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Do you agree with UK athletes participating in the Chinese Olympics
Former Member
Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
Personally I don't the UK athletes should have gone to China, a country which routinely makes its citizens disappear and disallows them talking to foreign journalists. By going to the olympics we are putting money into the Chinese system which keeps the iron grip tight on the people of China, we are basically saying, "If your rich enough, and manufacture for us, we don't care if you torture your citizens and have political prisons, we can ignore all that in favour of a nice cozy relationship".
What is you think about the issue?
What is you think about the issue?
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Comments
Maybe one should view this as an opportunity to highlight the flaws of the Chinese regime, but also see it as an event to emphasise the goodness which brings human beings from all parts of the world together.
I think a good job was done of bringing attention to the doings of the Chinese regime, and it definitely brought awareness to people who would otherwise not know.I don't know what actual effect it has had/will have, but for starters it has made awareness and that is a start. Even the Dalai Lama didn't condone boycoting of the Olympics which is important to bare in mind.
you say this as you type away on a computer that has roughly 90% of it's components made in China?
Most of the medals China will win will be tainted by the horrible conditions in their training camps - think the USSR but without steriods.
I think the way some people have used the games as a political manouevering tool is quite sad really and will probably detract from the spirit of competition. Not that I'm a big fan of the Games as a spectator event, I think the politics should be left out of it and we should just concentrate on the games.
The whole event is one giant political stunt from the Chinese government, its supposed to broadcast to the whole world what a lovely place it is and how they arent really a repressive government at all.
I agree with that. On second thoughts, I can see it is reasonable for our athletes to go the Olympic games, but I don't think our government should be endorsing the Chinese government.
I dont agree with anyone boycotting the olympics, I can see their motives but as others have mentioned, the olympics is about sporting achievement, not a place to launder political conflict issues.
Can you name a single country that doesn't have something anyone could not complain about?
No country is perfect
There's a lot of bullshit being spoken about these Olympics. It's claimed that they will change China forever. These same dreary apologists would have said the same thing in 1936. They would have claimed that Hitler and the Nazis were actually "misunderstood" and that the Olympics would highlight the error of his ways. Bollocks. In reality, Hitler simply ordered his minions to tone down their persecution of Jews and other minorities for a couple of weeks until everyone pissed off back home. Then it was business as normal.
A similar pattern will ensue in China. They will pretend that they're a lovely, cuddly country for a couple of weeks. The authorities will smile nicely, saying that journalists have got total freedom and that everything is brilliant. In September, when the foreign media (anyone outraged, incidentally, that the BBC are sending 437 of their staff on this junket?) have all buggered off back home, human rights abuses will continue exactly as they did before.
Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
As far as the Olympics go, the athletes should forget the Politics and do what they do, compete! The Government officials, Prime Minister and so forth should do the boycotting as they ARE political.
Thing is that people are aware of these wrong-doings now, and just the knowledge of it doesn't save the situation but I do believe it is a start. If they could just hold the olympics in Darfur now...
Why would the Chinese government arrest people for no reason? That would foster domestic and foreign opposition for no gain. They arrest people for a reason, whether it be dissent, criminal activity, or suspicion of these, even if the arrests are unjustified.
On the subject of Chinese government authoritarianism I think people are often confused to the extreme. China is not a totalitarian Orwellian superstate - not yet at least. Granted, at present some areas within cities (most infamously Tianamen square), some cities themselves (Shenzen has the highest concentration of CCTV in the world) and even some general regions (the South Eastern seaboard) resemble to some extent totalitarian/surveillence/police societies. However - whilst its a cliche to state it in such a discussion - China is a vast, vast country with a massive population and high population density in many areas. There is also a massive transient/mobile population which (partly through economic necessity) are poorly monitored. The country is in a state of flux and its society and economy has (perhaps unprecedented) fluidity. With its present infrastructure, the Chinese Regime is simply unable to apply sophisticated political/social control. Generally, they have little recourse to advanced Orwellian techniques of political monitoring/oppression. Their methods are crude: broad-brush internet and press censorship, sporadic centralized crackdowns on troublesome areas (village/town revolts/protests, etc), and most consistently devolution of violent repression to local authorities which often deviate from the central line, are strongly influenced by private interests and are very corrupt. They also delegate "trouble-shooting" to largely uncontrolled local private agents, hired thugs, etc, who pretty much act as they please.
There is a massive project to try and build infrastructure with the potential for such control and surveillence, called the "Golden Shield". This encompasses the "Great Firewall" but also aims to develop:a nationwide database containing information on all adult Chinese citizens, smart cards for all citizens which can be scanned without the owner?s knowledge at a distance of a few metres, extensive closed-circuit television to monitor public spaces, technology which allows the Public Security Bureau to make instant comparisons of fingerprints, etc. The Chinese Regime is using various Western corporations to develop "Golden Shield." But it will take decades and, at present, the regime has unsophisticated apparatus and its primary existential motivation is simply to maintain economic growth, which (since Mao) has provided it general public support and left dissention and subversion relatively minimal.
In terms of Olympic boycotts, this is 99% bluster and bullshit; as has been pointed out by others such talk is rendered completely hollow by our economic interaction/reliance on Chinese labour. Most of it is transparent xenophobia and ignorance. Generally, the only group that seem to "mean" their opposition are Tibet activists/Dalai Lama supporters. They are in a minority and the Tibet issue is almost laughably minor considering the scale of other issues. I also suspect that the position is most often dictated by "right on" fashion and popinjay-posturing than any genuine concern for Tibetans.
I don't see why Tibet is a 'minor' problem at all (how so?). I also find this paragraph condescending and ignorant towards people with a knowledge of China's human rights record in other areas, not only Tibet.
I can see completely why anti-genocide activists (who you seem to have missed out, or is Sudan laughably minor too?), environmental activists, human rights activists, Tibet activists and other people sympathetic to the aforementioned causes could see the Beijing Olympics as an opportunity to show their disagreement with a lot of things the government do.
From a campaigns perspective, the world's attention will be on China and raising awareness of these issues now is the best way to gain attention for the causes mentioned above. There is no better time for people to bash China's human rights record (economic reliance or not... it is better to say something than not to say something, if only to embarass the government) because next year, the opportunity will be over.
I also don't think there is an element of xenophobia. There's a difference between disliking a group of people from a certain region and disliking the government.
Also, please provide evidence of "right on" attitudes for Tibet.
Relatively minor. I.e. there are about 1.5 million people living in Tibet, there are 1.2 billion people living in China - those living in Tibet make up about 0.01% of those ruled by the Chinese central government. A drop in the ocean. I concede, that doesn't mean that people shouldn't stand up for them, but the time and effort devoted to their cause in the West seems grossly disproportionate to me. All "citizens" of China have to put up with the current regime, and in fact Tibetans have some advantages compared to Chinese citizens living elsewhere. Higher levels of government investment, and exemption from the one child policy, for example...
...whilst there is obviously cultural repression occuring at the same time. But you don't see caring liberal Western students banging on about "the Chinese occupation" of Xianjiang province do you? Perhaps thats because they're women-hating, gay-bashing Muslims rather than nice cuddly Buddhists...:chin:
That said, I don't want to come across as too cynical and skeptical of these people's intentions. I'm sure a lot, if not most of them mean what they say and its probably a nice way of getting people involved in politics and activism. Probably acts as a locus for general criticism about the regime as well. From my experience though, a lot of them don't know the first thing about the situation and are approaching it with spurious motives largely dictated by fashion and posturing.
No, but it somewhat defeats the point when you mouth off at somebody whilst handing them a fistful of cash don't you think? Especially when the favourable deal we are accorded results directly from very nature of the Chinese regime.
Where did you get this information?
Just because some investment has gone in to the region of Tibet, does not mean that the lives of Tibetans has improved.
I think that's a pretty piss poor and hollow argument though. Either debate the politics, or don't... When you are buying a product, you're paying a wage not just to the business owner, but also to the person working below them.
It's hard to avoid buying anything from China... I am not saying consume, or don't consume (not consuming is more ecologically sound... Things aren't black and white tho)... But it is pretty damn stupid to use the "aaahhhh but I bet you use Chinese goods somewhere in your non-perfect existence and this takes away all validity of your argument" because it holds no ground really. It just sounds like the opposition has no intelligent argument to contribute.
Human rights in China is a huge topic, much more than if we happen to have a computer with components which may or may not have parts made in China. So much is made in China, it's unreal. Perhaps we should get our goods from another country which abuses human rights? because most countries do....
No wait... maybe we should just stop eating anything we haven't grown, just so we are allowed an opinion.
Nobody said anything of the sort. You can criticise the human rights record of a country from which you buy products. That's quite different from saying that we should boycott one product of the Chinese regime (The Olympics), whilst spending every other pound on a product from the same country. But of course it's a lot easier to say that athletes should boycott China rather than doing it yourself, isn't it?
But it has. They're still way behind the rest of China with the lowest life expectancy and education levels, but the quality of life in Tibet has improved just like it has in the rest of China. There are issues in making the economic benefits of China as a whole filter down to more remote areas like Tibet, Sinkiang and Inner Mongolia, but there's absolutely no reason to think that the lives of Tibetans would change any quicker by them not being the beneficiaries of being part of the world's fastest growing economy. You're not going to get progress any quicker than that. And the rest of the human rights issues in Tibet are things that are more an issue in China as a whole, rather than being specific to Tibet. And as for free Tibet, the fact is that the people of Tibet are freer now than they have ever been in history. It's not enough, and progress still needs to be made, but the idea that the feudalism that preceded Chinese rule was preferable because it's other Tibetans that were ruling with an iron fist instead is ridiculous logic.