Between Envy and Fear

Written by Martin Khor
Published in the News Straits Time, 11th of August 2008

The Olympic Games has had a spectacular launch. The thrills and spills of the next fortnight are mixed with complex feelings, especially in the West, about the rise of the host country.

FOR the next fortnight, the Olympic Games will dominate not only the news but also the television and Internet attention of hundreds of millions around the world.

The “greatest show on earth” was launched in Beijing last Friday, and the spectacular opening ceremony is still being talked about by many.

It was shrewd of the Chinese authorities to get the country’s top film director to plan the extravaganza, which became an impressive showcase of the country’s history and present development.

While this opening and the new magnificent sports buildings, especially the “Bird’s Nest” stadium, won the acclaim of many, not least the reportedly billions of people who watched the show on TV, the whole Olympics being held in China also attracted sharp criticism, notably from the Western press.

The Times (London) said the Olympics was a subtle agenda for a dictatorship to overcome its crisis of legitimacy. It added that the US$40bil (RM132bil) propaganda coup is paid for by the masses the politicians are seeking to keep in check who have no choice but to cough up.

“No democratic government at China’s stage of economic development would have had the will or the gall for such extravagance,” said the Times.

The claim of the paper is that the Chinese people, if only they could freely voice their feelings, are angry about how their money is being wasted on the Olympics.

Yet the paper contradicts itself by stating that the Olympics is used as propaganda by the government to win political legitimacy. In other words, the extravagant show makes it popular with the masses.

The reality, as affirmed in many a report, is that the Olympics has been largely welcomed by the people in China, who are filled with pride at another “coming of age” of their country on the world stage.

Whether the vast amount of money and human resources that have gone into the Olympics could have been better spent is of course a legitimate subject of debate as it always has been when any large games – be it the Olympics or the World Cup, or the Commonwealth Games or Asian Games – is held, especially in a developing country, where there are competing uses of resources, such as building homes and schools for the poor.

However, China currently arouses especially strong feelings among the governments and people in the Western world.

This is usually dressed in the garb of caring for the human rights of the poor Chinese people, who are often portrayed as being victimised for the country’s development and the supposed personal glory of the political leaders.

But it is hard to deny the other view, that the development in the past 60 years of the highest-populated country has eradicated more poverty than elsewhere.

And whatever we think of the social unevenness and the environmental degradation accompanying the prolific economic growth of the past 10 to 20 years, it has also contributed to realising the economic and social rights of many hundreds of millions of ordinary Chinese.

And that in itself – transforming the image and reality of China from being populated with starving and malnourished people into a thriving developing country – has also contributed to the realisation of economic and social rights of humanity, given the gigantic size of its population.

Much more of course can be done to promote civic and political rights and freedoms, to cater to the legitimate interests and rights of minorities, to resolve the problems in Tibet, and so many other issues.

The urgent need to resolve these kinds of problems can be said of many other countries, too, including in the developed world.

Awe and mutual cooperation, rather then envy and anger, characterise Asean’s view of China.

African countries have recently viewed China as an additional and welcome source of finance and investment.

Though there may be some worry about over-dependence on China, there is more goodwill than fear because China is a major and growing market for the continent’s commodity exports, and its finance comes without the onerous (and often erroneous) conditions that accompany Western and International Monetary Fund financing.

The criticisms against China come mainly from the West. One can’t help but feel that the real source of this is envy and fear. Envy at the 10% plus growth rates, the huge trade surpluses and the gigantic foreign reserves, a bit of which has been used to buy equity in Western companies.

Fear that the balance of world power is shifting to Asia, especially to China, and Western hegemony, including of its culture and civilisation, is significantly slipping.

In fact, China has made itself vulnerable by holding so much of its foreign reserves, which are approaching US$2tril (RM6.6tril) in US Treasury bills.

If the US dollar depreciates significantly, China stands to lose many billions (even hundreds of billions) of dollars in terms of its capacity to import from (or buy assets) in other countries.

The growing dependence of the United States on China, its large trade deficit, and the shifting of US companies’ operations to China, makes this country a source of fear, especially of American workers losing their jobs.

Firstly, this is the reason for the growing protectionist sentiments in America, and secondly it may be an underlying factor for the expression of contempt for the political structures in China.

We can expect to see more of these complex feelings, mixed up with the thrills and spills of the sporting events, throughout the rest of the Beijing Olympic Games.