“To have counted on the Beijing Olympics to deliver a fast political miracle inside China, or anything else that the outside world might have wanted, was both unrealistic and shortsighted. We need to ask: What happens to China, to all the problems and challenges it faces at the end of this month when the Games are over? What is the leverage then?” asks Dr. Wenran Jiang in the Globe and Mail:
At the root of the “whatever China does, it is not good enough” attitude is a heavy dose of old colonial attitudes and racial prejudice, in the widely shared, although not always explicitly acknowledged assumption in both our elite and popular discourse that the West knows what is best for China, and must impose its values and guide the country in the direction the West wants.
Many critics do not understand that the real agent of change in China is neither foreigners nor the Chinese government. The Chinese people are the forces that move China forward. The media should refrain from portraying them as passive and ignorant followers of a Communist dictatorship or as a mass of nationalistic and xenophobic robots lacking in independent judgment.
With or without the Olympics, China’s long march toward modernity and democracy will be driven primarily by internal dynamics, managed by the Chinese themselves and at their own pace. The Chinese people want human rights and democracy no less than we Canadians do. We certainly should not think that they demand less or deserve less. For most Chinese, the key questions are not about whether China will become a democracy, but rather how to get there, how long it will take and in what form.
