Ugly games

There may be more than four months yet to go until the Beijing Olympics, but the big game has already gotten under way. No, not basketball or track or swimming – this is really a game with only one contestant, a test to see whether an established benchmark can be surpassed, then whether a new benchmark can itself be overcome. \nThe name of this game? “What awful thing will China do next?” \nAnd, thus far, the Chinese authorities’ progress in making themselves progressively more detestable has been nothing short of stunning. What’s remarkable is not so much the fact that the regime does awful things, but rather the sheer number and variety of those awful things. For example, it comes as no surprise that the Chinese government cracked down brutally on protests in Tibet. And its support for the genocidal regime in Sudan is nothing new (although the recent allegations that it is not merely buying oil from Sudan, but also selling the government weapons and providing training on them, managed – incredibly – to make its role look even worse). But then there are all the extraordinarily ugly little things that have come out about China’s Olympic preparations.\nTake, for example, the government’s massacre of cats throughout Beijing (the cats are rounded up and left to die in government pounds). Or how about its ban on live broadcasts from Tiananmen Square during the Olympics? Or its shutdown of several of the country’s video-sharing Web sites? Or the U.S. State Department’s recent warning that visitors to the Beijing Olympics should expect their hotel rooms to be bugged? Or how about the accusations by Human Rights Watch that the government is exploiting the migrant workers employed in its Olympic construction projects? (Funny thing for a “workers’ paradise...” ) They even managed to find a non-evil thing to do that is, nevertheless, rather lame: The Beijing Municipal Tourism Bureau is currently employing linguists to correct the city’s hilariously mistranslated English-language signs.\nThus, the question becomes: What can the Chinese government do to top all this? Turn a blind eye to toxic Olympics souvenirs? Ban any athletes who criticize it publicly? Pave over the entire region surrounding Beijing to provide a super-sized Olympics parking lot? Ban cheering? Nothing seems out of the realm of possibility.\nNow, in the wake of the Tibet violence, there have been some calls for countries to boycott the Olympics in protest – but while this idea is noble, I think it’s a mistake. No, countries need to have their athletes there in Beijing because otherwise, their citizens won’t pay attention to what happens there. And the world should be watching when the Chinese government commits every act of brutality and every petty cruelty because the world needs to see what authoritarian regimes do to get what they want. And because much of the world seems eager to think that China will supplant the United States as the global superpower. \nSo, to the countless individuals around the globe tuning in to the Beijing games, I say take a nice, close look: there’s the future.