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Does China Owe an Apology to the World?

For months, my friends and students in China have been accusing the world, and especially the United States, of trying to inject politics into the 2008 Olympics Games.Those who have dared to mention to mention the words Tibet’ and ‘Olympics’ in the same sentence are accused of mixing the sacred with the profane. The Olympics Games have nothing to do with politics, my friends always tell me. No country has the right to meddle in our internal affairs, they say. If we can keep Tibet and the Olympics separate, they ask, why is it so hard for the rest of the world to do the same? 

Unfortunately, it now seems that it is proving difficult even for China to keep politics out of the Olympics. CNN is reporting this week that the IOC has rebuked China  “over remarks by a Chinese official about Tibet and the Dalai Lama.” It was not so much the content of the remarks that caught the IOC’s attention but rather where and when the remarks were made. Last Saturday, during the closing ceremony of the Olympic Torch Relay, Zhang Qinglin, the highest ranking Communist Party member in Beijing was quoted as saying that “the sky above Tibet will never change” and that “the Red Star flag will always fly above this land.” He also mentioned Tibet’s exiled spiritual leader by name stating that “we can definitely smash the separatist plot of the Dalai Lama clique completely.” According to CNN, the IOC expressed ‘regret’ over the speech in a letter to Beijing this week. So far, Beijing has not acknowledged that they received such a letter.

China has always been very quick to demand apologies from countries that say or do things that “hurt the feelings of the Chinese people.” This year, companies like Carrefour and CNN, and people like Nancy Pelosi and Sharon Stone have experienced the wrath of the Chinese public when their actions or words were perceived to be inflammatory or damaging to China’s reputation. Is it now not time for China to issue an apology of its own for hurting the feelings of the world with the statements that were made by Comrade Zhang in Tibet? After all, the 2008 Olympic Games, contrary to what many in China may believe, do not belong to China; they belong to the world. What right then did the highest ranking Communist member in Tibet have to make statements about an ‘internal’ Chinese political issue at an Olympic event? It was already a slap in the face of the Tibetans to have the torch paraded through their province but making such political statements at an Olympic event is a slap in the face of the world.

Will China government apologize for the remarks? Of course not. After all, last Saturday’s events in Tibet held far more significance for the Chinese government than simply marking the end of the Olympic Torch Relay. The relative calm that has ensued since the protest in Tibet along with he torch’s incident-free journey through the region and the closing ceremony that followed represent a series of political triumphs for Beijing. The Tibetan ‘insurrection’ has been crushed and the world has been put on notice that Beijing will stop at nothing to assert its dominance and will in Tibet. Thus the comments by Zhang Qinglin were not made by mistake; if anything, they were well calculated. He used a privileged platform provided by the 2008 Olympic Games to blatantly promote China’s political agenda to the rest of the world even though China has always claimed that such issues are of no concern to the international community. Now, as a result of Zhang’s speech on Saturday, the Chinese have no right to insist any longer that the 2008 Olympics and politics be kept separate. Politics are and have been intertwined with the 2008 Olympics Games from the very moment that they were bestowed upon Beijing.  

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