The resignation last week of Hollywood film director Steven Spielberg as artistic advisor to the Beijing Olympics has shaken the Chinese regime, which has invested enormous prestige in this event as a means to boost its global image and increase support at home.
By chinaworker.info reporters

The protest has reignited an international debate spanning those who for a host of reasons call for a boycott of the Games and compare them to the 1936 Olympics hosted by Hitler, to those who argue the Olympics can help bring ’democracy’ to China. In our opinion both standpoints are mistaken. In China itself, Spielberg’s decision has spurred a furious reaction on internet chat sites with nationalists and Maoist-influenced youth condemning this as an ’attack on China’.

Meanwhile, the Chinese regime has been very muted in its response, expressing ’regret’ over the protest and lamely appealing for politics to be kept out of sport.

Spielberg says his resignation was motivated by the ongoing conflict in the Sudanese region of Darfur, which has claimed at least 200,000 lives since 2003. The Chinese and Sudanese dictatorships have substantial economic ties: China takes two-thirds of Sudan’s oil exports and is the country’s largest foreign investor, while 70% of Sudan’s oil income goes to military spending.

Many other issues are raised by Olympic protest groups – human rights abuses inside China itself, the issue of Tibet, and China’s support for dictators like Mugabe in Zimbabwe or the Burmese generals. These are important questions for socialists, anti-war activists and all those fighting injustice. The Chinese dictatorship has a lot to answer for – whether we are discussing its brutal suppression of democratic and trade union rights at home or its support for carbon copy regimes as in Burma. But it is hardly alone in this. The United States supports and works with dictatorships in Saudi Arabia, for example, and Pakistan, not to mention of course the biggest dictatorship of all - China! One of the peculiar features of the current debate, or rather a sign of how far the agenda has been almost entirely dictated by capitalist interests, is that most attention is not directed at what is happening inside China – where 55,000 US companies happily exploit the cheap non-union labour force with the protection of Beijing’s anti-democratic laws and riot police – but what the Chinese dictatorship is doing abroad where it competes with US and European imperialism.

Olympics’ political history

If there is any parallel with Hitler and the 1936 Olympics it is this: other capitalist governments did not really object to the Nazis when they were terrorising the German working class and smashing its trade unions and democratic rights – they first began to see Hitler as a problem when he developed international ambitions that threatened the interests of Britain, France and the other capitalist ’democracies’. However, the Berlin Olympics was the subject of a ’boycott’ action, but not by capitalist governments. Athletes from the Soviet Union did not take part in Berlin and the international workers’ movement and its sports clubs organised an alternative games in Barcelona.

The Olympics has throughout its history been an arena for geopolitical struggles. The Berlin Olympics were used by the Nazi regime to project Germany’s resurgent power. During World War II, of course, the Games were paused while the world was forcibly redivided between different blocs. From the 1950s to 1970s, Mao’s China opposed participation in the Olympics due to the ”2 Chinas” issue, i.e. the West’s recognition of Taiwan. In 1980, the Moscow Olympics were boycotted by US imperialism and its western partners due to Soviet bureaucracy’s invasion of Afghanistan. Deng Xiaoping’s China joined the US boycott. At the time of the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics the USSR led its Eastern European Stalinist satellites in another boycott in response to the US invasion of Grenada. The Chinese regime is spending a fortune on the Beijing Olympics to use it as a symbol of the rise of China as a new global power and to whip up nationalist support for the ruling party, which is ’communist’ only in name.

Olympics – not ’our’ games!

There are many good reasons to protest against the Olympic Games regardless of which country they are held in. Like all major sporting events in the capitalist world, the Olympics is first and foremost about making money for the big corporations. Bribery and corruption is legion throughout the Olympic industry as governments, construction firms and media corporations fight for a slice of the action. Endless doping scandals show the enormous pressure on athletes in the race for glory and fat advertising contracts.

So when the bosses of the International Olympic Committee awarded the 2008 Olympics to Beijing, this was about money, and big profit-making opportunities for global companies like Coca Cola, Adidas, McDonald’s etc. that have traditionally monopolised the event. To keep its side of the bargain, the Chinese regime is spending an estimated $40 billion on the Games – on grandiose infrastructure projects most of which will be of little benefit to workers and the poor. This is an especially sore point after last month’s freak snow storms that decimated much of the power and transport infrastructure in central and southern China. Some areas may be still without electrical power when the Olympics start in August! By comparison, $40 billion is much more than the $27 billion the government plans to spend over the 2006-10 period in order to abolish school charges for 160 million rural children. In Beijing itself, many people have been forcibly evicted from their homes to make way for Olympics related construction, or luxury apartments. The Geneva-based Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions has estimated that 1.5 million people will have lost their homes in Beijing by the time the Games take place.

Darfur and the ’Genocide Olympics’

We socialists are implacable critics of the Chinese regime and its repressive capitalist policies, whether at home or abroad. But the current debate including the charges raised in the Spielberg affair are unfortunately not about this. By only targeting China’s largely oil-driven diplomacy and power politics in Sudan or elsewhere, while ignoring and thereby whitewashing the role of other imperialist powers, such arguments cloud the real issue.

The real issue is the system of capitalism and imperialism and its support for local gangster regimes and warlords in Africa, Asia or elsewhere, in return for plunder in the form of energy and other mineral resources and also strategic political leverage, at the expense of rival imperialist powers. The Chinese regime is guilty as charged, but it is not alone in this, nor is it the biggest culprit. In fact, the Chinese regime is very much the ’new kid on the block’ and is learning its game from older, more experienced hands. Look at the role of the French government for example in 1994, which armed and assisted tribal warlords in Rwanda to carry out one of the worst genocidal massacres in history, with up to one million killed. Today, president Sarkozy actively supports, with French soldiers on the ground, the other side in the Darfur conflict – rebels that are linked to the dictator Idriss Déby in neighbouring Chad. The Chadian regime is guilty of similar atrocities as the Sudanese regime. Both regimes lean on outside powers for arms and diplomatic protection with oil as their main currency. The vast majority of their populations are terrorised and downtrodden while a small clique of officials, capitalists and generals profit from the present situation.

United Nations = no solution

The same arguments that apply to the Beijing Olympics and Darfur apply with even greater force to the next Olympic Games, in London in 2012, and Britain’s role as the major supporting power for US imperialism’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The war and the subsequent collapse of Iraq under US-British control has so far caused around half a million deaths and four million refugees – dwarfing even the horrors of Darfur. US and British military personnel have been directly implicated in civilian massacres and cases of torture. Which then is the real ’Genocide Olympics’?

Spielberg and his supporters accuse the Chinese regime of sabotaging a United Nations (UN) solution to the crisis in Darfur, but even if a UN supervised force was in place this would not lead to a solution in the interests of the poor and oppressed people of the region. That is because the UN is no more a ’neutral’ international peace-keeping body, than the Olympics is a ’non-profit’ sporting body – both are controlled by capitalist interests. The UN is dominated by a few powerful capitalist states, the very states that helped create the Darfur conflict in the first place through their predatory ’guns for oil’ policies. The list of UN ’acheivements’ in recent years hardly inspires trust – Afghanistan (where control was handed over from the UN to NATO, but the war intensifies), East Timor (where civil war again threatens to erupt), Democratic Republic of Congo (with five million people killed since 1997), and so on. This is not to mention the role of the UN in Iraq, where its food and medicine sanctions from 1990-2003 caused the death of half a million children and UN resolutions provided a legal cover for Bush’s military attack.

Protest yes, but how and against what?

Spielsberg’s action has generated as much confusion as anything else over what is to be done. Some capitalist media have jumped on this issue as an argument against ”China”, not differentiating between the regime and the workers, youth and poor peasants who are oppressed by it. For these commentators the Chinese regime is fine when it opens its markets and sweatshops to ’their’ capitalist companies but not when it ’steals’ markets or energy rights overseas. On the other hand there are those like the British Olympic Association that wanted Britain’s athletes to sign a contract preventing them from making any political statements during their time in China. Clearly, the Beijing regime does not hold the copyright when it comes to banning freedom of speech.

Inside China we see a mirror image of these mistaken arguments. Nationalists have been quick to line up in defence of ”China’s” Olympics, as if the event wasn’t dominated by Coca Cola, McDonald’s, General Electric and other foreign capitalist sponsors. Just as these companies make big profits at the expense of workers in their home markets of the US and Europe, so too the activities of Chinese companies in Africa and elsewhere only benefit a rich minority in China. Some pro-democracy campaigners have gone the other way and welcomed Spielberg’s stand as if this is a blow against dictatorship when it is nothing of the sort, only a plea for Beijing to adopt different policies in Sudan. Neither the apologists for the Chinese regime, nor its capitalist critics, stand for genuine change in the interests of working people and the poor, whether in China, Africa or anywhere else.

By putting China under the international spotlight the Olympics can be an opportunity to protest against poverty, inhuman factory conditions, land seizures, lack of basic democratic rights, environmental destruction and many other burning issues. In struggling against these injustices, socialists and worker activists do not expect or seek the support of foreign capitalists and governments, or show business figures like Spielberg, but rather the support of other oppressed peoples around the world. The debate around the Olympics can become an opportunity to show support for the struggle of Chinese workers and youth to build democratic organisations and especially independent trade unions as a crucial part of the international struggle against capitalism, imperialism and war.