Will Beijing Bid Change World?

For Beijing, the leading candidate to land the 2008 Summer Games, Friday’s vote by the International Olympic Committee could prove to be a defining moment in 21st century China, longtime observers of China and the Olympics say.

A vote for Beijing--over Paris and Toronto--would validate for the Chinese their perception of China’s place in the world and, perhaps most important, accelerate an opening up of China, inside and out, according to experts in Chinese politics, history and culture.

Several said the seven-year run-up to the Olympics and the 17 days of the Games could prove to be transformative events for China, shaping its direction for years to come--as important as China’s entry into the World Trade Organization, essentially all but approved only last week.

“The Olympics coming to China will further open up China’s political system and I think further expose Chinese culture to the world. And I think that’s a very healthy development,” said former U.S. Sen. James R. Sasser (D-Tenn.), who served as ambassador to China from 1996-99.

Peter Ueberroth, who led the successful 1984 Los Angeles Olympics--the Games that served to welcome the world’s most populous nation back into the Olympic movement--also cited an opening-up factor.

“The best part about the Olympic Games is the fact that they open the communication doors in a country so wide that they never can close, and that’s the best thing for the Chinese people and for long-term world peace,” Ueberroth said.

Robert Ross, a Boston College political science professor and China expert now working at Harvard’s Fairbanks Center, was among several scholars who said the Games would boost the Chinese view of China’s station in the world--perhaps to good effect elsewhere.

“There is this Chinese will to be part of international society,” Ross said. “Go figure. Why do they care?”

He answered the rhetorical question: “There are things they just want to do right, up to global standards,” adding, “The Olympics are sort of a way to do it right, to say, ‘This is one more thing by which we’ve taken our seat the way great powers do.’ ”

Heading into Friday’s vote, Beijing is widely believed to be the favorite for 2008, ahead of Paris and Toronto. Osaka, Japan, and Istanbul, Turkey, are also in the race but were essentially doomed by negative assessments in an IOC evaluation report issued in May.

Beijing tried for the Summer Olympics once before, waging a 1993 bid for the 2000 Games. Those Olympics were awarded to Sydney, Australia.

Later, it was learned that the night before the vote the president of the Australian Olympic Committee offered $35,000 in aid to Olympic committees in Kenya and Uganda, contingent on a Sydney victory. Sydney won the vote over Beijing, 45-43.

Many IOC members believe that the IOC not only owes China because of the 1993 decision but because China is home to one-fifth of the world’s people and the Olympic movement aims to be “universal.”

The Olympics have never been staged in China. The Summer Games, the IOC’s showcase, have been held in Asia only twice, in Seoul in 1988 and Tokyo in 1964.

The Chinese anticipate the spending of $14.3 billion in Games-related capital improvements between now and 2008. Much of the money would go toward subway and highway improvements. The Chinese also pledge environmental improvement--the smog in Beijing blots out the sun for days on end--and the construction of a range of sports facilities and housing.

The bid raises a host of complex questions. Professors of Chinese history and politics, as well as Olympics scholars, detail a full list:

If China wins, it is good for the athletes of the world? The Olympic movement? The ruling authoritarian government in Beijing?

On an international level, would staging the Games in Beijing mean seven years of mellow relations with the United States? With Taiwan? When it comes to ideals, would awarding the Games to Beijing advance the cause of human rights in the world’s most populous nation or help spread the rule of law?

Most China observers and Olympic scholars candidly admit they don’t have all the answers. Nonetheless, most experts believe that the potential rewards--economic, cultural, political, diplomatic--outweigh the risks in going to Beijing in 2008.

Orville Schell, dean of the graduate school of journalism at UC Berkeley and a longtime China observer, is among those hoping the IOC awards the Games to Beijing.

But he cautioned that it ought to be clear in Beijing that the Games come with expectations about progress in such issues as human rights and China’s treatment of, among others, Chinese-born U.S. citizens and legal U.S. immigrants. In the last year, China has been steadily imprisoning American citizens and permanent residents.

Meantime, Amnesty International last Friday issued a report saying that China executed 1,781 people over the last three months--some for violent crimes but others for offenses such as prostitution, using drugs and stealing gasoline.

“China is like a person with two heads,” Schell said.

“One is more cosmopolitan, reform-minded, enlightened and global. The other is more retro, Leninist, sort of self-reliant and fearful of outside interference and influence. This struggle is a constant one.”

Giving the Games to China would help the “head” that turns toward openness, Schell said. It would also, he said, “give China face,” and “whenever possible, one does want to give China face.”

But, he said, “What China often fails to understand is that face is not simply given. It is most . . . effective when it is earned.”

The human-rights issue has emerged in many minds as reason to deny China the Games.

The European Parliament recently passed a resolution opposing Beijing’s Olympic bid and condemning its “disastrous record on human rights.”

In the U.S., Rep. Tom Lantos (D-San Mateo) has introduced a resolution in Congress calling on the IOC to deny the Games to Beijing on human-rights grounds. But Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) is behind a competing measure that says it’s improper to mix sports with politics.

The Bush Administration has said it intends to take no stand on Beijing’s Olympic bid.

Olympic scholars say it is unlikely the human-rights issue will sway a majority of members to deny Beijing.

“The IOC is not a human-rights organization,” said John Hoberman, an expert on Olympic politics and history at the University of Texas. “It likes to pose as a human-rights organization in certain ways. But it is not one.”

If Beijing wins, the implications for international relations could be profound.

“There’s some tongue-in-cheek but also some reality in saying that in the [seven] years of building up, the Chinese will not behave nasty,” Ross of Boston College said.

If Taiwan was abruptly to assert itself with more belligerence, for example, all bets are off, he said. But if “the status quo holds, China would be less likely to challenge the status quo, to rock the boat. That’s not insignificant.”

Experts are mixed on the issue of whether the Games might also serve to moderate Chinese relations with the U.S.

Sasser, the former ambassador, said, “Bottom line, I think it will have a modernizing and moderating influence on China.”

David Zweig, a professor of Chinese politics at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and at Queen’s University in Kingston, Canada, said he envisions two scenarios.

“One is, hey, they feel good and that’s cool,” he said. “They’re treated as a world-class country and they behave well. And also they will have a desire to have a good Olympics, unlike the Russians, where people boycotted, so they behave well.” The U.S. and other nations boycotted the 1980 Moscow Games after the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan.

The other scenario, he said, is that an economic boost tied to the Games--in concert with entry into the WTO--produces a China that feels “strong and good and is swaggering around,” with uncertain consequences.

If, on Friday, the Chinese are denied the Games, several authorities said it will bode poorly for U.S.-Chinese relations--even though the U.S. holds only four of 122 seats within the IOC.

The spy-plane incident earlier this year was widely seen in China as a U.S. provocation, experts said. The 1999 U.S. bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, which American authorities have said was an accident, was regarded in China as a provocation.

To lose the Olympics--again--would complete a troika.

“The U.S. is sort of the hood ornament of world power,” Schell said. “Whenever China has a grievance, it’s always very tempting to find the American connection.”

Zweig said, “I’d not be surprised if you had violence in the streets, smashing of McDonald’s, that sort of thing.”

If, however, Beijing prevails come Friday, the domestic implications for China’s government and the Chinese Communist Party could also be far-reaching.

“It will be a great boon for the party--that the Communist Party is bringing China into the world, done a successful job and is winning recognition worldwide,” Zweig said.

“If they can deliver economically, that’s good for them too because their legitimacy is based on economic development and nationalism,” he said, adding, “And the Olympics would [further] both.”

Zweig, however, expressed corruption concerns.

“You start bringing in this kind of money for massive projects--massive projects are inherently corrupt. You’re bringing that into a society that right now is inherently corrupt,” he said. “How is the Party going to ensure that this is done in a clean, competitive way that will not spill back badly onto its reputation?

“It’s a real risk for them.”

One more thing, experts said. China is not the West, and Beijing may simply seem overwhelmingly foreign to Western athletes and to sports fans who go to the Games to have fun.

It might be a major challenge to convince athletes and fans that the food and water are safe.

Will athletes say they won’t want to eat the food in Beijing for fear, as Ross put it, “of getting dysentery while doing the pole vault?”

As for sports fans, “People [went] to Australia, that was a fun Olympics. They’ll go to Salt Lake next year--that could be a fun Olympics. Why? It’s an interesting place to visit. The mountains. Backpacking. Restaurants.

“Now you get all these people flying to Beijing and they don’t speak a word of Chinese--it will be difficult to be there.

“The Chinese will provide buses to take people places and there will be pressure to be at the bus stop at the right time. That will create a much less fun Olympics and more of a regimented Olympics.

“It will,” he said, offering perhaps the only prediction safely beyond dispute, “be a different Olympics.”