This is the beginning of the Chinese Century
Allen Abel
National Post
'When China is moved, it will change the face of the globe," said Napoleon Bonaparte, and now the movement hastens. The world's biggest event is deeded to the world's most populous country, but what the tenor and compass of that country will be seven summers from now, no one can predict.
By 2008, it may be the case that, as the Tiananmen Square generation reaches the age of authority, it begins to gradually liberalize China's immemorial heritage of unimpeachable power. Perhaps, by then, there will be multi-party elections for offices higher than the village or county level. Maybe, the right to stand on a street corner and protest -- or to follow the ways of the Falun Gong, or adhere to the serene wisdom of the Dalai Lama -- will be enshrined in law and recognized in fact.
Perhaps the jails will open and the wrongly caged go free.
Or -- and this appears more likely from my recent visits there -- the calls of a few brave Jeffersons for pluralism and individual liberty will be overwhelmingly drowned out by the growing multitudes who clamour only for flashier cars, bigger apartments, tastier banquets, and wireless e-mail ...
And Olympic gold.
One thing is certain: The temporary custody of the Olympic Games -- and the Olympic dream -- is only the first of many landmarks in what will be the Chinese Century. But they can be a major step in China's long, agonized ascent from isolation and vassalage, occupation and shame, ignorance and poverty.
A hundred years ago, Beijing was in ruins, ravaged by foreign armies rescuing their besieged nationals after the xenophobic madness of the Boxer Rebellion. But beyond the city walls, hundreds of millions of peasant farmers and herdsmen adhered to the rhythms of centuries, illiterate and mute, untouched by the rolling of time.
"Is there a sun and a moon in your country?" they would ask the strange, red-bearded aliens who came to talk to them of a foreign God. "Are there hills and trees? Why was Jesus not born in China? Why do you not have black eyes like we; have they faded?"
Then came the final overthrow of the Son of Heaven and the end of 5,000 years of imperial dynasties; a brief-lived republic, a quarter-century of civil war, Japanese rape and atrocity and Mao Tse-tung.
"China has stood up!" the Chairman cried from Tiananmen in 1949, as the People's Republic was born. Then he brought it to its knees.
In Mao's China in 1975, as the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution spent itself in a last mad frenzy of purges and parades, the country's Third National Games were held at Beijing.
It was unlike sport as we know it. "Friendship first, competition second," was the reigning theme. Opposing teams were expected to warm up together and share their game plans. Referees and judges were instructed to reverse victories and award medals on the basis of socialist behaviour and enthusiasm, rather than laps and baskets.
"Championitis" was reviled in the official press as the symptom of a grave disease.
Less than 10 years later, Mao and his delusions were dead, and Chinese gymnasts and weightlifters and volleyballers were reaping gold in Los Angeles. Each medal they claimed touched off a spontaneous parade of singing, chanting cyclists on the Avenue of Eternal Peace, the riders flourishing the five-starred red banner, burning with honest pride.
Yesterday, we saw a new generation on the same wide streets, their faces lit by fireworks, not by tracer bullets and flames.
I would hold that Beijing's triumph in the Olympic election need not be seen as the vindication of a venal regime. The people of that dust-choked capital, I suspect, are not so naive as to link the two. Our wails for "human rights" are costless; it is they, not us, who lost their sons and daughters when the tanks rolled through.
Already, there are many in Beijing who view themselves as being freer, wealthier, more mobile, more Web-connected and worldly than any other Chinese citizens in history. The seven years before the torch is carried along the Silk Road, the Yellow River, the boulevards of Shanghai, and the Great Wall may make them even more so.
Yesterday, a small majority of the International Olympic Committee looked beyond Beijing, and pictured the five rings they hold sacred flapping in the schoolyards of 930,000 villages. They imagined the earnestness of 400 million children as they work to be worthy of a place on their national team. And they hoped, as I hope, that the mathematics of the masses trumps the old men at the top.
As the Chinese Century opens, "Friendship first, competition second" is as defunct as a dowager empress. Seven years from now, on the home ground of a vastly different China, they may win every medal in sight.
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