The Reminder is making its archives back to 2003 available on our website. Please note that, due to technical limitations, archive articles are presented without the usual formatting.
If I were the Chinese bureaucrat responsible for guarding the sacred Olympic Flame, the place IÕd worry about most is Australia. It was there, just before the Melbourne Olympics in 1956, that a student pretending to be an Olympic athlete ran up to the mayor of Sydney and presented him with an ÒOlympic torchÓ consisting of burning underpants in a can nailed on top of a chair leg. He was gone before they realized it was not the real thing. His intention was to mock this pathetic neo-pagan ceremony that was originally invented by the Nazis to spice up the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. The 1936 Olympics was Nazi GermanyÕs coming-out party, so HitlerÕs people arranged for 3,442 racially pure Aryan runners to do a relay race with an ÒOlympic torchÓ from the Temple of Hera on Mount Olympus to the stadium in Berlin. This yearÕs Olympic Games were supposed to be Communist ChinaÕs coming-out-party, and the route is even more ambitious: 21 countries on all six inhabited continents. But that includes Australia, and I really wouldnÕt send the torch there if I wanted to preserve ChinaÕs dignity. Australia is the world capital of mockery, and by the time the torch gets there (if it ever does) the Australians are going to feel challenged. It was burning underpants in 1956; what might it be in 2008? The bar will have been set quite high by the time the torch reaches Canberra. After the propaganda triumphs for the ÒFree TibetÓ movement in London, Paris and San Francisco, the rain of humiliations for the Chinese regime may ease off for a while. But after Dar es Salaam, Muscat and Islamabad, where they donÕt care much about Tibet, comes New Delhi, where some people care a great deal. There will be a lot of Tibetans in New Delhi, so the run there, if it happens, may resemble a low-intensity war. Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur and Jakarta may be quiet, but then comes Canberra, where Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has already said that the Chinese thugs who have jogged alongside the torch-bearers in other countries to fend off protesters will not be allowed to operate. A nightmare It has become a nightmare for the poor, doomed Chinese bureaucrats who set this thing up: constant humiliations if they carry on with the planned route (which also goes through Tibet itself!) and utter humiliation if they cancel it. For the moment, they are brazening it out. ÒThe Olympic flame belongs to the people around the world,Ó said Wang Hui, a spokesman for the Beijing Olympic organizing committee, Òso the behaviour of a few separatists would not gain sympathy from people and will cause strong criticism and is doomed to fail.Ó So far, though, I havenÕt been hearing much criticism. Never mind the silly torch, and the equally bizarre Olympics Games of today. WhatÕs actually colliding here are two irreconcilable views of the world. For almost all Chinese, the turmoil in Tibet is a threat to national unity. Only in the past century have Tibet and the Turkish-speaking, Muslim province of Sinkiang come to be seen as a necessary part of that national unity, but they are now. Chinese propaganda insists that the local people support that consensus, but it makes no difference if they donÕt. They have to stay, because national unity is at stake. For almost everybody else, China and Tibet is obviously a colonial relationship, and itÕs perfectly natural for the Tibetans to seek independence. They wonÕt get it this time round, and they may never get it, but why would you be surprised that they try? Indeed, why wouldnÕt you support them? Foreign governments will never support TibetÕs independence, because they depend on ChinaÕs trade and they value ÒstabilityÓ in China above all else. Foreign individuals are under no such constraints, and the interminable, multi-national Tour of the Torch is giving them a lot of opportunities to show their feelings. It isnÕt Òanti-Chinese,Ó just pro-Tibetan, but there will be much anger and many hurt feelings by the time this is done.
