A BUZZFLASH NEWS ANALYSIS
by Amy Weiss

It's easy to nostalgically look back at the 2008 Beijing Olympics as one of the best ever (NBC sure does [1]). The opening ceremony was executed incredibly, an astounding amount of records were broken, and there were plenty of compelling athlete stories.

The athletes overall treated each other with enormous respect. The abundant examples of sportsmanship and camaraderie are admirable.

It's dangerous though, to let the U.S. and Chinese governments off the hook for the politics they played leading up and in relation to these games.

As Dave Zirin noted Sunday in his "Olympic Wrap-Up [2]," the press "chose not to ask why George W. Bush was the first US president to attend the Olympics on foreign soil, and why the State Department last April took China off its list of nations that commit human rights violations."

Not only did the State Department take China off the list of worst offenders, but also it couldn't even give a superficial explanation for why. In a press conference [3] about the 2007 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices, Acting Assistant Secretary of the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor Jonathan Farrar did not directly respond to questions about China. Finally one journalist called him out:

QUESTION: I just wanted to go to China for a moment because it - I mean, I didn't feel like you answered the previous question, which was, yes, we've seen the report, I've seen the preface or the introduction and all these things about China. At the same time, there is a list of systematic abusers of human rights, the worst of them, and China is not on that list and it was last year. So was that a gesture to the Chinese? Does it have anything to do with the Olympics? Can you please explain it?

MR. FARRAR: Sure. I think if you look at the introduction, you'll see that what we say about China - I could even flip to it if you give me a second.

QUESTION: No, I've read it.

MR. FARRAR: Is exact - is exactly accurate.

QUESTION: Actually, there's a discrepancy. That's exactly why I'm asking because the report says many things about China, but it's not on that list of the worst offenders and it was last year. Why is it not on the list? That's my question.

MR. FARRAR: I would say China is listed under a section dealing with authoritarian countries undergoing economic reform where the democratic political reform has not kept pace. And that is a completely accurate assessment.

The Chinese government quickly responded [4] to the U.S. report by calling the invasion of Iraq the "greatest humanitarian disaster" of modern history.

The Chinese government published a report that said, "(America's) arrogant critique on the human rights of other countries are always accompanied by a deliberate ignoring of serious human rights problems on its own territory."

As powerful as the idea of the Olympic spirit is, it's going to take a lot more than the superficial application of it every two or four years to change anything in or between either of these countries.

A BUZZFLASH NEWS ANALYSIS

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