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Running sore for dim totalitarian bullies
Article from: Herald Sun
Andrew Bolt
April 11, 2008 12:00am
WHAT great news that this catastrophic Olympic torch relay won't be called off by the International Olympic Committee - yet.
After all, see what tremendous good it's done already, sending a message to the dangerously deaf.
When the Beijing Games organisers first decided to run this torch through 19 countries over 130 days, there was one important fact they clearly were too arrogant or stupid to realise.
China is not a democracy, and there are still plenty of people in the declining West who see this as not just offensive but a threat.
We are still largely people who think it's not nice that China has overrun Tibet, shot monks, jailed democrats, silenced rights activists, persecuted Christians, terrorised the Falun Gong, suppressed free speech, threatened Taiwan, banned free elections, sponsored Sudan's genocidal regime and propped up crude dictators such as Zimbabwe's mad Mugabe.
And what the Chinese autocrats also didn't figure - although some of us predicted this - was that such people might use the torch relay through their cities to register their protest.
And here's a further thing the Chinese autocrats were too arrogant or stupid to realise. Given all the above, it would be especially stupid for an autocracy to advertise its nature by sending out the torch with a cocoon of 15 aggressive guards recruited from its armed police and decked in blue and white tracksuits, brighter than the people who ordered them.
But China has sure got the message today that it's public image is in bad shape and getting worse as its power grows. Protests - some unfortunately violent - have dogged almost every step of the torch relay through Greece, Istanbul, London, Paris and now San Francisco, where, comically, the torch even had to be run into a warehouse to hide it from the mob.
So strong have been these protests, mostly by the free-Tibet crowd, that even Western politicians more used to kow-towing to China for contracts have been forced instead to read it nervous little lectures on human rights.
France's President says he's thinking of boycotting the Games opening ceremony (but promising nothing). Britain's Prime Minister is urging "restraint" in Tibet (although not in the rest of China). Our own Prime Minister felt forced to tell students at Beijing University that "recent problems" in Tibet showed there were "human rights problems" there, (although he failed to mention similar ones in all other provinces).
Whether all this will do much - or any - good is still unknown. The only sign of internal reaction I've noticed from here is that Chinese state television, which first refused to show any of the torch protests, did belatedly air a grab of the ruckus in London.
Rudd's reproof on Tibet, however, was ignored by all the main Chinese newspapers which covered his speech, while a couple of party heavies rebuked him at a press conference for the foreign media.
Mind you, even if the Chinese public did learn of these recent protests, most would no doubt just take offence and wave the nationalist flag. After all, their leaders are no Nazis, and life for them has improved enormously.
Yet these protests will dismay the Chinese regime, because they'll focus opposition to its role in the world and rally opposition to some of it.
How can China keep winning friends and influence in the United Nations, for instance, if other leaders get the message from their voters that democratic values must be defended?
How can it keep threatening a Chinese democracy such as Taiwan with war, knowing that plenty of people in the West are suddenly sensitive to signs of Chinese bullying?
How can it keep swapping arms for oil with regimes such as Sudan's, when it must win the backing of Western politicians for deals for our resources?
China will realise its public image needs work if it wants to get its way.
It might realise, too, it must ignore flatterers such as the International Olympic Committee's Kevan Gosper, who attacked the Tibetan and pro-democracy protesters on the torch relay as "professional spoilers . . . filled with resentment and hate".
It might figure it got the rest of us in the West wrong. We do still stand for some things, not least of them freedom. And in fixing that fundamental flaw in their knowledge, the torch relay was worth every step.
By the time it reaches Beijing, who knows what else it will teach? Let this one run and run. |
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宝宝学说话记 (2007-6-29) 水晶靴 
发表于 2008-4-11 16:01
