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After One Hundred Year Countdown Chinese Finally Shout "Zero"
By Sasha Su-Ling Welland, Pacific News Service, July 20, 2001

China's successful bid to host the 2008 Olympics has given Chinese all over the world a huge morale boost while provoking considerable consternation in the United States. What Americans can't always see from their high moral ground is the deep Chinese yearning for legitimation and a place on the world stage. PNS commentator Sasha Su-Ling Welland is currently studying at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing.

BEIJING -- Beijing's victorious bid for the 2008 Olympics may be old news elsewhere, but in China's capital, there is a steady buzz of excitement underneath the sound of bulldozers currently transforming the city into a suitable host for the world.

My local post office -- crowded with people clamoring to buy stamps that commemorate the day of the International Olympic Committee announcement -- reminds me of the chasm that divides U.S. and Chinese interpretations of world events.

Indeed, the rhetoric flaring on either side of the Pacific can make anyone caught in between feel near schizophrenic. The Chinese press credits Deng Xiaoping's successful policy reform and opening with paving the way to the Olympic bid victory. The Western press points an accusing finger at China's human rights record. Both claims smack of propaganda, although Americans may be less aware than most Chinese of such tendencies. The implicit propaganda content of the U.S. statements is that the U.S. is global champion of human rights and the Chinese are so blinded by government directives as to be completely uncritical of their own society.

On the eve of July 13, when the I.O.C. was to make its decision, I sat in a bar in Beijing listening to the music of Wild Children, a folk-rock band from Gansu province in northwestern China. As I.O.C. president Juan Antonio Samaranch declared Beijing the winner, the band didn't skip a beat, but continued with half-closed eyes to play through a set of songs about losing hope in ideals, not having residence permits for Beijing, and the symbolic flow of the Yellow River through their home province. Outside the hot and stuffy bar, the summer streets of Beijing erupted into wild screams, confetti, fireworks, flags and champagne foam. When we headed home at 1:30 a.m., celebrators still lined the sidewalks and cars with horn-happy drivers and revelers hanging out of the windows clogged the early morning streets.

When we finally found a taxi, our driver's joy was irrepressible. He was so happy he knocked ten percent off our fare. At home, on TV, we watched faces -- broadcast from street corners, university dorm rooms, Internet cafes, and fast food joints -- reiterate phrases about working more diligently to build China. This is familiar rhetoric, but the voices rang with an enthusiasm that does not usually accompany such official sounding statements. Behind the fervor of the Beijing Olympic bid is the strong feeling, widely held among Chinese, of being denied a place on the world stage. This sense of humiliation and a yearning for modernity have historical roots that date back well over a century to a time when imperial powers -- Britain, France, Germany, Russia, Japan and the United States -- carved their country up into "spheres of influence."

On July 13, Beijing finally won a place in the pantheon of the world's Olympic cities, which have so far favored Europe and North America over all other regions of the world. This is the context of the day-after headline in the Beijing Evening News: "After One Hundred Year Countdown, We Finally Shout 'Zero.'"

Reaction to the announcement across the Pacific, however, demonstrates the American impulse to take the moral high ground with regards to China -- U.S. politicians and pundits find it far easier to talk about human rights violations elsewhere than to actually own up to them at home. For example, the New York Times editorialized, "In a more humane world, the I.O.C. would bar China from serving as an Olympic host nation until the government learned to live with the free expression of political and religious views and stopped abusing citizens who oppose the authoritarian rule of the Communist Party."

Fair enough, but might we not also say that in a more humane world, the U.S. government would pay reparations to African Americans, honor its treaties with Native Americans, pay an indemnity to Vietnam, lift the economic sanctions that are killing Iraqi children, cease flying spy planes through other countries' air space, end secret financial aid to anti-democratic dictators, and perhaps even enact stricter domestic gun control? Of course, none of these activities ever stopped the I.O.C. from giving U.S. cities the Olympic Games.

It's easy to make self-aggrandizing pronunciations about a more humane world if you don't stop to examine yourself in the mirror. This is the danger of the rhetoric on both sides.


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