July 06, 2008
Early Gold Medal for Team China
The Beijing Olympics may be still a month away, but Team China has already struck gold. After the pre-meetings of the G8 Summitt in scenic Hokkaido, President Bush and PM Fukuda have both stated their commitment to attend the Opening Ceremony of the Beijing Olympics. To my knowledge, no U.S. president has ever attended the Opening Ceremony of any Olympics. This is a major diplomatic victory for the Chinese especially considering the miserable PR embarassment that it has suffered during the world tour of the Olympic torch and the subsequent drove of world leaders who decided to not attend the Opening Ceremony in protest of China's poor human rights record, most prominently including Gordon Brown and Angela Merkel.
Bush and Fukuda passionately justify their decision by separating sports from politics. But we all understand that Olympics have always been political, sometimes resulting in very unfortunate and unfair consequences for the athletes. So why did Bush decide to go? In my understanding, Bush's decision to please China is intimately related to his success in the North Korea non-proliferation issue--arguably his only positive legacy on both the foreign and domestic front. The Bush team deserves credit for North Korea's recent move to turn over detailed documents of its nuclear program and subsequently destroying one of its reactors, and it is likely that China has been playing a continuous role in facilitating this development behind closed doors. Bush has taken North Korea off the terror list, which made many East Asian neighbors, including Japan, very unhappy. But what is done is done and the last thing Bush wants to see is North Korea turning back on its promises, which will make him look like a fool and squander his only chance of leaving a positive legacy in foreign affairs, at least in the foreseeable future. (It is still, in my opinion, unclear whether Iraq will be a positive or negative chapter in Bush's presidency; the war isn't over yet.) Therefore, to keep his success in North Korea on course, he must make sure China stays with him, and attending the Opening Ceremony and offending some human rights activists is a small price to pay.
Fukuda also has good reasons to please China. Since he took over the Japanese Diet, he's been much more pro-China than his two predecessors, Abe and Koizumi. He has made major efforts to improve relation between the two countries, from his visit to China that has "brought spring" to the bilateral relations, to the most recent settlement of the border and resource dispute in the East China Sea. Although the details on the border agreement and agreement to jointly excavate natural resources are still unclear, it is clear that both China and Japan are mindful of improving their relations at every step of the way. Seeing how increasingly dependent the lacklustre Japanese economy is on China and the vast prospect of wealth and strength the two Asia giants can bring to each other if their relationship continues to improve, attending the Ceremony is again a small price to pay for Fukuda, especially considering that the human rights organizations' presence is weak in Japan.
China has already scored major diplomatic victories for its Olympics, earning approval from the two top economic nations. Europe is still giving China the cold shoulder, but from China's recent reaction to Sarkozy's refusal to go to the Ceremony if China doesn't engage in genuine negotiation with the Tibetans and improve its human rights record, it's clear that China could care less about what Europe thinks at this point. The Chinese state media sent a less-than subtle message to Sarkozy, essentially saying that his presence is not welcomed and the Chinese people don't even want him here. This will certainly not go well with the EU since Sarkozy is not its president, but China has found a new sense of confidence, if not arrogance, when it comes to running its Olympics. This is a dramatic reversal from 3 months ago when China was under siege from the world for its violent crackdown in Tibet. There's still lots of time left between now and the Olympics, but so far China is leading the gold medal standing.
Posted by Kevin Xu at 11:02 PM | Comments (0)