How the Olympics Hurts China

Subject: How the Olympics Hurts China Mon Feb 14, 2022 10:06 pm

I n September 2008, three months before police arrived around midnight to take him from his home, to which he would never return — he died in custody nine years later, after having won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010 — Liu Xiaobo wrote a brilliant essay on that year’s Summer Olympics in Beijing.

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Were Liu alive today, there can be no doubt that he would denounce the genocide and culture-cide that are taking place in Xinjiang, the suffocating colonization that continues in Tibet and Southern Mongolia, the machine-like crushing of freedom in Hong Kong, and the CCP’s existential threat to Taiwan. But Liu’s splendid 2008 essay looked inward: It was about the costs of the Olympics to China’s Han majority.

The 2008 Olympics cost about $70 billion, more than seven times what the government was then spending annually for public health and medical care, and more than four times what it was spending on education. This was the people’s money, Liu observed; only a dictatorship could get away with spending it so frivolously.

Next, there were the spiritual costs. Is it good for a country to be intoxicated with chest-thumping “patriotism”? In China, the word had been molded to mean “love of Party” as much as “love of country,” but even setting aside that cynical pollution of meaning, Liu wondered: Do we Chinese want to be identified with adolescent bravado? Liu offered the story of Zhang Xiaoping, the Chinese light-heavyweight boxer who defeated Irishman Kenny Egan to win a gold medal. At the triumphant moment, the anchor on Central Television burst forth with, “Our Zhang Xiaoping has knocked his opponent silly! His blows show the glory of Chinese manhood! We can talk with our fists, and in any contest can fight with brawn as well as brains! A legend is born! China soars! The Chinese dragon takes flight!” Is this what we want to be as a country? Liu asked.

.https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/02/how-the-olympics-hurts-china/

How the Olympics Hurts China

How the Olympics Hurts China

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