The flame of nationalism

The George Orwell quote is quite apt, since the modern Olympic torch relay was revived for the 1936 Olympics. With that type of beginning, maybe this would be a good year to end it. Just fly the thing from Greece if they must have it.

I do wonder what kind of ivory-tower thinking led the IOC to award China the Olympics in the first place. I know they did it quite a few years ago,but how could they not have seen this coming?

I do see the protests as an opportunity for a western leader with the guts to use it; to inform the Chinese that,unlike them, you are accountable to your citizens for your actions. Unlike them, you must not only tolerate but seriously consider what is being said by those citizens, which is that the Chinese government is a barbaric totalitarian state. That if they can offer any rebuttal beyond “No we’re not, and it’s none of your business. How dare you!” you would be happy to hear it. But I don’t see it happening. The Chinese have money,and it’s money that matters.

You seem to be blaming those who are protesting real human rights violations by China in Tibet of being an impediment to the rise of a splendid democratic China.

I did not find evidence for that anywhere in the post. I did find evidence, in the sixth paragraph, that one of John’s concerns is the experience of the Tibetan people. By my reading, John sees that the protests have triggered a knee-jerk reaction from the Chinese government rather than winning concessions from them.

Cf: The result, almost certainly, is that the position of supporters of democracy will be worse than ever, with any criticism of the Chinese authorities being viewed as support for external attacks on China’s territorial integrity.

I do wonder what kind of ivory-tower thinking led the IOC to award China the Olympics in the first place. … The Chinese have money, and it’s money that matters.”

Whatever answer exists to your own wondering can probably be found by delving into that “it’s money that matters” concept. The explosively burgeoning Chinese economy had to have been a major factor.

I very much doubt that a democratic China would ever let go of Tibet, given the degree to which such a hypothetical state would no doubt be driven by popular nationalism. Not to mention that Han Chinese are now a slight majority, and likely to become a distinct majority in the future. Working for Tibetan autonomy and a lessening of Han racism within the context of a wider China human rights policy seems to be the sensible thing.

Huh, you’re right – and right, I think, on the urban illusion, since Lhasa is *very* Chinese. I’m surprised how small the Han population in Tibet is, actually, looking at the statistics. I’m pretty certain the official figures leave migrant workers out, though, since they usually do – there were a lot of Sichuanese in Lhasa last time I was there.

The penultimate paragraph looks a little naive. Territorial claims seem to matter very deeply to governments, and to ramify into institutions, political culture, settlers etc. I’m trying to think of other examples where a government has “come around to the viewpoint that territorial control over _____ is an expensive indulgence” and just let it go.

Of course from a certain distance, (though I will piss off Joseph D now) the torch relay theater works for everyone. Activists in cities the world over get the chance to protest, because the torch conveniently visits them! China’s government gets the chance to conflate nationalism with the wholesome associations of sport and brotherhood and fair play.

I once protested the apartheid-loving Governor of New Hampshire Meldrim Thomson during his attendance at a Shriners’ football game (which was raising money for the care of burned children) so I’m aware of the semiotic hazards of this kind of thing. But I’m glad I didn’t listen to the fogies who lectured me about being counterproductive.

The dissolution of the USSR made it very difficult for a successor state like Russia to exert a claim over a place like Latvia.

And the Brit empire never laid _territorial_ claim to India. The French empire is a more appropriate example.

I thought about East Timor too but it’s not a particularly happy or non-violent example. And we could run through examples of democracies hanging on to places like Kashmir, Catalonia, Gibraltar etc. A territorial claim can surely get insinuated into electoral politics is such a way that a democratic state might be *less* willing to let a territory go than an authoritarian one.

I don’t want to push the claim too far — your “expensive indulgence” outcome is certainly possible. But far from automatic, no?

Tibet controls the water sources of China’s biggest rivers, does it not? How likely is giving up control of that?

John wrote:

In fact, however, the protests have focused entirely on the national claims of Tibet…

Frankly, this isn’t true. Press coverage of the events certainly made “Free Tibet” protesters the center of the storm, likewise the Chinese media have spun the story into only “splittists” protesting the torch, but a wide variety of groups — RSF, environmental NGOs, Darfur activists, and others — brought criticism to bear on China in Paris, London, and elsewhere, but they’ve all but disappeared because the media narratives on both sides have no time for them.

Adam Kotsko’s Weblog links to this. Scroll down to No Shangri-La by Slavoj Žižek (who else?).

@15: “So crowning Victoria Empress of India was just kidding?”

That was something Disraeli divised to flatter Queen Victoria – as he reportedly said to Matthew Arnold: “Everyone likes flattery; and when you come to Royalty, you should lay it on with a trowel.”

Only some, like Winston Churchill, took the notion of the Emperor of India seriously, hence his persistent opposition to Baldwin’s India Act of 1935, which provided for limited internal self-government in India although Churchill opposed even that. It was his maverick behaviour as a Conservative MP which kept him out of Conservative governments through the 1930s rather than his repeated warnings after 1933 about the looming threat of the Nazis. Many also blamed him, as Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1925, for the downstream consequences of returning the Pound to the Gold Standard.

Btw Disraeli’s perceptive private view of Empire, expressed in a letter to Lord Malmesbury in 1852: “Those wretched colonies will all be independent too, in a few years, and are a millstone round our neck.”

@10: . . . though I will piss off Joseph D now.

Not really, Colin. I’ve been hanging around the internets long enough that I rarely get pissed off about anything in on-line discussions. I was really just trying to make a point — perhaps not very well — of my skepticism about: A) the effect of the recent protests, which I think will be minimal, and B) the evolution of China toward democracy, which I think will be never, or pretty close to never.

But I’m glad I didn’t listen to the fogies who lectured me about [protests] being counterproductive.

Exactly.

Erm, guys, it took a hundred years of protests and whatnot to convince the Brits that India is an “expensive indulgence” – so I’m not sure why this has been brought up as an example designed to bolster John’s point.

George Orwell observed over 60 years ago that

Even if one didn’t know from concrete examples (the 1936 Olympic Games, for instance) that international sporting contests lead to orgies of hatred, one could deduce it from general principles.

and history since then has given plenty of examples. It looks as if the 2008 Olympics will join them.

Actually, given the huge number of international sporting contests that are held every year, in every conceivable sport, it appears to me that there are precious few examples of the “orgy of hatred” phenomenon. And sporting contests are just one of many kinds of human activity that are the media of international cultural exchanges. Most of these exchanges and spectacles go off without incident.

Excuse me for not being with the program, but I am one westerner who is far more impressed with what the Chinese have been doing right for the past few decades than what they have been doing wrong, and I am very pleased that they are being given the opportunity to host the world at a major international event, and further open themselves and integrate themselves into the broader world community. Millions of Chinese people have been working extremely hard and energetically for a few decades now to build their economies, raise their standards of living, and improve the prospects for future generations of Chinese. They deserve this opportunity to show off what they have done.

China has a long way to go, as many of us do. But the Chinese are substantially more free now, socially and economically, than they were under the psychotically sick and impoverished Maoist insane asylum state of the 60’s. This is amazing progress, and merits recognition. Most of the improvement has little to do with western protests of any kind, but rather to disciplined diplomacy and the patient integration of the Chinese economy into the broader world.

I would love to see China continue to evolve more humane and tolerant social institutions, and more integrity in their rule of law. And I expect that the growing complexity of the Chinese society and economy will lead to a certain amount of decentralization and more local control, simply as a practical matter. But Chinese civilization has been around for more than 3000 years, and China has never been a democracy. Personally I don’t much care if it ever becomes a democracy.

[Meanwhile, how exactly do you resolve the ‘I would love’ and the ‘don’t much care’ in that last para? Either it matters or it doesn’t.]

Because I distinguished between liberalization and democracy. Highly centralized and bureaucratic governments are not all the same. Single party governments are not all the same. Some rule with a lighter hand, and some with a heavier hand. China has liberalized significantly since life under Mao, and I hope for the sake of the Chinese people it liberalizes more. But I don’t think it makes sense to regard it as some sort of godawful tragedy or crisis if a country that has never had elections in 3000 years, and yet has managed to enjoy a rather high level of civilization for much of that period, continues not to have elections.

I live in a country that has been around for a much shorter time, and has more than 1% of its adult population in jail. We are having an election right now where the debate is consumed by tabloid inanities about the candidates’ personal lives, and most often resembles a particularly idiotic sort of beauty contest. So I don’t think we have achieved enlightenment about universal values or have mastered the arts of sound government.

Re #26:

I agree the Orwell quote is a huge over-generalization. The Winter Olympics, as just one example? The only orgies of hatred there have been between individual American women figure skaters.

@29: you’re having your cake and eating it: how can country X ‘not be a democracy’ and have ‘much better developed democratic institutions on the local and workplace levels’? Institutions that let people vent [within, doubtless, carefully-defined limits] without actually giving them the chance to change the system aren’t ‘democratic’. And in not being democratic, they will, in the end, be repressive, because they will not acknowledge that the people have the right to change the government – so, when conflict arises, as it will, repression will ensue.

I’m NOT, repeat NOT advocating a one-size-fits-all westernised globalisation, I’m saying that, as a matter of fact, a country that isn’t a democracy isn’t a democracy, and the fewer democracies there are in the world, the less freedom there will be. You may be all happy-clappy multiculturally OK with ‘other’ people not having democratic rights, but I will continue to think that that’s a bunch of… well, fill in your own blank.

how can country X ‘not be a democracy’ and have ‘much better developed democratic institutions on the local and workplace levels’?

Why not? In the Soviet Union Aeroflot’s passengers used to take a vote to decide if the pilot should risk it to fly in a bad weather. Now, that’s democracy, baby!

the Orwell quote is a huge over-generalization. The Winter Olympics, as just one example

What if the generalisation were restricted to ‘sporting events which anybody other than Canadians and a small handful of others could actually give a rat’s arse about’?

http://www.mellenpress.com/mellenpress.cfm?bookid=6904&pc=9

This study considers the institutional evolution and progress of village elections in China. China’s dramatic economic growth in less than 30 years is the result of economic reforms initiated by Deng Xiaoping in the late 1970s, and thus has lifted more than 200 million people out of poverty. This change began with the “household responsibility system” permitting peasants to farm their own land, which eventually led to the abolishment of the commune system. In an effort to establish viable rural governance after de-communization, villagers took the initiative in establishing village self-government and electing their own leaders to manage village affairs. This book studies the creation and evolution of democratic institution of village election. […] It argues for the institutional buildup of democratic infrastructures to ensure what could eventually be the beginning of a more extensive move towards democracy.

“China is not Zimbabwe.”

Quite so. China has a thriving economy and inflation is under control.

No one has remarked on the enthusiasm of putative totalitarian regimes for staging the Olympic Games – remember Berlin, the venue for the Olympics in 1936?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vwO30VlJscY

Who will substitute for Leni Riefenstahl?

@38: “…It argues for the institutional buildup of democratic infrastructures to ensure what could eventually be the beginning of a more extensive move towards democracy….”

Or, in other words, some book says that what the CCP allows peasants to do [which is, from that brief summary, no more than, say, the absolute monarchs of C18 France ‘allowed’ their peasants to do, self-organise to meet immediate material needs and the external demands of the state] might, in the future, potentially, become a way of letting those same peasants have real power [which would, therefore, negate the current real power of the CCP]. The end point sounds fine, but I think the road-map for getting there is a tad optimistic. Local autogestion is meaningless in political terms if it continues to operate sous tutelle of a one-party state.

I disagree with this, “In fact, however, the protests have focused* entirely on the national claims of Tibet (as represented by the government in exile of the Dalai Lama) and have produced an unsurprising nationalist reaction in China (effectively in support of the existing government).”

Many commentators have talked about the general detestable character of the Chinese Regime, like Cafferty who is amply criticized on youtube by Chinese goons and thugs working for the Party.

Why, it’s democratic within the accepted boundaries, like any political party. One can’t advocate higher degree of income redistribution while being a US Republican party functionnaire. You have a volunteer grassroots-organization of 73 million people, leaders are elected. Of course it has a platform you have to adhere to, that’s normal. The issue is not the party itself, it’s the fact that there is no real opposition party, even though the PRC, in fact, is a multi-party state.

So is true that ‘China is a “barbaric” totalitarian state which must never be mentioned without unqualified condemnation’ or that ‘China is kewl and who needs outdated imperialist dogmas like “democracy” anyway?’. I await the verdict of the people of the Internet with interest…

#26″
But Chinese civilization has been around for more than 3000 years…
In that 5000 years is more than 3000 years, that’s a true thing. Just seriously inexact.

I just came back from dinner with 2 Japanese people who told me that, until the 2000 Sydney Olympics, they had no idea about Australian Aboriginal history. To them Australia had always just been a cheerful, welcoming place with an image of openness and gentleness. But with the various discussions about rights surrounding the olympics, they came to learn (mainly through Cathy Freeman’s story) about Indigenous history. It changed their view of Australia.

I had never really believed that activism around the olympics could make a difference. I don’t know how much difference educating 2 ordinary Japanese people about Indigenous history is, but it seems like something. So maybe these protests do have some benefit (though in this case I’m not sure that the protests are actually giving a truthful message – but that is a different issue).

Hey, ‘quaint’ is correct, I agree.

Obviously I am not advocating ‘democratic centralism’, a concept that is, in fact, remarkably similar to the controversial ‘unitary executive’ doctrine: you are given a chance to elect your leader, but once it’s done – shut up and follow. So it’s not really that different from the modern political thought in the western liberal democracies. Or some of them, at least.

That’s Sir Elton John to you.