From Foreign Policy:
It’s China’s chance to shine. It’s easy to forget that China refused to even participate in the Olympics before 1984. Since 1978, China’s economy has grown tenfold, while its trade with the United States has increased by a factor of 160. But authoritarian China still has a lot to prove to Western publics, according to the latest BBC World Service poll. And although China’s economy gets high marks, 59 percent of those polled in 33 countries view the country’s rising military strength as negative. That’s a problem for a nation on the make. “China’s greatest strategic threat today is its national image,” argues Joshua Cooper Ramo in a recent report for London’s Foreign Policy Centre. The timing of the Olympics, in which Beijing is investing some $23 billion, could therefore hardly be better. “It will get many more tourists and foreigners to China to have a look for themselves at the country’s level of development and the progress it’s making,” says Albert Keidel, a China expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Why it doesn’t: The Olympics could go badly. “If there are demonstrations and the Chinese have to put them down and people are there to witness it, that could be hurtful in terms of the country’s human rights image,” says Keidel. Or they could simply suffer the fate of the 2006 winter games in Turin, Italy, which drew the lowest ratings of any Olympics since 1992. [Full Text]
