Debating Myself

Now I know I’m a little late to the whole Olympic Tibet controversy game, but I hope what I have to say is still worth saying.

What sparked me to write this post initially is this article by Yahoo! Sports’ own Dan Wetzel about the Beijing Olympics. Now I will be the first to admit that I am not a fan of Wetzel–he is too preachy and too political for a sports columnist. If you want to make a political statement in a sports column then do it without a) insulting your readers’ intelligence and b) try to be classy about it. Wetzel should look at Sports Illustrated’s premier NFL analyst Peter King for a career full of examples of this.

But I think I took offense to Wetzel’s column less for its preachy tone (though that remains in abundance) and more for its blatant misrepresentation of the facts and crude assumptions. Wetzel is clearly pandering to his audience based on the assumption that they share some latent xenophobic feelings.

If Wetzel wrote this article for a high school newspaper his editor could have told him that his first paragraph makes one of the (unfortunately) most overused historical comparisons of the 20th and 21st century.

As the news pours out of China about the latest round of murdered monks and slaughtered nuns, as crowds around the world protest the Olympic torch, the prevailing wisdom now is that the Beijing Olympics are looking like, if we’re lucky, merely a redo of the 1936 Berlin Games. And that’s only in the unlikely event the bloodshed ends.

Does Wetzel really want to compare the internal strife in Tibet to the systematic destruction of an entire race, the complete destruction of an entire continent, and the near extermination of an entire of generation of men?

I would like to say that Wetzel is just using this paragraph as a hook to discuss the issue of Tibet more rationally, but unlike Wetzel I am compelled to be accurate and fair in my writing (unless I state otherwise). Wetzel’s article really degrades into anti-Chinese tirade and a rant against those corporate lapdogs the International Olympic Committee.

Wetzel makes a number of specious claims I won’t bother attacking here, what I want to respond to is his general thesis that the IOC “sold out” to the promise of making billions in China. Seriously,

No, this was a straight sellout, not a gamble. The IOC willingly purchased the unholy bill of goods China was peddling so its sponsoring corporations could, in turn, sell stuff to the Chinese people.

Wetzel is sadly short of history. I need only a mention a few Olympic games here to remind him that the Olympics has often been used to exactly the aim Wetzel doubts: “caus[ing] China to reverse course on human rights, democracy, freedom and the environment.” [For the better.]

Indeed, the 1988 games in Seoul, South Korea marked a turning point to that country, which now possesses the 12th largest economy in the world and is a fountain of stability and democracy in east Asia. Those 1988 games were boycotted by several nations and occurred although South Korea was (and still is) officially at war with North Korea.

Wetzel would probably had criticized those games too. After all, the games were probably enabled by “workers they then cheated out of wages and health care to build substandard Olympic facilities lacking small items like emergency exits and fire sprinklers.”

Hmm. Perhaps Wetzel should peek back at the history of the United States. The US hosted the Olympics three times before African-Americans even began to fully feel the benefits of citizenship in this country (1904, 1932 summer and winter, and 1960). No doubt American workers in 1904 faced perhaps worse labor standards than their Chinese compatriots today (there was, back then, no American consumer complete with hang-ups about sweatshop labor to try to please). From 1920-1940 it is estimated that up to 1,000 African Americans may have been lynched in the United States as the direct result of racism, hatred and bigotry. So clearly the United States had its fair share of violent internal strife and oppressed ethnic groups going on while it was permitted to host the games as well.

While Wetzel decries the death of “between 30 and 148″ people in Tibet he turns a blind eye to his own country’s history of prejudice and bigotry? Moreover, Wetzel pretends to understand the complexity of Chinese-Tibetan relations to suggest that Tibet should in fact be free. Would Wetzel welcome Chinese scrutiny, then, about the United States’ continuing treatment of Native-Americans and the reservation system that traps some tribes into a cycle of abject poverty and dependence on government handouts? Would Wetzel listen to Chinese commentators’ suggestions that perhaps we should grant the Native American’s full autonomy and statehood as reparations for the near extermination of an entire people?

Maybe it is unfair to make this comparison, but it is fair to say that he is overly critical of a situation that is much more complex than anyone with only one side (the Western side) of the story could fairly judge.

Wetzel does not really care about the plight of those in Tibet. Make no mistake, this is a rant against the corporatization of the games. The last sentence of his column makes this position strikingly clear:

What do a hundred dead monks matter anyway when there are so many Big Macs to move?

Wetzel sees the strife as occurring solely for the sale of corporate goods, but this is a false assumption and a terrible generalization to make. The idea harkens back to the example of South Korea I gave earlier–bringing world attention to Beijing will bring about a change in China by welcoming it to the world community, bringing international attention, and forcing it to consider the international consequences of its actions.

Besides is it fair for Wetzel, who will probably see his income spike from columns discussing a myriad of aspects of the Olympic games ad nauseum, to really criticize the games being corporatized? Isn’t that how he gets paid? Put your money where your mouth is and boycott the games yourself–don’t watch, don’t write about it, and don’t support it.

But of course that won’t happen. Wetzel doesn’t really believe, or if he does, he doesn’t care enough to do more than complain about it in a public forum using a dangerously xenophobic conception of China as his background.

I have a great fear that these games will be hijacked by an anti-Chinese political sentiment that has been growing in the United States for awhile now. Instead of focusing on the positive aspects of international attention in China, Wetzel panders to the latent anti-Chinese sentiment that is largely fueled by fear, ignorance and the lack of exposure to Chinese people and culture.

Sure, China has its problems, but so has every great nation that underwent the kind of dramatic industrial revolution currently occurring in China. Only by moving past the rhetoric of fear, ignorance and xenophobia can we ever hope to make a positive out of the strife currently occurring in Tibet. Resorting to yellow journalism to scare up readership will never be part of the solution and can only serve to perpetuate stereotypes and ideas that preclude meaningful engagement and peaceful resolutions in China.

China is hoping for the opposite–a kind of positive media attention that will change people’s minds about China. It will be interesting to see what prevails.

UPDATE: Here is a great letter from a Chinese-American to Mr. Wetzel.

North Korea has baffled American diplomats and politicians consistently for at least the last twenty years. Now a nuclear state, the question of Korea is even more important for the next President to provide some real solutions on. Hawks want to topple the regime and see a reunification of North and South Korea as the best solution for stability and security in East Asia. Doves want to use international pressure (particularly the 6-party talks) to coerce (convince, persuade?) North Korea into giving up its nuclear program and perhaps even opening a meaningful dialog with the West. Unfortunately, these competing tensions in US foreign policy have led to a 3 steps forward, 2 steps back development in US relations with Korea.

A little less lonely these days?

A few major events have taken place on the peninsula in the past month that indicate a need for Korea to be put on the national radar again. First, the issue that doesn’t involve Gershwin, classical music, or a cultural exchange—a perceived liberalization in Korean economic policy (which may in fact be music to the sound of capitalist reformers outside of Korea, and those hiding themselves within). North Korea, long known to hold major reserves of coal and precious metals, has begun selling its reserves to other countries—drastically increasing its meager foreign trade in a response to looming economic crisis. First let me throw some numbers at you from this excellent Washington Post article on the subject (incidentally, buried on page A19):

• $1.4 billion—total North Korean exports in 2006
• $11 billion—value of recent trade projects undertaken jointly between North and South Korea
• $2 trillion—estimated value of North Korean mineral reserves

Why are these figures significant? Well, not only is North Korea exporting goods and engaging in foreign trade, but also this:

They say that Kim’s government is increasingly willing to lease mines to outside companies and to negotiate joint ventures with foreign governments.

If talking is the first step toward warmer relations between two countries (or a single country and the entire world… and it is) then here is that big first step. The fact that Kim Jong Il’s brutal dictatorship (and make no mistake it is brutal—starving millions of its own people in the early 1990s) is increasingly engaging in trade dialog with neighbor states and allowing foreign countries to lease mines means that slowly the Western, or perhaps just capitalist, culture and way of doing business are going to creep in. A brutal dictatorship may be able to control every aspect of the daily lives of its people, but even Kim Jong Il’s regime can’t force its citizens to unlearn what they have already learned. The trickle of information exchange that these economic efforts bring with them is a start toward an irreversible path of liberalization.

Or is it? In the same article Andrei Lankov, an expert on the North and occasional visitor, states:

More important are Kim’s conflicted feelings about mining, said Lankov… “He sees the money now,” Lankov said. “But he believes that by reforming, he would be committing suicide. So he wants mining done under strict control of North Korean managers.”

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