In The Nation, Jeffery Wasserstrom writes:
I’m distressed by the tendency of so many Americans to assume that everything that goes on in China and everything about the treatment it gets is exotic and unusual. Often things that happen in or involve China are normal–even routine–and we can understand them without factoring in esoteric cultural traits or thinking of the country as a place that, in the global arena, always mysteriously gets handled with kid gloves.
Take the Olympics. To read some American commentaries, you’d think that the Games have virtually never been hosted by human rights-abusing authoritarian regimes–with Berlin in 1936 and Moscow in 1980 the only previous anomalies. According to this line of thinking, the decision for China to host the Games, despite the fact that the country is led by the regime responsible for the June 4, 1989, massacre, proves that it consistently gets coddled. [Full text]
Read also a critique of this essay from the Jottings from the Granite Studio blog.
