Games show two faces of China ...

Posted 08 22 2008 7:26PM

The Beijing Olympic Games were billed by China's leaders as the country's coming out party into the world after decades of isolation. They wanted to come in with a bang, and they succeeded. As the Games draw to a close, the Chinese are way ahead of the United States in gold medals, the goal they had set, though with fewer medals overall. A surge of Chinese national pride was justified in everything from the opening extravaganza, to the magnificent facilities, to the medals achievement.

The Games, for the rest of the world, have also served as a metaphor for China's rapid rise. They have spotlighted an uncomfortable possibility — that a few decades from now, history books might cast the coming period as a rising age of authoritarian capitalism (in China, Russia and elsewhere). Perhaps the aftermath of the Games will ultimately open Chinese society to broader freedoms. But democratization does not appear as inevitable as it once seemed.

During the Games, despite promises to the contrary, China has been unabashed in showing its darker side: repression of human rights and limits on political freedoms. Its methods have ranged from brutality to coercion. It denied visas to people it thought might make trouble, blocked some websites and imprisoned dissidents. Though it announced it would allow protest areas, it quietly arrested those who applied for permits, including two elderly women who were sent to be "re-educated" in labor camps, Wang Xiuying and Wu Dianyuan.

So the real question the Games raised, and the United States needs to heed might be this: What will it take to change China's model of authoritarian capitalism?

Western democracies have long assumed that engaging China would nurture a middle class that would demand more political freedoms. But Western companies during the Beijing Summer Games instead did more to reinforce Chinese leaders' belief that economics talk loudest. U.S. companies paid big money to run ads, targeted at the Chinese, hoping to get a toehold in China's growing market of 1.3 billion potential consumers. After NBC paid a premium for sports coverage, it was relatively muted in its coverage of China's repressive moves.

One tantalizing possibility is that the Beijing Olympics could become a galvanizing "Sputnik moment" — an echo of when the Soviet Union launched the first satellite into space in 1957, shocking the U.S. into a space race and also into a focused cultural, technological and ideological rivalry.

The Summer Games demonstrated how tough and complex China's coming challenge will be. In Beijing, China served notice it will be a formidable competitor, and not just in the athletic arena. It's a challenge that the U.S. dare not avoid.