The Olympics are over, Beijing is resting easy, and Chinese journalists are flooding the Internet with articles proclaiming the great success of the Games. For those of us who followed the Tibetan protests that preceded the games, and were aware of the crack-downs both in Beijing and Tibet that left many imprisoned, tortured, and dead during the Games, the Beijing Olympics amounted to an advertising campaign for China.
Nothing new or particularly devious about that; every host nation sees the Games as an advertising opportunity, and China was no exception. I didn’t watch these Games, in honor of my Tibetan friends—some of whom did watch them, another paradox for another day—but the people that I trust tell me that the 2008 edition was expertly choreographed, that the poison air around Beijing miraculously cleared, that the athletes soared, dove, flew, and fell the way they do every four years: with glory, with heartbreak, with pride, with suspicion.
Many of us who were involved with the Tibetan cause had hoped that the human rights
issues swirling around these Games might have claimed more attention than they did. The protests in New Delhi, Dharamsala, and around the world were extensive, well organized, and undertaken with integrity and forethought. I witnessed many of them first-hand this summer both in New Delhi and Dharamsala, and I came away from them with a fresh understanding of how perseverance and patience go hand-in-hand in any successful political action.
The Tibetan people aren’t going anywhere, and they are very patient.
The fifteen students that accompanied my Tibetan companion and me this summer to India returned to American very different people as well; they have spoken face-to-face with hunger-strikers and political prisoners who escaped from Chinese prisons; they have interviewed Tibetan nomads; they have asked questions of the seventeenth Karmapa. This matters because they have heard Tibetans telling their own stories; and now these students are busily telling other students about their experiences in India among the Tibetans, about the Tibetans they have met, and other students are busily listening.
So there were protests, and they did have an effect.
In the American press, these protests were sporadically covered, but the reliable Internet sources were tireless and consistent in their coverage, and without them, without the bloggers and correspondents, we’d have a substantially less detailed picture of what happened in the summer of 2008. We will count on these same people in the future as well . . . simply making the information available in clear and digestible formats is a mundane but essential aspect of raising awareness about these issues.
Entering the information, slapping it up on a blog site . . . it’s become a frontier, of sorts for political resistance.
But Americans who are interested in the Tibetan struggle have to be clear about our own country’s relationship to China. The Economic Policy Institute reported that in 2007, our trade deficit with China rose $23.7 billion dollars (10.2%) to total over $250 billion dollars, while the cost of petroleum imports rose $27.9 billion (9.6%). We are a country hamstrung by debt, and this compromises our ability to make demands on the international stage, particularly demands that lie outside the arena of goods and services—I am thinking, of course, of human rights.
China’s foreign reserves are now the largest in the world, with Japan in second place. By 1996, China had amassed its first $100 billion in such assets, and by 2001 it had doubled, and now it has increased to well over a trillion dollars. Because of China’s substantial holdings in the American economy, provoking Beijing over something like human rights is a dicey business. Writing in The Atlantic, James Fallows makes the case that
whatever the provocation, China would consider its levers and weapons and find one stronger than all the rest—one no other country in the world can wield. Without China’s billion dollars a day, the United States could not keep its economy stable or spare the dollar from collapse.
Would the Chinese use that weapon? The reasonable answer is no, because they would wound themselves grievously, too. Their years of national savings are held in the same dollars that would be ruined; in a panic, they’d get only a small share out before the value fell. Besides, their factories depend on customers with dollars to spend.
The point is that the United States has now entered into a relationship with China that
while, in some senses, is co-dependent, is a co-dependency whose capital must be spent wisely and conservatively. We simply will not and cannot challenge China aggressively over such issues as human rights. We have to manipulate, urge, pressure. Sophie Richardson, the Asia Advocacy Director at Human Rights Watch, recently stated that
not a single world leader who attended the Games or members of the IOC seized the opportunity to challenge the Chinese government’s behavior in any meaningful way. Will anyone wonder, after the Games are over, why the Chinese government remains intransigent about human rights?
And so what then are we to do, we who are concerned about human rights, and who still feel deeply frustrated at our country’s continuing hypocrisy and intransigence—to use Richardson’s word—over the issue of human rights in Tibet?
Luckily, we have an extraordinary number of talented men and women who have thought long and hard about that question, and I will address some of their solutions in my next posting.
