4/4/08: Olympics in China call for new approach

In the summer of 2001, when Beijing was chosen to host this year's Summer Olympics, I was teaching at an English camp in the south of China.

When the announcement came through, my American teammates and I were startled out of our beds by what sounded like several million people cheering. Our students, middle and high school age, could hardly sit still through their English lessons the next day.

China is excited about the Olympics -- not just for the substantial economic opportunity the games represent, and not just as a way to gain "face" internationally, but because the Chinese people are proud of their country and eager to share it with the world.

Americans seem to be viewing the Beijing Olympics differently. Since the announcement, news coverage of the upcoming event has been filled with warnings of disappointment to come -- the world's top long-distance runner may not compete due to Beijing's notorious pollution -- and protests, which have made strange bedfellows of the Falun Gong, Christians, Steven Spielberg, President Bush and several Nobel Peace laureates, all railing against China's various human rights violations.

More recently, protests in Tibet have taken center stage, despite the efforts of the Dalai Lama and the Chinese government to limit the violence done by and to Chinese and Tibetans.

As Americans, we take principled stands against China's attitudes toward an independent Tibet, Taiwan, the Sudanese government, national democracy and its religious or political dissidents. We remember the Tiananmen Square protests. We make plans to further the cause of democracy, viewing the Olympics as a chance to make Red China into a free-speaking, free-market capitalist society.

We will convert them with American dollars, with international ill-will, by putting the thumbscrews to Chinese leaders, we seem to be saying. China's government will buckle under pressure.

The problem with our plans is that they are old ones. We have discussed human rights and trade agreements with Chinese premiers in each decade since President Nixon visited in 1972. The economic diplomacy supposed to bring democracy to China has done what it can: We have traded with China, allowed the country to import its inexpensively made goods, even arranged to shore up the American dollar by selling I-bonds to the Chinese government.

Our economies are inextricably linked; our political systems remain divergent. The combination of protest and money has brought us this far but will take us no further.

The Olympics call for new approach: listening. In August, thousands of foreigners will descend on the capital of the People's Republic at the same moment, for the same peaceful purpose. Thousands of Chinese who have never left their homeland will meet people from around the world, be exposed to new points of view and express their opinions -- on their lives, their work, their government -- to new friends. But this will only happen if we come as friends, willing to learn instead of lecture.

The people of China are eager to meet us, and in a country where so much is based on "guanxi" -- personal relationships -- simply acting decently should be our next step. The Chinese people themselves will create the change in their country. It will be the impression we make that determines whether they would want to be anything like us.

Protesters claim that the stakes are too high to let this opportunity for real change pass us by. As an American who lived among the open and generous people of China, I tend to agree.