Carrying the torch

All of this stuff with the Olympic torch relay is pretty fascinating. Protests in London, Paris, San Francisco and just about anywhere else the torch shows up. Demonstrators scaled the Golden Gate Bridge to unfurl banners critical of the Chinese government.

Officials in San Francisco, where the torch is now, switched routes without telling anyone. The torch was extinguished in Paris, and the relay was cut short there. At the very least, organisers are facing some pretty pissed off people wherever the flame goes.

And yet, the Chinese still insist they will take the torch through Tibet itself. This is a stupid idea, and I suspect that international pressure, combined with escalating tensions and protests as the date nears, will make them reconsider. But you never know.

World leaders such as British PM Gordon Brown, Australian PM Kevin Rudd, US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the leading Democratic presidential candidates all have weighed in on China’s atrocious human rights records, specifically with respect to Tibet.

Rudd is probably the most recent one, having made statements in official visits to Washington and London that riled the Chinese government. He then travelled directly to China, as part of a planned foreign-policy world tour, and delivered a speech (in Mandarin, in which he is fluent) to students at Peking University, in which he challenged China on human rights yet again, citing “significant human rights problems” in Tibet.

Rudd is also, perhaps, the one world leader with the most street cred with the Chinese now. Besides the fact that America has zero credibility on human rights any more, Rudd has a few other things going for him. His fluency in Mandarin certainly helps, as does his power position with respect to the minerals/mining industry. Two of the largest mining concerns in the world, Rio Tinto and BHP Billiton, are Australian companies, and Australia holds some serious natural resources (iron ore, uranium, etc.) that China covets.

China wants a piece of BHP Billiton—and Rudd is the guy who can quash any such foreign direct investment. At the very least, he holds the cards to make approval of any deals contingent upon improved human rights conditions or further autonomy for Tibet.

So they have to listen to him. But they won’t, because they’re the Chinese government and they have their heads so far up their own asses. (Shang Ba Pun, the Chinese provincial governor for Tibet: “Tibetans are now enjoying democracy and wonderful human rights”. I’m sure any Tibetan who didn’t have a gun to his head would disagree.)

My initial reaction to all of this Olympic stuff was, What the hell was the IOC thinking? And then I remembered a few things: One, it’s all about money. And the Chinese have boatloads of it.

Two, the IOC doesn’t give a rat’s ass about human rights, otherwise they never would have given the Olympics to China. (See #1)

And three, it’s not like the IOC is worried about the symbolism of the Olympic torch. If they were, they would never hold another worldwide torch relay again. Why? Because the relay was the sole creation of a guy named Carl Diem, who wanted to link the 1936 Games to the good old days—all for a little bit of Nazi propaganda.

(Bonus question: Who did the PR for the first relay? Answer: Josef Goebbels.)

(BTW, I got to hold the torch once, when I was a kid. It came through my hometown in Texas on its way to the summer Games in Los Angeles, in 1984. I was in downtown Arlington. It was heavy. That’s about all I remember.)