpower, economically at least, if not politically too. It's undeniable China is becoming richer and more integrated into the world economy. But I'm not convinced about the great Chinese future. For one thing, I don't think statistics coming out of China are likely to be reliable, any more than Olympic ticket sales figures were honest. More fundamentally, though, if you wanted to dominate the world economically, you wouldn't start by having a one-party state. China's progress is bound to be limited, its opening painfully slow and excessively cautious , its treatment of workers and innovators high-handed and counterproductive, as long as it is run by the Chinese Communist Party. One day the Chinese people will say goodbye to the CCP - and then we'll all really be able to celebrate one dream for the world.
Have your say - join the discussion