Beijing 2008: The Olympics in the belly of the beast

National Review, Oct 9, 2000 by Jay Nordlinger

Here we go again: Beijing is trying to get the Olympic Games, for 2008. In the early '90s, they made an all-out effort to win the Games for 2000, losing out by a hair to Sydney. Now they are the clear front-runner; a decision is expected next summer. The Chinese insist aggressively that the 2008 Games are their due. So it is time to consider, once more, whether the Games-which are extremely important to much of the world-should be staged in a totalitarian capital.

Back in 1992 and '93, when the Chinese made their first attempt, Tiananmen Square was a fairly fresh memory. (That massacre took place in 1989.) The authorities needed a leg up with both the world and their own people. So they craved the Olympics even more desperately than they do today. In a breathtaking campaign, they earmarked billions of dollars for "Olympic construction." They offered to pay transportation and room-and-board for the many thousands of athletes and officials who would attend the Games. They initiated a public-hygiene crusade: "Mobilize the Masses to Create a Fly-Free City!" They enlisted the citizenry to scrub and festoon the capital. They held contests in speaking English and other foreign languages, with cold cash going to the winners. They forbade residents to burn coal (as most of them did for their basic needs): The sky had to be blue! Every day, it was put out more flags, brandish and recite more slogans.

And the deciders? They got the royal (Communist) treatment. Said one Beijing official, "We look upon the International Olympic Committee as God. Their wish is our command." The government ordered the air force to disperse the clouds over the capital, lest it rain on the Committee's grandees. They took the step of nominating Juan Antonio Samaranch, boss of the IOC, for the Nobel Peace Prize. They provided each member of the Committee with all manner of comforts, including a chauffeured black Mercedes. They pledged to build a monument on the Great Wall bearing the names of all ninety IOC members.

And, for a special treat, they stopped following foreign reporters-stopped putting tails on them, giving them a little more space. Nevertheless, there were human-rights objections here and there. The U.S. Congress adopted a resolution opposing the granting of the Olympics to Beijing; the European Parliament did the same. This hardly pleased the IOC. Samaranch grumbled that the United States was happy to trade with China but not to give them the Olympics. Another Committee official said-poetically if absurdly-"If we always picked a city wearing a halo, we wouldn't be celebrating our hundredth anniversary "

The Chinese dissident community itself was split. Most were opposed to letting the regime have the Games, but a few prominent spokesmen were not. Wang Dan, a student leader in Tiananmen Square, was released in February 1993, about a half-year before the Committee's vote. Somewhat reluctantly, he favored giving the Games to Beijing, hoping that this plum would "accelerate China's opening to the rest of the world." Wei Jingsheng, another widely admired dissident, felt the same. He was released a grand total of nine days before the Committee voted, after being imprisoned for 14 and a half years. As a further sweetener, Beijing delayed the prosecution of about twenty other democracy activists-men and women who were pawns in the regime's Olympic game.

Today, Wei opposes Beijing 2008, for reasons that we will explore in a moment. (Wang Dan, who now, like Wei, lives in the United States, was unavailable for comment.) Wei brings up-as do many others-the specter of Berlin '36. These were, of course, the Hitler Games. The standard American view of these Games is that they blew up in Hitler's face thanks to the historic performance of the (black) U.S. track-and-field star Jesse Owens. This view is handed out to Americans in kindergarten along with crayons and construction paper. But it is untrue: The opportunity to host the Olympics was of great importance to Hitler and the furtherance of his regime, as scholars of the period uniformly acknowledge.

Berlin got the '36 Games in 1931, two years before the Nazis rose to power. Once Hitler was installed, however, a movement took shape to boycott the Games. In 1933, the American Olympic committees voted to stay away from Berlin if Hitler refused to allow Jewish athletes to participate on German teams. The regime found two token Jews, both of them living in exile, and this gesture satisfied the Americans. All hope of a boycott faded. Hitler also relaxed-just for a bit-his general persecution of the Jews, a period that become known as his "Olympic Pause."

In 1935, the American consul in Berlin, one George S. Messersmith, wrote the following to secretary of state Cordell Hull: "To the [Nazi] Party and to the youth of Germany, the holding of the Olympic Games in Berlin in 1936 has become the symbol of the conquest of the world by National Socialist doctrine. Should the Games not be held in Berlin, it would be one of the most serious blows which National Socialist prestige could suffer." As Duff Hart-Davis, author of Hitler's Games, relates, the Nazis ensured that Berlin was nicely and benignly turned out, creating the mirage that the Fuhrer's Germany was "a perfectly normal place, in which life went on as pleasantly as in any other European country." Freedom-suppressing governments-such as China's-become expert at erecting Potemkin villages. Hart-Davis further writes, "That the success of the eleventh Olympiad gave Hitler an enormous boost, both moral and political, nobody could deny." The journalist William Shirer recorded in 1984, "Hitler, we who covered the Games had to concede, turned the Olympics into a dazzling propaganda success for his barbarian regime."