The Chinese, eh?

Enormous country. Industries churning out pollution like there’s no tomorrow. State engaged in violent repression of occupied ethnic minority, media whipping up paranoid hatred of same among law-abiding middle classes. Companies aggressively buying influence in the developing world, shamelessly colluding with mass-murderous regimes. It all sounds eerily familiar.

Plus, I mean, there’s loads of them.

Look, it’s right and just that events in Tibet are at the centre of media attention right now. They are, indeed, much more interesting than the other stories du jour: white English woman murdered in Jamaica, white English girl horribly murdered in Goa, white English girl murdered ages ago in Japan (almost as if the journalistic classes of the nation had some wierd collective obsession, some kind of fetish about dirty foreign types doing horrible things to helpless White girls in far off places). But, as usual, between the “extremes” of “my, aren’t the Chinese horrible” and “let’s just hope it doesn’t get in the way of the games” lies almost none of what needs to be said.

First of all, Americans and Brits who bleat on about the “Genocide Olympics” are utter hypocrites, either deluded or disingenuous to the point that literally no-one should be listening to them. China has been giving the Sudanese regime guns with which to pursue genocide in Darfur. I’m not saying that’s not terrible, but what about Britain giving the Indonesian regime guns with which to pursue genocide in West Papua? What about bankrolling Egypt and Saudi Arabia, what about the Israel of Latin America and what, especially, about Israel itself, which routinely puts Palestinians through what we’re now apparently calling “Cultural Genocide”? What of the invasion, via an Ethiopian proxy, of Somalia, for it is this and not Darfur which the UN considers to be the worst humanitarian crisis in Africa – second in the world to Iraq alone. And what, while we’re at it, about Iraq?

I’m all for opposing imperialism and oppression, but it surely starts at home. Terrible as China’s crimes may be, we have more than enough on our plates dealing with the greater crimes of our own ruling class. It’s very easy for a westerner today to criticise Beijing/Tehran/Khartoum, just as it would have been easy for a German citizen in the early 1940s to decry the bloodthirsty imperialist Winston Churchill. In neither case is it particularly constructive.

If some good has come out of Middle America’s hypocritical outrage, though, it is that the myth of the noble West against the savage East has only been further undermined. Forget the screeching of the lobbying minority, it seems likely that the silent majority also identifies far more closely with the liberation of the Tibetan people than with the smooth running of the games. The governments of the West could have scored an impressive propaganda victory by using their immense leverage to defend Tibet. Instead, they have shown that they identify less with the oppressed than with the oppressor, less with the Dalai Lama than with the Chinese Communist Party. And therein lies the real story.

In China, democracy and [neoliberal] economics were not proceeding hand in hand; they were on opposite sides of the barricades surrounding Tiananmen Square.*

The Chinese government has never been what I would call “Communist”, a word that deserves better than to be debased through application to every totalitarian regime with a spattering of cynical People’s Rhetoric in its nomenclature. Nevertheless the People’s Republic was ruled through the familiar Stalinesque system of State Capitalism until about 1980, when the ruling elite saw the potential to use their position to make it big on the free market. They weren’t wrong – while most Chinese get nothing from the current boom but longer and harder exploitation, a new class of millionaires is emerging among the sons and daughters of Communist party cadres – but nor were they naive. Some of their reforms were going to be popular, some of them were going to be unbearable.

Three years after the neoliberalisation of China began in 1980, with a propaganza starring none other than Milton Friedman himself, Deng Xiaoping created a new People’s Armed Police to clamp down on “economic crimes” (strikes, protests, and that), and a few years later it was clear that even that even that would not be enough. Freedom of capital did not bring freedom to the people; it brought price inflation, unemployment, inequality, and various far-from-liberating sensations. In ‘88, Friedman was brought back in for a second round of sermons, but in ‘89 China was nonetheless the scene of massive protests. And the rest is history.

The protestors in Tiananmen Square were after Democracy, but not in the narrow sense in which that word tends to be used around here. They weren’t risking (and, in a great many cases, losing) life and limb merely for the right to vote on which party cadre gets to announce horrible economic policies to them – they were more concerned about turning those economic policies around. They were fighting for not just for their ideas, but for the wealth and security that was being taken from them – and they could not be deterred by less than mass state terror.

Tibet is a new front in that same war. Of course, a combination of repressive government and nationalistic aspirations is always going to create resentment, and the build-up to the Olympics was always going to be a good time to get that resentment out. But, as Pankaj Mishra points out in an excellent CiF piece (h/t Fanonite), there is more at work here than the memories of the 1959 invasion. In fact, there’s something of a second invasion afoot, armies of colonists, coming in on new railways from the rest of China to modernise and industrialise the still rural province. Traditionally, freedom of worship has been a major bone of contention in Tibet, and Western punditry has been keen to see this as another clash between religious rights and cleric-bothering commies, but in fact

the Tibetans have had more [religious freedom] in recent years than at any time since the cultural revolution. Eager to draw tourists to Tibet, Chinese authorities have helped to rebuild many of the monasteries destroyed by Red Guards in the 1960s and 70s, turning them into Disneylands of Buddhism. Tibet and Tibetan Buddhism have even inspired a counterculture among Chinese jaded by their new affluence.

Industrialisation is rarely painless for those being industrialised (look at Victorian Britain), and the faster and more dramatic the industrial revolution the more intense the suffering (look at Stalin’s USSR). But there’s something particularly horrible about frontier industrialisation. Ask the Native Americans, whose genocide, cultural and otherwise, stands as a grim warning to the people of Tibet. Capitalism needs growth to survive, and nothing excites it like a new frontier, at which it can throw capital investment and population surplus on shiny new railways. Any natives who get in the way are stunned by the speed of it all, and by the time they come around the land they used to roam has been enclosed and privatised, made the domain of armed and hungry colonists. A monster of farms and factories has taken over their world, and they can either surrender and be ground down to nothing inside the monster or wither away outside of it.

This monster, incidentally, is no stranger to the Olympics. The modern games have a long history of turning people’s homes into shiny “opportunities for development”. From Atlanta to Barcelona, Sydney to Seoul, the Olympics have always brought tasty slices of corporate welfare to a wealthy few, enclosure and exclusion to many others. No wonder Beijing wants a bit of the action. I have to disagree with the Dalai Lama when he says that the protests have nothing to do with the games. The Olympics don’t just provide an opportunity to spoil the Chinese government’s fun, they also provide a very apt symbol for all that’s oppressing his Holiness’ people, for the aggressive expansion of a way of life that completely goes against his Holiness’ philosophy.

If you want to boycott the Genocide Olympics then, after all that, I think it’s probably a good idea. I’d be with you all the way, if my complete lack of interest in watching monotonous displays of the human body pushed to its limits in competition for competition’s sake (at least, it certainly doesn’t seem to be for entertainment’s sake) didn’t make such a boycott on my part totally meaningless; I’ll certainly join you in solidarity with the Tibetan people. But let’s be clear in what we’d be standing against: nothing so banal as the illiberality of the Chinese government. We’d be standing against the “frontier spirit” so beloved of Barack Obama. We’d be standing against the monstruous excesses of capitalism, against the ravenous drive for new profits and new markets that makes those excesses inevitable. And, obviously, we’d be standing against the games themselves, which are boring as fuck.

* Naomi Klein, in The Shock Doctrine, from which book most of the information in the subsequent paragraphs is taken. Read this book.