Money Takes the Gold at the Beijing Olympics

By John W. Whitehead

“If freedom-loving people throughout the world do not speak out against Chinese oppression and China and Tibet, we have lost all moral authority to speak on behalf of human rights anywhere in the world.”— Nancy Pelosi (D-CA)

There was a time when the Olympic Games embodied all that was noble and worthy about sports competition: the sense of fair play, the good-natured competition, the idea that hard work and determination paid off in the end, the triumph over adversity.

Who could forget African American track and field runner Jesse Owens flying in the face of Hitler’s claim of Aryan supremacy to win four gold medals at the Berlin Olympics? Or Wilma Rudolph overcoming a lifetime of childhood diseases, including polio, to win three gold medals at the 1960 Olympics? Or Abebe Bikila of Ethiopia running the fastest marathon ever, all the while wearing no shoes? Or Nadia Comaneci’s perfect 10 in gymnastics?

These triumphs and what they stand for have been largely overshadowed in recent years by the rampant greed that has turned the Olympic Games into a money-making enterprise. The upcoming Games in China are no different. Corporations have already spent millions of consumer dollars to be named sponsors of the Beijing Olympics. They include some of the best-known brands in the world: Adidas, Anheuser-Busch, Coca-Cola, General Electric (parent of NBC), Johnson & Johnson, Kodak, McDonald’s, Microsoft, Panasonic, Samsung, Staples, Swatch, UPS, Visa and Volkswagen, to name just a few.

What’s become even more troubling for many human rights activists, however, is the extent to which corporations and governments, loath to rile China and upset the proverbial moneycart, have turned a blind eye to the rising superpower’s human rights abuses and its support of the genocidal regime in Sudan.

The latest tensions between China and protesters in Tibet only underscore the concerns that were first voiced when Beijing was selected as the host for the 2008 Olympics. Yet as David Wallechinsky, the vice president for the International Society of Olympic Historians, remarked, “The International Olympic Committee asked for trouble when they put the Olympics in a country run by a dictatorship. Now it’s come back to haunt them.”

During the Olympic bids, Chinese officials pledged that they would improve human rights conditions by the Games’ commencement on August 8, 2008. However, no such progress has been made. In fact, the staging of the Olympic Games has exacerbated human rights violations and widespread crackdowns on political dissidence.

Despite China’s best efforts to block information about the political unrest in Tibet through telephone taps, Internet filtering and travel restrictions, enough news of its totalitarian tactics have filtered through to cause what the Wall Street Journal termed “growing concern among corporate sponsors that the rising tide of protests over Tibet and China’s support of the Sudanese government will detract from the Games’ commercial success.”

And this is where the whole thing turns into a farce. In rejecting calls for a boycott, the Olympic Committee and sponsor corporations have attempted to spin their refusal to sanction China as part of their commitment to not politicize the Games and penalize “innocent athletes.” But that’s not the issue.

We’re talking about a totalitarian regime notorious for its human rights violations. Within the past year alone, Chinese authorities have gone to great lengths to silence dissidence and discontent through any means possible, from the unjust imprisonment and, in some cases, disappearance of human rights defenders and activists to the extensive censorship of the media and Internet.

Li Heping, a Beijing-based lawyer known for his involvement in human rights cases, was abducted by government officials and beaten with electro-shock batons. Gao Zhisheng, a human rights defender who wrote a letter to the U.S. Congress opposing the Beijing Games in light of China’s human rights violations, “was last seen in the presence of municipal Public Security Officers at his Beijing home on September 22, 2007 and has not been seen or heard of since.” Yang Chunlin, a farmer who signed a petition entitled “We Want Human Rights, not the Olympics,” was detained in July 2007 and “had his arms and legs stretched and chained to the four corners of an iron bed on numerous occasions. He has then been left to eat, drink, and defecate in that position.”

In addition, Amnesty International reports that China “has the largest recorded number of imprisoned journalists and cyber-dissidents in the world. As of July 2006, at least 54 Chinese Internet users are believed to be imprisoned for such acts as signing petitions, calling for an end to corruption, disseminating health information, or planning to establish pro-democracy groups.” This heightened degree of censorship stems from the fact that all Internet connections and communications must pass through government-controlled routers that allow officials to monitor Internet activity. American Internet companies such as Yahoo and Google, which have aided and abetted China in its censorship, are partially to blame.

Clearly, China has done little to clean up its human rights record. We can fool ourselves into believing that we’re helping to spread democracy by allowing Beijing to host the Summer Olympics, but all we’re really doing is standing by as silent witnesses while the schoolyard bully bloodies noses. In this way, we’re just as much to blame. Perhaps we’re even more to blame, since our consumer spending is giving them the muscle to fund their huge terror machine.

Understanding that money talks, the activist organization Dream for Darfur (dreamfordarfur.org) is urging Americans to voice their discontent over China’s ongoing human rights abuses to the Olympic sponsors who stand to profit from the upcoming Games.

The bottom line is that something needs to be done. If the Olympic torch is to stand for more than economic self-interest, then we need to stop trading on people’s freedoms and start doing the right thing for a change.


Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. He can be contacted at johnw@rutherford.org. Information about The Rutherford Institute is available at www.rutherford.org.